The Insane True Story Of How "Titanic" Got Made
James Cameron Jack
The first time I saw Titanic  my father left the theater in the middle of the movie to get a haircut. I didnât notice he was gone. I wasnât conscious of any reality but Titanic  even though I already knew exactly what was going to happen. One of my friends had briefed me on what to expect:  Jack  and Rose fall in love  the ship sinks  and  Jack  finds a piece of wreckage floating in the sea and helps Rose clamber onto it  saving her from the freezing death that claims him before the lifeboats return for survivors. But it wasnât fair  my friend explained: It was obvious to her that there was room for them both. It didnât matter that I knew exactly what was coming. I couldnât think about anything else while the movie played. And even when the lights came up and I realized my father was missing  his absence didnât seem to matter much. I was 9  but I already understood he had a habit of wandering off when he got bored. I was even used to it. What was new was this feeling: that I had to get back to Titanic as soon as possible. The credits were barely rolling as I began to strategize my next viewing. I knew that the movie had completely devastated me  and I knew that all I wanted was to be devastated again. But why? Viewers â many of them adolescent and preadolescent girls like me â would go back to Titanic over and over again while it was in theaters. It was the No. 1 movie in the US for 15 consecutive weeks  a feat that has yet to be surpassed  and likely never will be. Well before it was released  James Cameronâs passion project became notorious as the most expensive movie ever made  with a final budget of $200 million. Then it became the first movie in history to earn $1 billion at the box office. And it achieved this success despite months of advance press claiming that the movie was all but doomed; despite the widespread belief that James Cameron  who previously helmed the Alien and Terminator franchises  had no business trying to tell a story about love; and despite the fact that Titanic  in a way that is now all too easy to forget  is an immensely difficult movie to watch. When Titanic was released on video in September 1998  its 3 hours and 14 minutes had to be split across two VHS tapes. The same studio heads who were convinced Titanic could only recoup its budget at best (success was almost mathematically impossible) had seen its gargantuan runtime as just one of its many liabilities. Critics also pointed to its ungainly length as proof of its failure to play by the rules: It was a âbloated leviathan â a âbehemoth â and a tiresome epic that  according to the Washington Postâs Desson Howe  left viewers âthinking the unpardonable thought: âOK  sink already.ââ Titanicâs length was also bad news for movie theaters  since it meant they had to schedule fewer showings â and sell fewer tickets â than they could with a normal movie. After screening Titanic for a test audience in Minneapolis  however  executives at Paramount and Fox  which had jointly financed the production  began wondering if  Cameron âs folly might not be a disaster of Waterworld proportions. The audience laughed and cheered and gasped at all the right moments  and gave the movie and its characters astoundingly high ratings on the survey cards they filled out after the showing. âIt went well â a Fox executive said cagily. âNot great  but well.â When all was said and done  Titanic had cost a little over $1 million per minute of screentime  and it was sometimes hard for studio executives to look at the movie  Cameron  described as a way to honor the disasterâs victims without wondering just how much this history lesson would end up costing them.  Cameron  had been dreaming of Titanic since Robert Ballard located the shipâs remains in 1985 (âIâll be goddamned!â Ballard exclaimed as Titanic loomed into view  a line  Cameron  later borrowed for  his  own characters). After watching National Geographicâs special on Ballard in 1987   Cameron  made a few notes: âDo story with bookends of present-day [wreckage] scene...intercut with memory of a survivor...needs a mystery or driving plot element.â
 Cameron  had always loved diving and deep-sea exploration  and The Abyss   his  third film as director and sole writer  had been a love letter to both. But that was fantasy; Titanic was real. And when  Cameron  first decided to pursue the project  the prospect of going to the wreck of Titanic might have been incentive enough to pitch the movie. When  he  first met with 20th Century Fox Chairman Peter Chernin to discuss Titanic  in the spring of 1995   he  asked for $2 million to fund a deep-sea expedition. It was an amazing sum of money to the Russian scientists and submersible pilots who took  Cameron  to the wreck. It was nothing compared to Titanicâs final price tag. When Titanic opened in theaters across the US  on the weekend of Dec. 19  1997  it became the No. 1 movie in America by the skin of its teeth  edging out the latest James Bond movie  Tomorrow Never Dies  by a margin of $3.5 million. But to the executives who had nervously overseen Titanicâs production â and watched its budget nearly double  from $110 to $200 million â this wasnât particularly encouraging news. For Titanic to earn a profit  executives calculated  it would have to attract viewers in utterly unprecedented numbers: Even if it sold more tickets than Dances With Wolves  the most profitable three-hour-long movie ever released  Fox would still be $70 million in the red. And to be a success? It would have to somehow repeat its $28 million opening-weekend ticket sales â and stay the No. 1 movie in America â for weeks and weeks in a row  in a way no movie had in nearly a decade. It would have to be more than just a movie. It would have to become a cultural obsession. And it did.  Cameron  had once â optimistically  as the final budget reflected â called Titanic "a $190 million chick flick." By Jan. 31  1998  20th Century Fox estimated that 7% of all American teenage girls had seen the movie twice. They werenât the only ones going back to see Titanic a second time  and perhaps a third  though they did receive the most press. In 1997  the average return viewer rate for a theatrically released movie was 2%. Meanwhile  Titanicâs was 20%. In February 1998  a survey found that 76% of Titanic's repeat viewers still planned to see it again. It made more money â $32 million â during its 11th weekend in theaters than it did during its first. (It helped that this weekend also happened to fall on Valentineâs Day.) Theaters that previously worried about losing money on a movie they could screen only two or three times a day started squeezing in showings as early as 8 a.m. and as late as midnight  letting out satisfied viewers at 3:30 in the morning. Adults  people with families  responsibilities  and jobs  flocked to see Titanic. Because for a little while â for 3 hours and 14 minutes  to be precise â the rest of their lives disappeared. Titanic gave people a way to make the rest of their lives disappear  and so they kept coming back  and finding that the world  James Cameron  had created for them still felt just as real as it had the first time. What made Titanic not just a movie  but a destination? And what did it take to will such a world into solid reality?
âIt is the night before shooting starts â Kate Winslet wrote in her diary on Sept. 15  1996  âand here I am  all pin-curled up and hungry  ready to go. Thinking about Rose. She was so young. I need to think about her childhood  her youth  and find my way through the 17 years of her life. I'll never sleep tonight.â The next morning  Winslet added: âNo sleep. This is itâ¦ My life is not my own and probably never will be â and that's Rose talking.â During Titanicâs seven months of production  the line between Kate and Rose would sometimes blur â but it had been that way from the beginning. After she auditioned for the part  and  Cameron  left her waiting as  he  deliberated casting  Winslet tracked  him  down on  his  car phone  reaching  him  when  he  was on the freeway. âYou donât understand â she told  him . âI am Rose.â And she was. Kate Winslet was 20 when she began filming Titanic  and spent her 21st birthday shooting  Jack âs death scene. âWe were lying there on the raft  sort of shivering together â she told Rosie OâDonnell while promoting the movie  âand I said âLeo  itâs my birthday today.â And he said  âThatâs great  sweetie. You know what? I donât care.ââ DiCaprio himself turned 22 while Titanic was in production. In the same Rosie appearance  Winslet said she and Leo had been âthe naughty children on the set â and remembered how  while filming the scenes where  Jack  and Rose waited for the lifeboats to return after the shipâs sinking  âLeo would sometimes say to me  âSweetie  sweetie  I gotta pee.â âIâd go  âSo have I.ââ They would pee in shifts  taking turns swimming over to another part of the tank â which was about the most romantic gesture anyone could get either of them to recall from Titanicâs set  though people tried. âHe doesnât think that heâs gorgeous â Kate Winslet told Vanity Fair  around the time Leomania became a bona fide pandemic. âAnd to me  heâs just smelly  farty Leo.â When she wasnât called on to talk about his sex appeal  Winslet sang DiCaprioâs praises as an artist. âHeâs gifted from God  as far as Iâm concerned â she told OâDonnell. In another interview  she mused  âLeo is such a brilliant actor. And he doesnât know it. He really doesnât know it.â
