Cameron’s Titanic rises from depths

WHEN “Titanic” hit the screen in 1997, Leonardo DiCaprio became the hottest young actor around, carrying the $250 million production — the most expensive ever made until that point — on his slim shoulders. He was only 22-years-old, a star of edgy art films like The Basketball Diaries and Total Eclipse.

Director Cameron admits it took some persuading to have the actor take on Titanic, recalling, “Leo liked to play tortured souls and wasn’t interested in doing my movie in the beginning.”

But Titanic was hard to resist for Leonardo.

“It was a good story and contained some emotionally charged characters,” he explains. “Jim (Cameron) said he wanted it to be a Doctor Zhivago type of thing, and I thought it would be interesting to be part of that. Also, I’m not really Mr Action Guy, so this kind of action movie made sense to me; a love story in which a working-class artist meets an upper-class girl and falls in love, and in the midst of everything, the ship starts going down.”

It wasn’t an easy film to make for DiCaprio and co-star Kate Winslet who spent six months on tilting sets in Mexico.

“We were thrown around a lot,” recalls Leonardo, “and it was very hard on our bodies. There were definitely certain moments when I felt like I was there for real. When you ran on the ship with 200 people around you screaming for their lives while the ship is tilting up, you feel like you are there.”

Filming in water for weeks on end was cold and exhausting. Says James Cameron, “Every time we were about to do water work, Leo got sick.”

“Not true!” laughs DiCaprio. “But you just don’t want to be there after a while. I got to dump a big thing of ice and water on Jim’s head at the end of shooting, in front of the crew. It was my revenge.”

The production filmed over six months at a 40-acre site in Rosarita Beach, Mexico. Leonardo had filmed Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet in the same place the year before, where the crew got attacked, robbed and shot at, so the actor was not keen on returning there.

“There was garbage everywhere, and I missed home and my mother’s cooking,” he remembers. “I wouldn’t have chosen to spend a whole year in Mexico if I could have helped it, but those two movies happened back to back.”

It wasn’t all bad.

“No,” he grins, “I did get to kiss Kate, which ain’t bad at all.”

The Titanic love scenes were among his favourites to do.

“The soul of the movie is the romance, it’s what the audience connects to. It was crucial to make it as realistic as possible.” He grins. “But it wasn’t easy for Kate. The first day at work the poor girl had to be completely naked in front of me and the whole crew.”

Leonardo recalls the making of the epic as “a very interesting period in my life. The shoot itself was an unforgettable experience, but all the attention the picture generated around the world turned my world upside down. I found myself chased by the paparazzi, girls who would become hysterical when they saw me, and they would climb over walls to get to me. It was surreal.”

In the years that followed, DiCaprio would try his best to escape from the pressures that Hollywood put on him to continue being the Movie Star heartthrob.

“The success of Titanic was like a runaway train. I didn’t want to be the giant romantic lead guy, and my instinctive reaction to the tabloid madness was to run away. An actor has no control over how the media paints him. For a while my world ceased to be about actors and directors and became all about publicists and agents. It was extremely frustrating, distracting and, ultimately, a waste of time.”

So Leonardo formed his own production company, Appian Way, and began making his own films: The Aviator, Blood Diamond and Shutter Island, as well as Public Ememies for Johnny Depp. The three-time Oscar nominated actor has also starred in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, Christopher Nolan’s Inception and Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. At Christmas he returns as a romantic leading man in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, his first such role since Titanic.

“I’m grateful for the possibilities it has given me,” he says. “If it hadn’t been for that movie I wouldn’t have been able to take control of my career. Kate and I never expected in a million years that Titanic would be that kind of success, didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into... It empowered us in a lot of ways. Being able to do almost any type of movie you want to do is a huge privilege.”

The two actors have remained close friends.

“Kate is one of my dearest friends,” tells DiCaprio, who reunited with Winslet for the 2008 drama Revolution Road. “Kate is the same person that she was back then, and we have the ultimate trust in each other.”

And has Leonardo come to terms with the fact that the world at large will always associate him with Jack Dawson?

“Yes,” he answers. “I’ve accepted it. I’ve been to the Amazon, and people with no clothes on, and I’m not exaggerating now about that film. The fame is empty and pointless, but the payoff is having your films remembered. All I care about is to have a good body of work to look back at.”

James Cameron, an obsessive perfectionist, had already made special effects extravaganzas like Aliens, The Terminator and True Lies before Titanic and worked an exhausting 14 months on the ambitious epic that cost somewhere between $225 and $285 million.

Despite having no massive star names, Cameron believed the audience would be fascinated by the notion that people who were supposed to be coddled and secure were facing imminent doom.

“They thought they were safe in this big luxury hotel but in fact they were in a steel object over two miles of water. It’s a metaphor for the inevitability of death. We’re all on the Titanic. But this is no action picture. I was drawn to the story because of its drama.”

The director was accused of abusing his actors and crews, and he had an exasperated Kate Winslet demanding a break after 13 straight days of shooting.

“At one point I nearly drowned when Leonardo and I ran along a corridor pursued by a gigantic rushing wave and we found ourselves trapped by a closed gate,” recalls the British actress, who was 22-years-old when she portrayed Rose Dewitt Bukatern and only known for the costume drama Sense and Sensibility. “We finally got it open, but my long coat snagged the gate and submerged me beneath the rising water. I had to sort of shimmy out of the coat to get free. I had no breath left. I’d thought I’d burst.”

