The Making of Titanic
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Success
Titanic 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 Cameron's passion project became notorious as the as the most expensive movie ever made, with a final budget of $200 million. Then it became the first movie history to earn $1 billion at the box office. it achieved this success despite months of advance press claiming the movies was all but doomed.
Despite the widespread belief that James Cameron, who previosly helmed the
Aliens and Terminator franchises,
had no business trying to tell a story about
love; and the fact that Titanic, in a way that is now all to 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.
James Cameron
Titanic represented a new challenge for James Cameron, too. It wasn’t 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 — who had cracked into the big leagues after making 1984’s The Terminator, and had seen his sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, become the highest-grossing movie of 1991 — found himself in the odd position of trying to sell studio executives on exactly the kind of movie they didn’t think he could make.
“James Cameron knew he wanted DiCaprio to
be his Jack Dawson, but DiCaprio didn't want
to be his Jack.”
When Titanic was released on video in September 1998,
its 3 hours and 14 minutes had to be split across two VHS tapes.
The Outcome
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 “bloated leviathan,” a “behemoth,” and a tiresome epic that, according to the Titanic’s length was also bad news for movie theaters, since it meant they had to schedule fewer showings and sell fewer tickets than they could with a normal movie.
After screening Titanic for a test audience in which had jointly financed the production, began wondering if Cameron’s 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.
Jack Dawson
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 character’s developmentally disabled younger brother, Arnie, in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
James Cameron knew he wanted DiCaprio to be his Jack Dawson, but DiCaprio didn’t 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 “read it once, [and started] goofing around.”
“I just wasn't used to playing an openhearted, free-spirited guy,” DiCaprio told the Los Angeles Times shortly after the Titanic premiere. “I've played the more tortured roles in the past.
Rose Dawson
“It is the night before shooting starts,” Kate Winslet wrote in her diary on Sept. 15, 1996, “and 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.” The next morning, Winslet added: “No sleep. This is it… My life is not my own and probably never will be — and that's Rose talking.”
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. “You don’t understand,” she told him. “I am Rose.” And she was.
Kate Winslet was 20 when she began filming Titanic, and spent her 21st birthday shooting Jack’s death scene. “We were lying there on the raft, sort of shivering together,” she told Rosie O’Donnell while promoting the movie, “and I said ‘Leo, it’s my birthday today.’ And he said, ‘That’s great, sweetie. You know what? I don’t care.’”