He had started his career with commercials for Kraft cheese (âHands off  the Free Singles are for Daddy!â âAw  but Mom!â)  Matchbox cars  Bubble Yum (âOnly Yum is the fun that never blows out!â)  and Fred Meyer fashions (âYou wanna dance?â a girl asks him. âI like your sweaterâ). He won his first TV roles â after being kicked off the set of Romper Room  at 3 years old â in The New Lassie and Parenthood. He was good at playing junior-high heartthrobs and squeaky-clean sons  but the more he got cast in those parts  the less interested in them he seemed to be. By the time he was cast as Jack Dawson  Leonardo DiCaprio had already been nominated for a best supporting actor Academy Award for his role as the title characterâs developmentally disabled younger brother  Arnie  in Whatâs Eating Gilbert Grape. Initially  director Lasse HallstrÃ¶m had believed DiCaprio was too handsome for the role â a judgment born out by the fact that fan mail for him was already streaming onto the set of Growing Pains. âWhen I was doing Growing Pains I had quite a teen following â DiCaprio said in a 1993 interview. âFor a while  I was third in fan mail or something like that. To tell you the truth  I don't like that. Being the hunk-of-the-month annoys me. ... I don't care about being a star. Anybody can be a star with a little makeup and a music video. I'm concerned about being an actor.â  James Cameron  knew  he  wanted DiCaprio to be  his  Jack Dawson  but DiCaprio didnât want to be  his   Jack . When DiCaprio auditioned for the role   Cameron  later remembered   he  first refused to read a scene with Kate Winslet  then âread it once  [and started] goofing around.â After that   Cameron  said  âI could never get  him  to focus on it again. But for one split second  a shaft of light came down from the heavens and lit up the forest.â DiCaprio had never played a character like  Jack  before: one who forced  him  to be  so relentlessly  in the light. Instead   he  had spent  his  early career playing roles like the heroin-addicted Jim Carroll in 1995âs The Basketball Diaries  and Arthur Rimbaud (âyoung  gorgeous  and derangedâ) in Total Eclipse. âHow do you do that?â DiCaprio said of  his  role in Titanic  even after filming had ended. âI was asking Jim  âCanât we add some dark things to  his  character?â And  he  was like  âNo  Leo  you canât.ââ
âI just wasn't used to playing an openhearted  free-spirited guy â DiCaprio told the Los Angeles Times shortly after the Titanic premiere. âI've played the more tortured roles in the past. It was difficult to be someone closer to 'me' than anyone else.â âHis character doesnât go through torment â  Cameron  later said of the role  âand Leo previously  and subsequently in his career  was always looking for that dark cloud. ... [It was] only when I convinced him [this] was actually the harder thing to do that he got excited.â Titanic represented a new challenge for  James Cameron   too. It wasnât his first romantic movie (try listening to the love theme from The Terminator sometime)  but it was the first movie he had ever made where a love story served as the primary dramatic engine. When he pitched Titanic to Fox Chairman Peter Chernin in 1995  Cameron â who had cracked into the big leagues after making 1984âs The Terminator  and had seen his sequel  Terminator 2: Judgment Day  become the highest-grossing movie of 1991 â found himself in the odd position of trying to sell studio executives on exactly the kind of movie they didnât think he could make. "They were like  'Oooooohkaaaaaay â" he later told Paula Parisi  author of Titanic and the Making of  James Cameron . ââA three-hour romantic epic? Sure  that's just what we want. Is there a little bit of Terminator in that? Any Harrier jets  shoot-outs  or car chases?' I said  'No  no  no. It's not like that.'" Yet  James Cameron  was  in a sense  a natural choice for the helm of a romantic epic:  He  knew how to translate love into action. From the beginning   his  heroes and heroines had been made powerful by their ability to love  and by loveâs ability to instill in them greater strength than any opponent could hope to defeat. The Terminator ends with Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) speaking gently to her unborn son as she drives into a mounting storm; in Aliens  Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) balances a little girl on one hip and a flamethrower on the other; and in Judgment Day  the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger)  programmed to protect the adolescent John Connor  tells John âI know now why you cryâ as he destroys himself to save the future of humanity. âBuilding Better Worldsâ is the space conglomerate slogan on display in James Cameronâs Aliens  but it could just as easily apply to the worlds  Cameron  builds in  his  movies â or rather  the worlds  he  allows to come into being  by stripping away the rules as they have always previously applied. In The Terminator  Terminator 2  and Aliens  this idea seems to go hand in hand with getting rid of men â and Titanic follows this example. Even if men arenât actively oppressing women  Cameronâs movies suggest  they still have a way of holding women back from doing what they need to. Even if all you want is to save John Connor  youâre still a product of Skynet. The best protection you can offer the world is to leave it.
Before filming even began   Cameron  knew  his  $110 million budget projection was only an educated guess. To begin with  Fox would have to build a brand-new studio from the ground up  something neither it nor any other major movie company had done since the 1930s. No one knew how much it cost to do that kind of thing anymore â to say nothing of the price tag for conjuring the past with computer-generated effects so brand-new that their final cost was also impossible to estimate. But if anyone could make Titanic work  Fox executives felt  it was  James Cameron . He had made Terminator 2  from script to premiere  in 13 months: He shot the movie six days a week  and on the seventh day  he edited. (Crew members somehow found enough time away from their grueling production schedule to make shirts reading âYou canât scare me  I work for  James Cameron .â) He liked to say he had won his first directing gig â for Piranha II: The Spawning  the sequel to a Jaws knockoff â because he convinced producers he could make mealworms writhe on command. (He had called âAction!â and then electrified them with an AC current.) He had a reputation as a miracle worker  and he encouraged it. How else could you convince a roomful of businessmen to give you the money you needed to project your dreams and nightmares directly into the American mind? The question was just how much this dream was going to cost.  Cameron  asked for $125 million to make Titanic. Fox Chairman Peter Chernin balked  and told  Cameron   he  could make the movie  he  had first pitched as âRomeo and Juliet on a boatâ if  he  could have it ready for a July 1997 release  and keep the budget to $110 million.  Cameron   perhaps believing this might really be possible at the time â and perhaps also figuring it was better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission â said  he  could do it  offering to forfeit $4 million of  his  own salary to squeeze under the line. Almost as soon as Titanic went into production  it began to go over budget. In 1996  shooting a typical action blockbuster â a Batman Forever or a Tomorrow Never Dies â cost an average of $100 000 to $150 000 a day. Titanic averaged between $225 000 and $300 000 â and this was after construction ended on the brand-new 40-acre movie studio  Cameron  needed to film it.  He  had considered locations all over the world  and ultimately decided on a spot 15 miles south of the border  in Rosarito  Mexico. Workers needed 10 000 tons of dynamite to blast a hole in the coastline big enough for the 17-million-gallon open-air tank â the largest ever built â that  Cameron  needed to hold  his  ship. And in a detail that becomes noteworthy when the movie in question is so concerned with the politics and hierarchies of labor â and Titanic never for a moment lets you forget that the captainâs pleasure in his âunsinkableâ ship is powered by the sweat of the stokers in the hold  â Cameron  shot Titanic in Mexico in part to keep labor costs down. (âThis is NAFTA at work!â Foxâs Tom Sherak told journalists who visited the set.)
Less than halfway through its seven-month shooting schedule  the movie had gobbled up nearly three-quarters of its budget  and showed no signs of slowing down â and  Cameron  seemed unwilling to make it slow down. So  Paula Parisi writes in Titanic and the Making of  James Cameron   the studio did its best to persuade  him . One night in the fall of 1996  20th Century Fox President Bill Mechanic visited  Cameron  onset during his 2 a.m. lunch hour  a schedule necessitated by the movieâs endless night shoots. âFrom a financial standpoint â Mechanic told him  âthis film is wildly out of control. Nothing is going to change that. All we can do now is contain it. So here are some scenes weâd like you to cut from the shooting schedule.â  Cameron  studied the list of scenes  and immediately refused to cut any of them. âIf you want to cut my film â  James Cameron  told the president of Fox  âyouâll have to fire me  and to fire me youâll have to kill me.â Then he stormed off set. The scenes stayed in the picture. Mechanic had little choice but to relent: No other director could manage all the moving parts Titanic required. When  Cameron  asked Peter Chernin to fund  his  submersible expedition to Titanic   he  wanted not just to see the wreck himself  but to film it in a way that would allow viewers to feel they were there with  him . Doing so would also allow  him  to do Bob Ballard one better: Ballard may have found the ship  but  he  had only been able to capture video of it with  his  underwater remote operating vehicle  Jason. (Ballard had also initially wished to keep Titanicâs location secret.)  Cameron  might not be shooting Titanic first  but  he  was going to do it right.  His  engineer brother  Mike â the only Cameron boy who finished college â developed a titanium-encased film camera capable of independently withstanding the pressure of the ocean floor  and of capturing images of Titanic as it had never been seen before. Each dive would cost $25 000  and could record only 10 minutes of film. Some of the footage  Cameron  brought back from Titanic appears in the movie. Some is recreated. But what  Cameron  also seems to have brought back from those dives was a new sense of humility about the task before  him . After  his  second trip to Titanic   Cameron  told Paula Parisi  âI just sat there  and I just started to cry  thinking about the dive and everything Iâd seen and experienced.â Later   he  wrote in James Cameronâs Titanic: âThat night I realized that my project  my film  was doomed to failure if it could not convey the emotion of that night rather than the fact of it.â More and more  it seemed to  him  that  he  could only let viewers experience Titanicâs sinking by letting them fully experience the ship itself â and  he  could only do that by recreating it.