Kate had been working out with a trainer to prepare for the swimming sequences because she knew how important strength would be on a film like this.

But she had not expected the degree of exhaustion she would face over the long period of filming.

“I should have done an Arnold Schwarzenegger workout,” she insists. “But I only lifted light weights, about five pounds, because I had to keep the length in the muscle. Back then women didn’t have any muscles because they never lifted anything. They even had someone to help them get dressed.”

At the end of filming, Winslet, who caught flu and suffered chills from being immersed in too-cold water, was quoted, “You’d have to pay me a lot of money to work with Jim (Cameron) again.”

By the time the film opened, the actress who would go on to receive an Oscar nomination for her work in the film, and later the award itself for The Reader, had got a distance on the turbulent filming and enthused, “Jim’s a wonderful director, but it was an exhausting ordeal. Luckily I’m a masochist, I love working until I’m exhausted.”

The filming of Titanic was plagued with dissension among crew and cast members because of the usual Cameron-generated on-set turmoil.

“People know I demand a tremendous amount from myself and everyone else,” claims the Canadian director, who would not do another film for 12 years. “You don’t care if the cast and crew get mad. When you spend between $25,000 and $45,000 an hour and my hand is on the throttle, it’s my job to be impatient. And long hours are a way of life in the film business.”

“It’s perfectly acceptable in sports not to tolerate mistakes and laziness, so why should this be frowned upon in film production?” asked Cameron, who directed Titanic through a bank of speakers pitched to concert volume. The crews responded to the pressure by printing up T-shirts with semi-jokey slogans: You can’t scare me — I worked for Jim Cameron.

“I’m not the most popular person in the world,” admits Cameron. “At the end of a film, about 50% of the crew thinks I’m a complete asshole. But the other 50% have come to understand that I’m an asshole but I’m going for something.”

As for being labelled a control freak, he says, “It’s the director’s responsibility to be in control. You hire somebody to be the contractor on your house. If they don’t know what the hell is going on, you’re going to fire them. That’s kind of the director’s job.”

After filming finished, Cameron — armed with his own personal computer-effects studio, Digital Domain — worked for five months, seven days a week, 17 hours a day, on the post-production. Still he could not finish the effects in time. Especially complicated were the 3-D renderings of crowds of virtual people on the slanting deck.

Also, Cameron wanted a cloud of mist added in front of each face on the deck, to show their breath in the cold air.

In the end, Titanic arrived in the cinemas vastly over budget and five months after the original July 1997 opening date. Two studios, Paramount and Fox, had to split the production costs.

Because of its budget, Titanic was compared by the press to the financial disaster of 1963’s Cleopatra (whose budget rivalled Titanic’s in 1997’s dollars) and 1980’s Heaven’s Gate (which nearly ruined United Artists). The failure of the film could have broken Hollywood careers and have affected studio management teams.

“I’m not afraid of taking a risk with an awful lot of money,” says Cameron, who was so passionate about the film that when the budget could not accept a shot he wanted, he paid for it out of his own pocket.

During the shoot, he waived his entire production and directing fees (reportedly $9 million) to reduce the film’s budget.

“It did cost me personally to spend more money on Titanic, but for me the desire to create the best possible film always wins out.

“I just can’t do it less than the way I think it should be. I can’t hack it. It’s a curse.”

“There are no limitations to what you can do,” he continues. “Only money. The really scary thing for me is that technology is so good now that you can do anything, put anybody anywhere. The director is always God.”

Despite complaints about the blandness of its story, Titanic went on to win 11 Oscars, including awards for Best Picture and Best Director.

“I don’t care what the critics think,” he insists.

“What I care about is the public. It doesn’t cost any more to see Titanic than it cost to see a little romantic comedy.

“The guy on the street always knows that he’s getting his money’s worth when he sees my movies, because there’s not a penny spent that’s not on the screen.”

In 1997, Titanic became the highest grossing film of all time ($1.84bn worldwide) and it remained so for 12 years, until Cameron’s Avatar beat it by grossing €2bn dollars at the 2009 box-office. (Note to film buffs: neither grosses were adjusted for inflation, so Gone with the Wind is still the box-office champ).

Cameron’s income from making it was reportedly a mind-boggling $115m (and would be peanuts compared to the $350m he would collect for writing, directing and producing Avatar). Now he will add to his fortune with the new “turbocharged version” of Titanic. The re-release has been converted into 3-D at a cost of $18m, a process that took 60 weeks and required the work of 300 artists.

Its debut this month marks the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking. So, is it all commerce? “What’s wrong with commerce anyway? What’s wrong with making jobs for people in movie theatres around the world? What’s wrong with entertaining people?” asks Cameron, who believes sceptics are motivated by cynicism and jealousy. “Commerce is art and business put together, and I have no problem with that whatsoever.”

* Titanic 3D is on general release now.

* Titanic: 100 Years A special publication with next Wednesday’s Irish Examiner, featuring interviews with film director James Cameron, ocean recovery expert Robert Ballard, stories of Irish survivors and a look back at the unique access afforded to this newspaper at the ship’s last port of call in Queenstown (now Cobh).