âI wanted to be able to say to an audience  without the slightest pang of guilt: This is real â  Cameron  wrote of Titanic. âThis is what happened. Exactly like this. If you went back in a time machine and stood on the deck  this is what you would have seenâ¦ Second Officer Lightoller would be over there â¦ and Wallace Hartley would be leading the band in a lively waltz just there  a few yards away â¦ [and] slaloming between these immovable pylons of historical fact are  Jack  and Rose.â In this way   Cameron  wrote  âThe film comes full circle  from being a film about Titanic  to being a love story that happens merely to be set on Titanic  back to being about the emotional truth of Titanic after all. By feeling the fear  the loss  the heartbreak of  Jack  and Rose  we finally can feel for the 1 500.â After seeing Titanic for the first time  Harry Knowles compared the experience to traveling to the past through self-willed hypnosis  like the hero of Somewhere in Time. Titanic experts who visited Cameronâs set had the same experience in the flesh.  Cameron âs devotion to history was exacting  and at times excruciating: Every possible detail  from the davits used to lower the lifeboats to the carpet in the first-class dining saloon (recreated  all 18 000 square feet of it  by the same company that had manufactured the original)  was identical to what Titanicâs passengers would have seen. When the furniture being artificially aged for a scene recreating the wreck didnât look quite right to  Cameron    he  spent a day and a half working on the props himself. ( He  was supposed to be finishing the screenplay at the time.) â Cameron  wanted real wallpaper and things like that " the movieâs head of physical production  Fred Gallo  recalled. "I said  'Why don't you build the sets and have them paint on the wallpaper? No one will ever know.'â But  Cameron  would. Thousands of props  from ashtrays to teacups to forks  had to be stamped with the White Star Line emblem  even if it was impossible for viewers to see. The costumes alone cost $8.4 million. The chandeliers couldnât be Lucite   Cameron  decided  because then they wouldnât chime ominously as the ship began to tilt; they would have to be crystal  just as they had been in 1912. âThere should be a little brass sign right here that says âPush ââ  Cameron  said apologetically to Ken Marschall  as he led the Titanic expert through a doorway on D deck during a set visit. âIt was one delight after another â Marschall said of his time on Titanic. But he didnât have to work there.
"You don't just join one of his films " editor Mark Goldblatt said of  James Cameron . âYou sign on for a tour of duty." On Titanic  two-thirds of the shoot had to be done at night  and even the cast sometimes worked 20-hour days. âNothing could have prepared me for it â Kate Winslet later said. Night after night  as Titanic sank again and again  she and Leonardo DiCaprio had to struggle through water pumped in straight from the ocean. âI bet people will think it's heated â she wrote in her diary  âbut it isn't.â The crew watched actors vigilantly for signs of hypothermia. (Later  they would begin heating the water  even though Winslet had believed the cold would make her performance more authentic). "I chipped a small bone in my elbow  and at one point I had deep bruises all over my arms " Kate Winslet told the Los Angeles Times once Titanicâs arduous shoot was over. "I looked like a battered wife." Filming underwater close-ups  where Winslet had to be weighted in a tank while completely submerged  terrified her.  Cameron   she wrote  âwouldn't have made me do that if I didn't say  âNo  I'm okay.â" But even though it was a highly supervised set  with safety divers everywhere  she sometimes felt like she was drowning. âTake after take â Winslet wrote in her diary  âI reminded myself that I wanted to be part of this. I will not admit defeat.â
No one would. Titanicâs budget continued to swell as  Cameron  continued to fall behind schedule  and its release date was pushed back from July to December. Fox shunted Speed 2 â which some executives had higher hopes for  anyway â into the summer release slot Titanic was meant to fill. It flopped  and Titanic plunged ahead  its budget once rising by $20 million in the space of two chaotic weeks. âI cannot think of one crew member who didn't say  'I've had it ââ first assistant director SebastiÃ¡n Silva said. âBut no one walked." As far as  Cameron âs temper went  Kate Winslet said  âthe actors got off lightly. I think Jim knew he couldn't shout at us the way he did to his crew because our performances would be no good.â âAny idiot could figure this out!â This  Paula Parisi wrote  was a standard  Cameron  response to crew members who couldnât make his vision a reality fast enough. He raged at workers and he raged at executives and he seemed sometimes to want  more than anything  to simply be able to do every single job on Titanic himself. When the ice arrived  in hundred-pound blocks   Cameron  picked up an ax and started chopping  preparing it for the scene where it was to splinter off the iceberg and fall onto the deck. âGetting over their initial disbelief â Paula Parisi wrote  âthe crew followed suit. ... Giving up his ax   Cameron  stepped back and watched for thirty seconds  then  he  just couldnât stand it anymore.  He  pushed a puny guy aside  taking  his  ax. It was just too much fun.â  Cameron   Parisi wrote  was âshowing that he knew full well the film was going to be hard work  but no one would work harder than he would.â Maybe. But Titanic  Parisi also observed  âwas a factory â and it had only one product:  Cameron âs dream. Cameronâs recreation of the ship itself contained 300 tons of steel  bolted together  at a breakneck pace  by 30 laborers. The wardrobe department needed 8 000 separate articles of clothing to dress the extras for the Southampton scene alone. Every time  Cameron  sank the first-class dining saloon  and raised it again for another take  crew members spent the next workday drying carpets  righting furniture  collecting 1 800 pieces of flatware off the floor  and recreating Titanic all over again. Titanic had one boss and hundreds of workers  and though it amassed superlative after superlative in terms of monetary costs well over a year before it even reached theaters  its cost in terms of human labor may be yet more staggering. What does it feel like to surrender seven months of your life  for nearly every waking hour of the day  to one manâs vision? What does it do to you? What makes you stay?
For the laborers and extras hired in Rosarito  it probably had something to do with the pay; for the crew  it probably had something to do with the prestige; for the cast  it probably had something to do with the exposure. But among the cast and crew members who described not just the tortuous process of making Titanic but their own dedication to the film  a shared conviction is always present: They were doing something real  and they could feel it. âOne thing thatâs very important to me in life â Kate Winslet said while Titanic was in production  âis [that] through having a relationship with somebody and loving that person and being allowed to feel the whole emotion of love despite all of the risks  you can find out who you are. And when Rose meets  Jack  she cuts through all of the class and money nonsense and connects with something real and alive and passionate in  his  soul. And when I read the script I was in floods of tears  because it takes you to the point where you would do anything â absolutely anything â to stop that ship from sinking.â If Titanic felt real â if it was real â then perhaps this painfully conjured time travel was the only way to make  Jack  and Rose  and the love between them  become real as well.  James Cameron  spent the summer of 1997 in an at-home editing room darkened by blackout curtains  faceting the dream  he  had now poured years of  his  life into. In late July   he  took a day off to marry Linda Hamilton   his  girlfriend of seven years  in a backyard ceremony. The next day   he  went back to  his  editing suite  and back to Titanic. âTaped to  his  editing machine â Entertainment Weekly reported in November 1997  âis a suicide device â a razor blade with the simple instruction âUse only if film sucks.ââ
On TitanicShack â one of the many websites and forums that sprang up after the movieâs release as outlets for people confronted by the grim fact that they couldnât spend every single day in the theater  watching Titanic again and again â fans wondered why the movie had such a hold on them. Some felt as mystified as the movieâs harshest critics did about just why they couldnât stop themselves from returning to Titanic: I've seen this movie 13 times (and yes  I must go back  if only because 13's unlucky! :-) Why do I  a thirty-something  sane woman keep going back? Because I love this movie â everything about it â and I know they'll letterbox it when it comes out on video and it just WON'T be the same on my tiny 19-inch tv screen. Someone told me a story about a woman in the States who was kicked out of the theatre for reciting every line with the movie. She had ticket stubs to prove she had seen it 84 times!! Now that's a bit excessive!!!! I can't really pinpoint why I keep going back. All I can say is that this movie gets to me every single time... The life lessons it teaches are many  but there is one theme in particular that all humankind never tires of hearing: love really is the greatest power of all. As it continued its dominance of Americansâ hearts and minds  almost anything Titanic touched became a guaranteed moneymaker. The J. Peterman catalog began selling what it advertised as a âfairly enormousâ $198 Heart of the Ocean necklace  and quickly ran out of stock (disappointed customers could  however  content themselves with a $19 knockoff called âthe Jewel of the Sea â at least until Fox sued the company that made it). CÃ©line Dionâs âMy Heart Will Go Onâ became the world's best-selling single of 1998  and pushed the Titanic soundtrack to the top of the charts  too. ( Cameron  had initially resisted including any song over the closing credits  feeling it was akin to commissioning a pop single for the soundtrack to Schindlerâs List. But Horner and Dion cut a demo in secret  and won him over.) Even â maybe especially â after the movie was gone from theaters  any piece of media that summoned its world would suffice for fans.  James Cameron âs Titanic  a glossy coffee table book detailing the movieâs production  shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list  and candy-hued unauthorized biographies of Leonardo DiCaprio began appearing in bookstores  and in smitten girlsâ backpacks. "There's a lot of me in Jack  definitely "  James Cameron  told Rolling Stone in 1998  in an interview in which  he  also discussed  his  recent separation from Linda Hamilton. She had been  his  fourth wife  and  his  Sarah Connor. "Actually â  Cameron  clarified  âI shouldn't say that. Jack is the guy I wished I could have been. I wished I had the courage and the openness.â
Reading the Titanic screenplay  itâs easy to tell which character  Cameron  wished  he  could have been: Even the simplest descriptions of Jack find a way to be adoring. One of Jackâs sketches âcaptures [Cora and her father] perfectly  with a great sense of the humanity of the moment.â Jackâs sketchbook is âa celebration of the human condition.â As Jack stargazes before his first conversation with Rose  he is thinking not just any thoughts  but âartist thoughts.â And as Rose begins to fall for Jack  we listen in on her first impressions of him: He âis so open and real...not like anyone she has ever known.â Remembering the iconic âking of the worldâ scene â one he later reenacted  to near-universal disdain  at the 1998 Academy Awards â Cameron described the kind of power  the kind of joy  that even the experience of commanding a vast and imposing structure â a ship  a movie set â couldnât necessarily allow you to feel. âYou see the power of [Titanic] â he said of the scene  âand you see the satisfaction of the officers who run the ship  and their domination of the elements. And then I take that energy and I give it to Jack. Heâs an artist. Heâs a guy whoâs able to have his heart soar. Itâs his ship  man. It doesnât matter that he doesnât have a dime. This is his ship  and his moment. He owns the moment.â To survey (and enjoy) the power of the vast system he commands  the captain â âa great patriarch of the seaâ in Cameronâs script â must stand on the bridge and look at Titanic itself. But Jack  because this is not his ship and not his dream  can stand at Titanicâs prow as it cuts through the water  feeling the sun on his face  and watching the dolphins that leap and swim âfor the sheer joy and exultation of motion.â He can fully experience Titanicâs power because he feels no need to convince himself he commands it â and then he can give it to Rose. "I've been part of a film that's broken cultural boundaries â DiCaprio reflected in 2004. âI went to the middle of Brazil  in the rainforest  and the Indians there knew [Titanic]. It's surreal.â From the beginning  it was clear Titanicâs success transcended borders. When it finally left US theaters in the fall of 1998 â staying on the big screen even after it was released on video â it had made $659 million domestically. In the process  it became the highest-grossing movie in US history  shattering the record comfortably held  for 20 years  by Star Wars. (George Lucas took out an ad in Variety where Han and Leia posed like Jack and Rose to publicly congratulate Cameron  perhaps with some sense of relief: Heavy is the head that wears the big-gross crown.) But Titanicâs worldwide theatrical gross was nearly $2.2 billion. In a March 1998 article titled âFan Sinks into Titanic Obsession â the Associated Press reported that a 12-year-old girl named Gloria had gone to see Titanic  at the only movie theater in the town of Castelfranco Emilia  Italy  every single night since its release  and that she would go on watching it until she couldnât anymore. She had seen it 50 times so far and wasnât tired of it yet; the theater no longer charged her admission  and â recognizing that the love of an adolescent girl is nothing to be trifled with â saved her favorite seat for her every night. âJack is cuter than Leo â Gloria clarified  for anyone who wondered.
âExperts say that the pure passion that pre-adolescent girls have for their idols represents a time in their lives that is brief  intense and â once it's run its course â gone forever â Frances Grandy Taylor wrote in the Hartford Courant in March 1998  in one of the countless articles and TV segments that tried to help parents understand Leomania. The âgone foreverâ part must have seemed particularly comforting. When the unafflicted tried to make sense of the phenomenon following the movieâs release  they tended to focus on Leoâs looks and his celebrity  and of course they werenât wrong. Like all adolescent crushes  he was perfect and remote: He couldnât hurt you  couldnât reject you  couldnât disappoint you. And as Jack Dawson  he was pure fantasy: so handsome as to seem almost unearthly; an androgynous angel who wanted only to love you  to worship you  and to be the idea of a romantic partner  one with whom reality could never try to compete. He was a dream  the argument went  and that was why adolescent girls â who were overwhelmingly presented in the media as the driving force behind Titanicâs success  regardless of whether this was quite true or not â kept going back to the theater for more. It was wish fulfillment. But what were we really wishing for? More than any  Cameron  protagonist before  him   Jack Dawson is heroic for his ability to love. He can watch the world as he knew it fall apart around him and not feel that everything he believed in â hierarchy  order  masculinity â is being yanked out from under his feet  because he never felt much of a need to believe in it  anyway. When Jack turns up in a tuxedo to accompany Rose to dinner in first class  he first exaggerates the aristocracyâs manners just enough to make them seem absurd  then captivates some of the wealthiest people in the world with stories of the kind of freedom they can barely allow themselves to imagine. Roseâs life  as she has lived it so far  has taught her that she is an object to be bought and sold: All women are  and the best you can hope for  as a woman  is to be the most expensive object  sold to the richest buyer. Jack saves Rose from literal death â twice â but he also saves her from the society- and self-imposed prison of believing that she can only ever inhabit the role she was born into. â'Titanic' is starting to sail out of movie theaters â conservative commentator Betsy Hart wrote in 1998  âbut it may have left a wake of devastation in its path in the hearts of teenage girls everywhere.â As heartbreaking as the movieâs ending was  Hart found that she was âsaddened much moreâ by the thought of âthe millions of teenage girlsâ who had helped make the movie a hit  and who had been duped into thinking that âthe intense sentiment and easy sex over a few days that formed the romantic centerpiece of Titanic is the kind of love they should strive for.â âIt's little wonder â Hart concluded  that âour society has so many young people that need so much rescuing.â
This analysis has always been obviously wrong in at least one more way: Titanic is not a fun movie to watch. You arenât escaping from anything so much as putting yourself through an emotional ordeal: a decathlon of passion  dread  terror  numbness  and finally cathartic hope. You  yourself  have survived something by the end of Titanic; you have sat immersed in death  in dying  in questions about your own behavior in such a situation  and have asked yourself to believe in love in the face of all this â and perhaps have been able to. For that experience  we were willing to go back to Titanic over and over again. And if weâre focusing on the girls in the audience  then please â letâs really think about them. Who were these girls  and why were they there? Why was I? When Titanic was in theaters  girls of 9 and 10 and 11 and 12 and 13 shaped their lives around it  and fell in love not just with Leo  but with the whole story they had first found him in. We had a sense  maybe  that life as we knew it was not so different from Titanic: that we  too  lived in a world where society might have to fall apart completely before we could be liberated from the roles that gender and class and race forced us to occupy. In Titanic  Rose is freed not because her mother and her fiancÃ© die (they donât)  but because a microcosm of the world as she knows it collapses around her  and in that moment she realizes its rules no longer dictate her existence. They were never really real  of course â but now that she has seen the spectacular defeat of every system the society that raised her guaranteed would work forever  she can no longer even feel its laws governing her. Something breaks when you no longer believe that anyone  anywhere  can build an unsinkable ship. And if you canât put your faith in a system like a ship â or a government â you have to start directing all your trust  all your love  to the people around you. Titanic poses the question of what we can hold onto when the structures and beliefs we have built our lives on founder beneath us  and one of the answers it allows us to reach is: each other. We hold onto each other. Recently  a writer friend told me that this year  as the world has started to feel like itâs falling apart  he has found himself turning again and again to W.H. Audenâs closing lines in âSeptember 1  1939â: Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. In the past year  I have developed the same kind of relationship â have been taking the same kind of refuge  grasping for the same kind of wisdom â with Titanic. When I first fell in love with Titanic  at 9 years old  I wanted to be Jack as much as I wanted to be loved by him. I wanted the freedom he enjoyed: freedom that seemed to give him the ability to love so deeply and so selflessly. It was the kind of freedom the world around me said a girl could never have. But the world had also told Rose that  and she had found that freedom  in the end. Yet no matter how vast James Cameronâs abilities were  his imagination â big enough to bring a lost ship back to life; big enough  even  to let the viewer feel some sense of what 1 500 lost souls really means â still couldnât conjure a vision so radical that it could let Jack survive. If it were possible for  James Cameron  to imagine masculinity doing anything  in the long term  but infecting everything around it with violence and arrogance and greed and destruction  then Jack could have survived. If  Cameron  were able to imagine a world beyond the hierarchy of patriarchal control â instead of just spectacularly destroying one â then Jack could have survived. If he could have imagined possibilities for men beyond either blindly following the patriarchy or dying for its sins  then Jack could have survived. But instead  Jack has to die  and to love Rose in the only way a world of patriarchal masculinity  even one reduced to flotsam  will allow: by giving his life for hers. Beyond even Titanicâs unresolved questions about masculinity  the one radical possibility  James Cameron  seems unable to imagine is one in which partners can lovingly empower each other through a life lived together. This is where we have no choice but to do what he couldnât: to imagine such love  and live it. To focus on nurture  and let go of heroism. To know that love is the only way through. To say: Get on this board  you idiot. Thereâs room for us both.
The first time I saw Titanic  my father left the theater in the middle of the movie to get a haircut. I didnât notice he was gone. I wasnât conscious of any reality but Titanic  even though I already knew exactly what was going to happen. One of my friends had briefed me on what to expect:  Jack  and Rose fall in love  the ship sinks  and  Jack  finds a piece of wreckage floating in the sea and helps Rose clamber onto it  saving her from the freezing death that claims him before the lifeboats return for survivors. But it wasnât fair  my friend explained: It was obvious to her that there was room for them both. It didnât matter that I knew exactly what was coming. I couldnât think about anything else while the movie played. And even when the lights came up and I realized my father was missing  his absence didnât seem to matter much. I was 9  but I already understood he had a habit of wandering off when he got bored. I was even used to it. What was new was this feeling: that I had to get back to Titanic as soon as possible. The credits were barely rolling as I began to strategize my next viewing. I knew that the movie had completely devastated me  and I knew that all I wanted was to be devastated again. But why? Viewers â many of them adolescent and preadolescent girls like me â would go back to Titanic over and over again while it was in theaters. It was the No. 1 movie in the US for 15 consecutive weeks  a feat that has yet to be surpassed  and likely never will be. Well before it was released  James Cameronâs passion project became notorious as the most expensive movie ever made  with a final budget of $200 million. Then it became the first movie in history to earn $1 billion at the box office. And it achieved this success despite months of advance press claiming that the movie was all but doomed; despite the widespread belief that James Cameron  who previously helmed the Alien and Terminator franchises  had no business trying to tell a story about love; and despite the fact that Titanic  in a way that is now all too easy to forget  is an immensely difficult movie to watch. When Titanic was released on video in September 1998  its 3 hours and 14 minutes had to be split across two VHS tapes. The same studio heads who were convinced Titanic could only recoup its budget at best (success was almost mathematically impossible) had seen its gargantuan runtime as just one of its many liabilities. Critics also pointed to its ungainly length as proof of its failure to play by the rules: It was a âbloated leviathan â a âbehemoth â and a tiresome epic that  according to the Washington Postâs Desson Howe  left viewers âthinking the unpardonable thought: âOK  sink already.ââ Titanicâs length was also bad news for movie theaters  since it meant they had to schedule fewer showings â and sell fewer tickets â than they could with a normal movie. After screening Titanic for a test audience in Minneapolis  however  executives at Paramount and Fox  which had jointly financed the production  began wondering if   [TGT]  âs folly might not be a disaster of Waterworld proportions. The audience laughed and cheered and gasped at all the right moments  and gave the movie and its characters astoundingly high ratings on the survey cards they filled out after the showing. âIt went well â a Fox executive said cagily. âNot great  but well.â When all was said and done  Titanic had cost a little over $1 million per minute of screentime  and it was sometimes hard for studio executives to look at the movie   [TGT]   described as a way to honor the disasterâs victims without wondering just how much this history lesson would end up costing them.   [TGT] had been dreaming of Titanic since Robert Ballard located the shipâs remains in 1985 (âIâll be goddamned!â Ballard exclaimed as Titanic loomed into view  a line   [TGT]   later borrowed for   [TGT]   own characters). After watching National Geographicâs special on Ballard in 1987    [TGT] made a few notes: âDo story with bookends of present-day [wreckage] scene...intercut with memory of a survivor...needs a mystery or driving plot element.â
  [TGT] had always loved diving and deep-sea exploration  and The Abyss    [TGT]   third film as director and sole writer  had been a love letter to both. But that was fantasy; Titanic was real. And when   [TGT] first decided to pursue the project  the prospect of going to the wreck of Titanic might have been incentive enough to pitch the movie. When  he  first met with 20th Century Fox Chairman Peter Chernin to discuss Titanic  in the spring of 1995   he  asked for $2 million to fund a deep-sea expedition. It was an amazing sum of money to the Russian scientists and submersible pilots who took   [TGT] to the wreck. It was nothing compared to Titanicâs final price tag. When Titanic opened in theaters across the US  on the weekend of Dec. 19  1997  it became the No. 1 movie in America by the skin of its teeth  edging out the latest James Bond movie  Tomorrow Never Dies  by a margin of $3.5 million. But to the executives who had nervously overseen Titanicâs production â and watched its budget nearly double  from $110 to $200 million â this wasnât particularly encouraging news. For Titanic to earn a profit  executives calculated  it would have to attract viewers in utterly unprecedented numbers: Even if it sold more tickets than Dances With Wolves  the most profitable three-hour-long movie ever released  Fox would still be $70 million in the red. And to be a success? It would have to somehow repeat its $28 million opening-weekend ticket sales â and stay the No. 1 movie in America â for weeks and weeks in a row  in a way no movie had in nearly a decade. It would have to be more than just a movie. It would have to become a cultural obsession. And it did.  Cameron  had once â optimistically  as the final budget reflected â called Titanic "a $190 million chick flick." By Jan. 31  1998  20th Century Fox estimated that 7% of all American teenage girls had seen the movie twice. They werenât the only ones going back to see Titanic a second time  and perhaps a third  though they did receive the most press. In 1997  the average return viewer rate for a theatrically released movie was 2%. Meanwhile  Titanicâs was 20%. In February 1998  a survey found that 76% of Titanic's repeat viewers still planned to see it again. It made more money â $32 million â during its 11th weekend in theaters than it did during its first. (It helped that this weekend also happened to fall on Valentineâs Day.) Theaters that previously worried about losing money on a movie they could screen only two or three times a day started squeezing in showings as early as 8 a.m. and as late as midnight  letting out satisfied viewers at 3:30 in the morning. Adults  people with families  responsibilities  and jobs  flocked to see Titanic. Because for a little while â for 3 hours and 14 minutes  to be precise â the rest of their lives disappeared. Titanic gave people a way to make the rest of their lives disappear  and so they kept coming back  and finding that the world  James Cameron  had created for them still felt just as real as it had the first time. What made Titanic not just a movie  but a destination? And what did it take to will such a world into solid reality?
âIt is the night before shooting starts â Kate Winslet wrote in her diary on Sept. 15  1996  âand here I am  all pin-curled up and hungry  ready to go. Thinking about Rose. She was so young. I need to think about her childhood  her youth  and find my way through the 17 years of her life. I'll never sleep tonight.â The next morning  Winslet added: âNo sleep. This is itâ¦ My life is not my own and probably never will be â and that's Rose talking.â During Titanicâs seven months of production  the line between Kate and Rose would sometimes blur â but it had been that way from the beginning. After she auditioned for the part  and   [TGT] left her waiting as   [TGT]   deliberated casting  Winslet tracked   [TGT]   down on   [TGT]   car phone  reaching   [TGT]   when   [TGT]   was on the freeway. âYou donât understand â she told  him . âI am Rose.â And she was. Kate Winslet was 20 when she began filming Titanic  and spent her 21st birthday shooting  Jack âs death scene. âWe were lying there on the raft  sort of shivering together â she told Rosie OâDonnell while promoting the movie  âand I said âLeo  itâs my birthday today.â And he said  âThatâs great  sweetie. You know what? I donât care.ââ DiCaprio himself turned 22 while Titanic was in production. In the same Rosie appearance  Winslet said she and Leo had been âthe naughty children on the set â and remembered how  while filming the scenes where  Jack  and Rose waited for the lifeboats to return after the shipâs sinking  âLeo would sometimes say to me  âSweetie  sweetie  I gotta pee.â âIâd go  âSo have I.ââ They would pee in shifts  taking turns swimming over to another part of the tank â which was about the most romantic gesture anyone could get either of them to recall from Titanicâs set  though people tried. âHe doesnât think that heâs gorgeous â Kate Winslet told Vanity Fair  around the time Leomania became a bona fide pandemic. âAnd to me  heâs just smelly  farty Leo.â When she wasnât called on to talk about his sex appeal  Winslet sang DiCaprioâs praises as an artist. âHeâs gifted from God  as far as Iâm concerned â she told OâDonnell. In another interview  she mused  âLeo is such a brilliant actor. And he doesnât know it. He really doesnât know it.â
He had started his career with commercials for Kraft cheese (âHands off  the Free Singles are for Daddy!â âAw  but Mom!â)  Matchbox cars  Bubble Yum (âOnly Yum is the fun that never blows out!â)  and Fred Meyer fashions (âYou wanna dance?â a girl asks him. âI like your sweaterâ). He won his first TV roles â after being kicked off the set of Romper Room  at 3 years old â in The New Lassie and Parenthood. He was good at playing junior-high heartthrobs and squeaky-clean sons  but the more he got cast in those parts  the less interested in them he seemed to be. By the time he was cast as Jack Dawson  Leonardo DiCaprio had already been nominated for a best supporting actor Academy Award for his role as the title characterâs developmentally disabled younger brother  Arnie  in Whatâs Eating Gilbert Grape. Initially  director Lasse HallstrÃ¶m had believed DiCaprio was too handsome for the role â a judgment born out by the fact that fan mail for him was already streaming onto the set of Growing Pains. âWhen I was doing Growing Pains I had quite a teen following â DiCaprio said in a 1993 interview. âFor a while  I was third in fan mail or something like that. To tell you the truth  I don't like that. Being the hunk-of-the-month annoys me. ... I don't care about being a star. Anybody can be a star with a little makeup and a music video. I'm concerned about being an actor.â  James Cameron  knew  he  wanted DiCaprio to be  his  Jack Dawson  but DiCaprio didnât want to be  his   Jack . When DiCaprio auditioned for the role   Cameron  later remembered   he  first refused to read a scene with Kate Winslet  then âread it once  [and started] goofing around.â After that   Cameron  said  âI could never get  him  to focus on it again. But for one split second  a shaft of light came down from the heavens and lit up the forest.â DiCaprio had never played a character like  Jack  before: one who forced  him  to be  so relentlessly  in the light. Instead   he  had spent  his  early career playing roles like the heroin-addicted Jim Carroll in 1995âs The Basketball Diaries  and Arthur Rimbaud (âyoung  gorgeous  and derangedâ) in Total Eclipse. âHow do you do that?â DiCaprio said of  his  role in Titanic  even after filming had ended. âI was asking Jim  âCanât we add some dark things to  his  character?â And  he  was like  âNo  Leo  you canât.ââ
âI just wasn't used to playing an openhearted  free-spirited guy â DiCaprio told the Los Angeles Times shortly after the Titanic premiere. âI've played the more tortured roles in the past. It was difficult to be someone closer to 'me' than anyone else.â âHis character doesnât go through torment â   [TGT]   later said of the role  âand Leo previously  and subsequently in  [TGT]  career  was always looking for that dark cloud. ... [It was] only when I convinced him [this] was actually the harder thing to do that he got excited.â Titanic represented a new challenge for   [TGT]    too. It wasnât his first romantic movie (try listening to the love theme from The Terminator sometime)  but it was the first movie he had ever made where a love story served as the primary dramatic engine. When he pitched Titanic to Fox Chairman Peter Chernin in 1995  Cameron â who had cracked into the big leagues after making 1984âs The Terminator  and had seen his sequel  Terminator 2: Judgment Day  become the highest-grossing movie of 1991 â found himself in the odd position of trying to sell studio executives on exactly the kind of movie they didnât think he could make. "They were like  'Oooooohkaaaaaay â" he later told Paula Parisi  author of Titanic and the Making of  [TGT]  . ââA three-hour romantic epic? Sure  that's just what we want. Is there a little bit of Terminator in that? Any Harrier jets  shoot-outs  or car chases?' I said  'No  no  no. It's not like that.'" Yet   [TGT]   was  in a sense  a natural choice for the helm of a romantic epic:  He  knew how to translate love into action. From the beginning   his  heroes and heroines had been made powerful by their ability to love  and by loveâs ability to instill in them greater strength than any opponent could hope to defeat. The Terminator ends with Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) speaking gently to her unborn son as she drives into a mounting storm; in Aliens  Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) balances a little girl on one hip and a flamethrower on the other; and in Judgment Day  the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger)  programmed to protect the adolescent John Connor  tells John âI know now why you cryâ as he destroys himself to save the future of humanity. âBuilding Better Worldsâ is the space conglomerate slogan on display in James Cameronâs Aliens  but it could just as easily apply to the worlds   [TGT] builds in   [TGT]   movies â or rather  the worlds   [TGT]   allows to come into being  by stripping away the rules as they have always previously applied. In The Terminator  Terminator 2  and Aliens  this idea seems to go hand in hand with getting rid of men â and Titanic follows this example. Even if men arenât actively oppressing women  Cameronâs movies suggest  they still have a way of holding women back from doing what they need to. Even if all you want is to save John Connor  youâre still a product of Skynet. The best protection you can offer the world is to leave it.
Before filming even began    [TGT]   knew   [TGT]   $110 million budget projection was only an educated guess. To begin with  Fox would have to build a brand-new studio from the ground up  something neither it nor any other major movie company had done since the 1930s. No one knew how much it cost to do that kind of thing anymore â to say nothing of the price tag for conjuring the past with computer-generated effects so brand-new that their final cost was also impossible to estimate. But if anyone could make Titanic work  Fox executives felt  it was   [TGT]  . He had made Terminator 2  from script to premiere  in 13 months: He shot the movie six days a week  and on the seventh day  he edited. (Crew members somehow found enough time away from their grueling production schedule to make shirts reading âYou canât scare me  I work for   [TGT]  .â) He liked to say he had won his first directing gig â for Piranha II: The Spawning  the sequel to a Jaws knockoff â because he convinced producers he could make mealworms writhe on command. (He had called âAction!â and then electrified them with an AC current.) He had a reputation as a miracle worker  and he encouraged it. How else could you convince a roomful of businessmen to give you the money you needed to project your dreams and nightmares directly into the American mind? The question was just how much this dream was going to cost.   [TGT]   asked for $125 million to make Titanic. Fox Chairman Peter Chernin balked  and told   [TGT] he  could make the movie   [TGT]   had first pitched as âRomeo and Juliet on a boatâ if   [TGT]   could have it ready for a July 1997 release  and keep the budget to $110 million.  Cameron   perhaps believing this might really be possible at the time â and perhaps also figuring it was better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission â said  he  could do it  offering to forfeit $4 million of  his  own salary to squeeze under the line. Almost as soon as Titanic went into production  it began to go over budget. In 1996  shooting a typical action blockbuster â a Batman Forever or a Tomorrow Never Dies â cost an average of $100 000 to $150 000 a day. Titanic averaged between $225 000 and $300 000 â and this was after construction ended on the brand-new 40-acre movie studio   [TGT]   needed to film it.   [TGT]   had considered locations all over the world  and ultimately decided on a spot 15 miles south of the border  in Rosarito  Mexico. Workers needed 10 000 tons of dynamite to blast a hole in the coastline big enough for the 17-million-gallon open-air tank â the largest ever built â that   [TGT] needed to hold   [TGT]   ship. And in a detail that becomes noteworthy when the movie in question is so concerned with the politics and hierarchies of labor â and Titanic never for a moment lets you forget that the captainâs pleasure in his âunsinkableâ ship is powered by the sweat of the stokers in the hold  â  [TGT]   shot Titanic in Mexico in part to keep labor costs down. (âThis is NAFTA at work!â Foxâs Tom Sherak told journalists who visited the set.)
Less than halfway through its seven-month shooting schedule  the movie had gobbled up nearly three-quarters of its budget  and showed no signs of slowing down â and   [TGT] seemed unwilling to make it slow down. So  Paula Parisi writes in Titanic and the Making of   [TGT]    the studio did its best to persuade   [TGT]  . One night in the fall of 1996  20th Century Fox President Bill Mechanic visited   [TGT]   onset during  [TGT]  2 a.m. lunch hour  a schedule necessitated by the movieâs endless night shoots. âFrom a financial standpoint â Mechanic told him  âthis film is wildly out of control. Nothing is going to change that. All we can do now is contain it. So here are some scenes weâd like you to cut from the shooting schedule.â   [TGT]   studied the list of scenes  and immediately refused to cut any of them. âIf you want to cut my film â   [TGT]   told the president of Fox  âyouâll have to fire me  and to fire me youâll have to kill me.â Then he stormed off set. The scenes stayed in the picture. Mechanic had little choice but to relent: No other director could manage all the moving parts Titanic required. When   [TGT] asked Peter Chernin to fund   [TGT]   submersible expedition to Titanic   he  wanted not just to see the wreck himself  but to film it in a way that would allow viewers to feel they were there with  him . Doing so would also allow  him  to do Bob Ballard one better: Ballard may have found the ship  but  he  had only been able to capture video of it with  his  underwater remote operating vehicle  Jason. (Ballard had also initially wished to keep Titanicâs location secret.)   [TGT] might not be shooting Titanic first  but   [TGT]   was going to do it right.   [TGT]   engineer brother  Mike â the only Cameron boy who finished college â developed a titanium-encased film camera capable of independently withstanding the pressure of the ocean floor  and of capturing images of Titanic as it had never been seen before. Each dive would cost $25 000  and could record only 10 minutes of film. Some of the footage  Cameron  brought back from Titanic appears in the movie. Some is recreated. But what   [TGT] also seems to have brought back from those dives was a new sense of humility about the task before   [TGT]  . After   [TGT]   second trip to Titanic    [TGT] told Paula Parisi  âI just sat there  and I just started to cry  thinking about the dive and everything Iâd seen and experienced.â Later   he  wrote in James Cameronâs Titanic: âThat night I realized that my project  my film  was doomed to failure if it could not convey the emotion of that night rather than the fact of it.â More and more  it seemed to  him  that  he  could only let viewers experience Titanicâs sinking by letting them fully experience the ship itself â and  he  could only do that by recreating it.
âI wanted to be able to say to an audience  without the slightest pang of guilt: This is real â   [TGT] wrote of Titanic. âThis is what happened. Exactly like this. If you went back in a time machine and stood on the deck  this is what you would have seenâ¦ Second Officer Lightoller would be over there â¦ and Wallace Hartley would be leading the band in a lively waltz just there  a few yards away â¦ [and] slaloming between these immovable pylons of historical fact are  Jack  and Rose.â In this way    [TGT]   wrote  âThe film comes full circle  from being a film about Titanic  to being a love story that happens merely to be set on Titanic  back to being about the emotional truth of Titanic after all. By feeling the fear  the loss  the heartbreak of  Jack  and Rose  we finally can feel for the 1 500.â After seeing Titanic for the first time  Harry Knowles compared the experience to traveling to the past through self-willed hypnosis  like the hero of Somewhere in Time. Titanic experts who visited Cameronâs set had the same experience in the flesh.  Cameron âs devotion to history was exacting  and at times excruciating: Every possible detail  from the davits used to lower the lifeboats to the carpet in the first-class dining saloon (recreated  all 18 000 square feet of it  by the same company that had manufactured the original)  was identical to what Titanicâs passengers would have seen. When the furniture being artificially aged for a scene recreating the wreck didnât look quite right to   [TGT]  [TGT]   spent a day and a half working on the props himself. (  [TGT]   was supposed to be finishing the screenplay at the time.) â  [TGT]   wanted real wallpaper and things like that " the movieâs head of physical production  Fred Gallo  recalled. "I said  'Why don't you build the sets and have them paint on the wallpaper? No one will ever know.'â But   [TGT] would. Thousands of props  from ashtrays to teacups to forks  had to be stamped with the White Star Line emblem  even if it was impossible for viewers to see. The costumes alone cost $8.4 million. The chandeliers couldnât be Lucite   Cameron  decided  because then they wouldnât chime ominously as the ship began to tilt; they would have to be crystal  just as they had been in 1912. âThere should be a little brass sign right here that says âPush ââ   [TGT] said apologetically to Ken Marschall  as  [TGT]  led the Titanic expert through a doorway on D deck during a set visit. âIt was one delight after another â Marschall said of his time on Titanic. But he didnât have to work there.
"You don't just join one of his films " editor Mark Goldblatt said of  [TGT]  . âYou sign on for a tour of duty." On Titanic  two-thirds of the shoot had to be done at night  and even the cast sometimes worked 20-hour days. âNothing could have prepared me for it â Kate Winslet later said. Night after night  as Titanic sank again and again  she and Leonardo DiCaprio had to struggle through water pumped in straight from the ocean. âI bet people will think it's heated â she wrote in her diary  âbut it isn't.â The crew watched actors vigilantly for signs of hypothermia. (Later  they would begin heating the water  even though Winslet had believed the cold would make her performance more authentic). "I chipped a small bone in my elbow  and at one point I had deep bruises all over my arms " Kate Winslet told the Los Angeles Times once Titanicâs arduous shoot was over. "I looked like a battered wife." Filming underwater close-ups  where Winslet had to be weighted in a tank while completely submerged  terrified her.  Cameron   she wrote  âwouldn't have made me do that if I didn't say  âNo  I'm okay.â" But even though it was a highly supervised set  with safety divers everywhere  she sometimes felt like she was drowning. âTake after take â Winslet wrote in her diary  âI reminded myself that I wanted to be part of this. I will not admit defeat.â
No one would. Titanicâs budget continued to swell as   [TGT] continued to fall behind schedule  and  [TGT]  release date was pushed back from July to December. Fox shunted Speed 2 â which some executives had higher hopes for  anyway â into the summer release slot Titanic was meant to fill. It flopped  and Titanic plunged ahead  its budget once rising by $20 million in the space of two chaotic weeks. âI cannot think of one crew member who didn't say  'I've had it ââ first assistant director SebastiÃ¡n Silva said. âBut no one walked." As far as  Cameron âs temper went  Kate Winslet said  âthe actors got off lightly. I think Jim knew he couldn't shout at us the way he did to his crew because our performances would be no good.â âAny idiot could figure this out!â This  Paula Parisi wrote  was a standard   [TGT] response to crew members who couldnât make  [TGT]  vision a reality fast enough.  [TGT]  raged at workers and  [TGT]  raged at executives and  [TGT]  seemed sometimes to want  more than anything  to simply be able to do every single job on Titanic himself. When the ice arrived  in hundred-pound blocks    [TGT] picked up an ax and started chopping  preparing it for the scene where it was to splinter off the iceberg and fall onto the deck. âGetting over their initial disbelief â Paula Parisi wrote  âthe crew followed suit. ... Giving up his ax   Cameron  stepped back and watched for thirty seconds  then  he  just couldnât stand it anymore.  He  pushed a puny guy aside  taking  his  ax. It was just too much fun.â   [TGT] Parisi wrote  was âshowing that he knew full well the film was going to be hard work  but no one would work harder than he would.â Maybe. But Titanic  Parisi also observed  âwas a factory â and it had only one product:  Cameron âs dream. Cameronâs recreation of the ship itself contained 300 tons of steel  bolted together  at a breakneck pace  by 30 laborers. The wardrobe department needed 8 000 separate articles of clothing to dress the extras for the Southampton scene alone. Every time   [TGT]   sank the first-class dining saloon  and raised it again for another take  crew members spent the next workday drying carpets  righting furniture  collecting 1 800 pieces of flatware off the floor  and recreating Titanic all over again. Titanic had one boss and hundreds of workers  and though it amassed superlative after superlative in terms of monetary costs well over a year before it even reached theaters  its cost in terms of human labor may be yet more staggering. What does it feel like to surrender seven months of your life  for nearly every waking hour of the day  to one manâs vision? What does it do to you? What makes you stay?
For the laborers and extras hired in Rosarito  it probably had something to do with the pay; for the crew  it probably had something to do with the prestige; for the cast  it probably had something to do with the exposure. But among the cast and crew members who described not just the tortuous process of making Titanic but their own dedication to the film  a shared conviction is always present: They were doing something real  and they could feel it. âOne thing thatâs very important to me in life â Kate Winslet said while Titanic was in production  âis [that] through having a relationship with somebody and loving that person and being allowed to feel the whole emotion of love despite all of the risks  you can find out who you are. And when Rose meets  Jack  she cuts through all of the class and money nonsense and connects with something real and alive and passionate in  his  soul. And when I read the script I was in floods of tears  because it takes you to the point where you would do anything â absolutely anything â to stop that ship from sinking.â If Titanic felt real â if it was real â then perhaps this painfully conjured time travel was the only way to make  Jack  and Rose  and the love between them  become real as well.   [TGT]   spent the summer of 1997 in an at-home editing room darkened by blackout curtains  faceting the dream   [TGT]   had now poured years of   [TGT]   life into. In late July    [TGT]   took a day off to marry Linda Hamilton    [TGT]   girlfriend of seven years  in a backyard ceremony. The next day    [TGT]   went back to   [TGT]   editing suite  and back to Titanic. âTaped to   [TGT]   editing machine â Entertainment Weekly reported in November 1997  âis a suicide device â a razor blade with the simple instruction âUse only if film sucks.ââ
On TitanicShack â one of the many websites and forums that sprang up after the movieâs release as outlets for people confronted by the grim fact that they couldnât spend every single day in the theater  watching Titanic again and again â fans wondered why the movie had such a hold on them. Some felt as mystified as the movieâs harshest critics did about just why they couldnât stop themselves from returning to Titanic: I've seen this movie 13 times (and yes  I must go back  if only because 13's unlucky! :-) Why do I  a thirty-something  sane woman keep going back? Because I love this movie â everything about it â and I know they'll letterbox it when it comes out on video and it just WON'T be the same on my tiny 19-inch tv screen. Someone told me a story about a woman in the States who was kicked out of the theatre for reciting every line with the movie. She had ticket stubs to prove she had seen it 84 times!! Now that's a bit excessive!!!! I can't really pinpoint why I keep going back. All I can say is that this movie gets to me every single time... The life lessons it teaches are many  but there is one theme in particular that all humankind never tires of hearing: love really is the greatest power of all. As it continued its dominance of Americansâ hearts and minds  almost anything Titanic touched became a guaranteed moneymaker. The J. Peterman catalog began selling what it advertised as a âfairly enormousâ $198 Heart of the Ocean necklace  and quickly ran out of stock (disappointed customers could  however  content themselves with a $19 knockoff called âthe Jewel of the Sea â at least until Fox sued the company that made it). CÃ©line Dionâs âMy Heart Will Go Onâ became the world's best-selling single of 1998  and pushed the Titanic soundtrack to the top of the charts  too. (  [TGT]   had initially resisted including any song over the closing credits  feeling it was akin to commissioning a pop single for the soundtrack to Schindlerâs List. But Horner and Dion cut a demo in secret  and won him over.) Even â maybe especially â after the movie was gone from theaters  any piece of media that summoned its world would suffice for fans.   [TGT]  âs Titanic  a glossy coffee table book detailing the movieâs production  shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list  and candy-hued unauthorized biographies of Leonardo DiCaprio began appearing in bookstores  and in smitten girlsâ backpacks. "There's a lot of me in Jack  definitely "   [TGT] told Rolling Stone in 1998  in an interview in which   [TGT]   also discussed   [TGT]   recent separation from Linda Hamilton. She had been   [TGT]   fourth wife  and   [TGT]   Sarah Connor. "Actually â   [TGT]   clarified  âI shouldn't say that. Jack is the guy I wished I could have been. I wished I had the courage and the openness.â
Reading the Titanic screenplay  itâs easy to tell which character   [TGT]   wished   [TGT]   could have been: Even the simplest descriptions of Jack find a way to be adoring. One of Jackâs sketches âcaptures [Cora and her father] perfectly  with a great sense of the humanity of the moment.â Jackâs sketchbook is âa celebration of the human condition.â As Jack stargazes before his first conversation with Rose  he is thinking not just any thoughts  but âartist thoughts.â And as Rose begins to fall for Jack  we listen in on her first impressions of him: He âis so open and real...not like anyone she has ever known.â Remembering the iconic âking of the worldâ scene â one he later reenacted  to near-universal disdain  at the 1998 Academy Awards â  [TGT]  described the kind of power  the kind of joy  that even the experience of commanding a vast and imposing structure â a ship  a movie set â couldnât necessarily allow you to feel. âYou see the power of [Titanic] â  [TGT]  said of the scene  âand you see the satisfaction of the officers who run the ship  and their domination of the elements. And then I take that energy and I give it to Jack. Heâs an artist. Heâs a guy whoâs able to have his heart soar. Itâs his ship  man. It doesnât matter that he doesnât have a dime. This is his ship  and his moment. He owns the moment.â To survey (and enjoy) the power of the vast system he commands  the captain â âa great patriarch of the seaâ in Cameronâs script â must stand on the bridge and look at Titanic itself. But Jack  because this is not his ship and not his dream  can stand at Titanicâs prow as it cuts through the water  feeling the sun on his face  and watching the dolphins that leap and swim âfor the sheer joy and exultation of motion.â He can fully experience Titanicâs power because he feels no need to convince himself he commands it â and then he can give it to Rose. "I've been part of a film that's broken cultural boundaries â DiCaprio reflected in 2004. âI went to the middle of Brazil  in the rainforest  and the Indians there knew [Titanic]. It's surreal.â From the beginning  it was clear Titanicâs success transcended borders. When it finally left US theaters in the fall of 1998 â staying on the big screen even after it was released on video â it had made $659 million domestically. In the process  it became the highest-grossing movie in US history  shattering the record comfortably held  for 20 years  by Star Wars. (George Lucas took out an ad in Variety where Han and Leia posed like Jack and Rose to publicly congratulate Cameron  perhaps with some sense of relief: Heavy is the head that wears the big-gross crown.) But Titanicâs worldwide theatrical gross was nearly $2.2 billion. In a March 1998 article titled âFan Sinks into Titanic Obsession â the Associated Press reported that a 12-year-old girl named Gloria had gone to see Titanic  at the only movie theater in the town of Castelfranco Emilia  Italy  every single night since its release  and that she would go on watching it until she couldnât anymore. She had seen it 50 times so far and wasnât tired of it yet; the theater no longer charged her admission  and â recognizing that the love of an adolescent girl is nothing to be trifled with â saved her favorite seat for her every night. âJack is cuter than Leo â Gloria clarified  for anyone who wondered.
âExperts say that the pure passion that pre-adolescent girls have for their idols represents a time in their lives that is brief  intense and â once it's run its course â gone forever â Frances Grandy Taylor wrote in the Hartford Courant in March 1998  in one of the countless articles and TV segments that tried to help parents understand Leomania. The âgone foreverâ part must have seemed particularly comforting. When the unafflicted tried to make sense of the phenomenon following the movieâs release  they tended to focus on Leoâs looks and his celebrity  and of course they werenât wrong. Like all adolescent crushes  he was perfect and remote: He couldnât hurt you  couldnât reject you  couldnât disappoint you. And as Jack Dawson  he was pure fantasy: so handsome as to seem almost unearthly; an androgynous angel who wanted only to love you  to worship you  and to be the idea of a romantic partner  one with whom reality could never try to compete. He was a dream  the argument went  and that was why adolescent girls â who were overwhelmingly presented in the media as the driving force behind Titanicâs success  regardless of whether this was quite true or not â kept going back to the theater for more. It was wish fulfillment. But what were we really wishing for? More than any   [TGT]   protagonist before  him   Jack Dawson is heroic for his ability to love. He can watch the world as he knew it fall apart around him and not feel that everything he believed in â hierarchy  order  masculinity â is being yanked out from under his feet  because he never felt much of a need to believe in it  anyway. When Jack turns up in a tuxedo to accompany Rose to dinner in first class  he first exaggerates the aristocracyâs manners just enough to make them seem absurd  then captivates some of the wealthiest people in the world with stories of the kind of freedom they can barely allow themselves to imagine. Roseâs life  as she has lived it so far  has taught her that she is an object to be bought and sold: All women are  and the best you can hope for  as a woman  is to be the most expensive object  sold to the richest buyer. Jack saves Rose from literal death â twice â but he also saves her from the society- and self-imposed prison of believing that she can only ever inhabit the role she was born into. â'Titanic' is starting to sail out of movie theaters â conservative commentator Betsy Hart wrote in 1998  âbut it may have left a wake of devastation in its path in the hearts of teenage girls everywhere.â As heartbreaking as the movieâs ending was  Hart found that she was âsaddened much moreâ by the thought of âthe millions of teenage girlsâ who had helped make the movie a hit  and who had been duped into thinking that âthe intense sentiment and easy sex over a few days that formed the romantic centerpiece of Titanic is the kind of love they should strive for.â âIt's little wonder â Hart concluded  that âour society has so many young people that need so much rescuing.â
This analysis has always been obviously wrong in at least one more way: Titanic is not a fun movie to watch. You arenât escaping from anything so much as putting yourself through an emotional ordeal: a decathlon of passion  dread  terror  numbness  and finally cathartic hope. You  yourself  have survived something by the end of Titanic; you have sat immersed in death  in dying  in questions about your own behavior in such a situation  and have asked yourself to believe in love in the face of all this â and perhaps have been able to. For that experience  we were willing to go back to Titanic over and over again. And if weâre focusing on the girls in the audience  then please â letâs really think about them. Who were these girls  and why were they there? Why was I? When Titanic was in theaters  girls of 9 and 10 and 11 and 12 and 13 shaped their lives around it  and fell in love not just with Leo  but with the whole story they had first found him in. We had a sense  maybe  that life as we knew it was not so different from Titanic: that we  too  lived in a world where society might have to fall apart completely before we could be liberated from the roles that gender and class and race forced us to occupy. In Titanic  Rose is freed not because her mother and her fiancÃ© die (they donât)  but because a microcosm of the world as she knows it collapses around her  and in that moment she realizes its rules no longer dictate her existence. They were never really real  of course â but now that she has seen the spectacular defeat of every system the society that raised her guaranteed would work forever  she can no longer even feel its laws governing her. Something breaks when you no longer believe that anyone  anywhere  can build an unsinkable ship. And if you canât put your faith in a system like a ship â or a government â you have to start directing all your trust  all your love  to the people around you. Titanic poses the question of what we can hold onto when the structures and beliefs we have built our lives on founder beneath us  and one of the answers it allows us to reach is: each other. We hold onto each other. Recently  a writer friend told me that this year  as the world has started to feel like itâs falling apart  he has found himself turning again and again to W.H. Audenâs closing lines in âSeptember 1  1939â: Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. In the past year  I have developed the same kind of relationship â have been taking the same kind of refuge  grasping for the same kind of wisdom â with Titanic. When I first fell in love with Titanic  at 9 years old  I wanted to be Jack as much as I wanted to be loved by him. I wanted the freedom he enjoyed: freedom that seemed to give him the ability to love so deeply and so selflessly. It was the kind of freedom the world around me said a girl could never have. But the world had also told Rose that  and she had found that freedom  in the end. Yet no matter how vast James Cameronâs abilities were  his imagination â big enough to bring a lost ship back to life; big enough  even  to let the viewer feel some sense of what 1 500 lost souls really means â still couldnât conjure a vision so radical that it could let Jack survive. If it were possible for  James Cameron  to imagine masculinity doing anything  in the long term  but infecting everything around it with violence and arrogance and greed and destruction  then Jack could have survived. If   [TGT] were able to imagine a world beyond the hierarchy of patriarchal control â instead of just spectacularly destroying one â then Jack could have survived. If he could have imagined possibilities for men beyond either blindly following the patriarchy or dying for its sins  then Jack could have survived. But instead  Jack has to die  and to love Rose in the only way a world of patriarchal masculinity  even one reduced to flotsam  will allow: by giving his life for hers. Beyond even Titanicâs unresolved questions about masculinity  the one radical possibility  James Cameron  seems unable to imagine is one in which partners can lovingly empower each other through a life lived together. This is where we have no choice but to do what he couldnât: to imagine such love  and live it. To focus on nurture  and let go of heroism. To know that love is the only way through. To say: Get on this board  you idiot. Thereâs room for us both.