“Titanic” Tape 1
1997 • PG-13 • 1h 48mins (tape 1) • Rent it • Watch trailer
🎟️✌️Double Feature: Pairing up Titanic with, wait, also Titanic?
Two special things are happening in the next two weeks. First, as usual, Valentine’s Day. But second, a 25th anniversary theatrical run of the biggest movie of my lifetime: 1997’s Titanic. Go see it! It’s better than you remembered, or, if you haven’t seen it at all, not the bodice-ripper you think it is. And like the vessel itself, the story of how it got made is bigger and the ride wilder than you’d expect. In the US on VHS, you had to watch it in two parts. Tonight, we’re popping in tape one.
Here’s the plot. It’s 1996 and we’re on Keldysh, a research vessel in the Atlantic. Treasure hunter Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) oversees a dive to recover a giant diamond, The Heart of the Ocean, from the wreckage of Titanic. He finds a safe that doesn’t contain the diamond but does have a spicy drawing dated the same day as the sinking. After choppering out the woman in the drawing, Rose (Gloria Stuart), they get the full story.
Now we’re in 1912 and Rose (Kate Winslet), 17, is engaged to rich jerkwad Cal (Billy Zane). She doesn’t love the guy—not sure even his own mother does—but he’ll solve her family’s money problems. As Rose and Cal board, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his pal Fabrizio (Danny Nucci) win tickets in a poker game. At the last second, they jump aboard. Jack and Rose don’t meet until she, sick of being her family’s and Cal’s pawn, climbs out on the bow railing to end her life. Jack talks her back to safety. They might be friends now? Rose shows Jack her upper crust life. Jack shows her what living is really like when there’s nothing in your pocket. After some will-they-won’t-they, Rose resolves to abscond with Jack, leaving only the portrait Jack draws of her for Cal to remember her by. While they go for a ride in a Renault tucked away belowdecks, the ship’s officers talk turkey about navigating in the nighttime. Having been pushed to go full speed to make headlines with an early arrival at port, the ship, equipped with a too-small rudder even for normal speeds, cannot correct course when an iceberg looms into view. Jack and Rose watch from the upper deck while the ‘berg tears gashes along half the ship below the waterline. As Captain Smith (Bernard Hill) predicts that the next two hours will indeed be headline-making, tape one ends.
How did we get Titanic? It starts with James Cameron. He loves shipwrecks, even diving to explore them between movies. For a guy like that, Titanic’s wreckage is basically Mount Everest. Cameron made Terminator (‘84), Aliens (‘86), T2 (‘91), and True Lies (1994)—the first movie to cost over $100M. The Schwarzenegger vehicle more than tripled its budget at the box office and made Cameron the hot ticket in Hollywood. Instead of diving right into another movie, he dove into the Atlantic. He finally had the time and money to see Titanic for himself. But if you’re smart, you don’t pay a bill someone else is willing to.
Look, there are pitches, and then there are pitches. Cameron’s was the latter. In 1995, he came to 20th Century Fox with a peach of a two-parter.
Part one: He wanted to make “Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic.” As Cameron tells it, “They were like, ‘Oooooohkaaaaaay—a 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.’” They said yes. This was the second in Fox’s $500M five-picture deal with Cameron and they were just trying to make the relationship work.
Now for part two: Getting to the shipwreck—what Cameron really wanted all along. He says he put it like this to Fox. “Now, we can either do [wreckage shots] with elaborate models and motion control shots and CGI and all that, which will cost X amount of money, or we can spend X plus 30% and actually go shoot it at the real wreck.” The clincher was that doing so would give Fox the built-in marketing strategy only a splashy shoot of Titanic itself could afford. Want to see the real thing? Then you’d have to see this movie.
Cameron was off to the races. Remember how I said True Lies cost $100M in ‘94, a record at the time? Titanic cost twice that only three years later. So how’d they spend a production budget that big? Let’s count the ways.
After two years of diving for footage of the wreck, Cameron felt his movie had a lot to live up to. Nothing like sea ghosts to put the fear of God in your heart, am I right? He wrote the script himself with a slew of experts on tap and a whole library of research. Even had the fellas in tweed suits vet his script, fixing things they said he got wrong.
Fox built him a studio in Mexico just for this movie. It boasted a ludicrous seventeen million-gallon fake sea with a 270º field of view. Cameron got White Star Line to slip him the plans for the original Titanic, then rebuilt it at 1:1 scale in his fancy new movie pond. Add to that a tiltable scale model, a replica Grand Staircase, and historically precise sets. Oh, and since their Titanic was on its maiden voyage, every piece of period-correct furniture had to be built from scratch—the real stuff was antique. They built their upper deck on a giant hinge that would do 90º. Stunt people fell down across set pieces made of foam to prevent injury (which only sort of worked, yikes). The extensive cast had etiquette coaches on set to flex like real aristocracy when cameras were rolling.
That’s how you burn a million dollars a minute of final running time.
James Cameron is not a nice person at work. He’s direct, critical, yelly, demanding, and tireless. This movie isn’t subtle, and neither is he. But just as you can’t give nuanced dialog to your characters when you’ve got three dozen main ones, two different timelines, and a giant ship to sink, you can’t mince words with a crew in the hundreds. Wes Anderson is famous for filming in ritzy locales and throwing nightly dinner parties with the cast. Cameron’s production, uh, wasn’t like that.
But to do something this big, I think you’d need a disposition like his. It was the biggest budget in history for the biggest director at the time for the biggest ship ever. "Film-making is war. A great battle between business and aesthetics,” Cameron said. Fair enough.
How did Kate and Leo get the parts? Winslet had been working her way up. Heavenly Creatures in ’94, Sense and Sensibility in ’95, period dramas in ’96. She campaigned heavily for the part of Rose, who Cameron wanted to be “an Audrey Hepburn type”. Cameron is tough, but Winslet is tougher. She sent Cameron letters from England, even called him daily. She flew out to California for auditions, including with DiCaprio. She told Cameron, “He’s great. Even if you don’t pick me, pick him.” DiCaprio had been in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape in ’93, The Quick and the Dead in ’95, and critically Romeo + Juliet in ’96. They considered actors deeper into their careers, like Matthew McConaughey, Billy Crudup, Paul Rudd and Jared Leto (Cameron’s choice, but he refused to audition), but felt they were too old to play a twenty-year-old. Both Winslet and DiCaprio were perfectly poised to play young leads in a period romantic tragedy. Now, it’s hard to imagine it any other way.
Next week we’re back with tape two, a thumb through the themes, and a look at what this did to late-‘90s culture.
Go see this while it’s in theaters! Showings start next Thursday and only last for a week. Or see it at all, especially for Valentine’s Day. And share this with someone else if you liked it!
NOTES:
Cameron balances knowing that Titanic was badly engineered—unprepared for even a single voyage—and a really big crush on the ship’s scale and aesthetic.
The present day ship, Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, is the actual ship Cameron used as his base of operations for two years of diving to film the wreckage. Several of the folk involved had cameos in the movie.
Gloria Stuart, “Old Rose” as my subtitles call her, was a silent film star in the early 1900s. She was in Universal Monsters picture The Invisible Man (1933). Cameron wisely cast somebody who was somebody back then.
I love Lewis Abernathy’s character mansplaining Titanic’s sinking to Old Rose. I’m guessing what we see is previsualization made during the production of this movie to plan sinking scenes. But I don’t have to guess that it’s being played for our benefit. No one watching the movie doesn’t know Titanic sank, but we need to know how it happened before it plays out.
Young Rose brings a gallery’s worth of art with her on Titanic. Old Rose brings enough framed pictures with her on Keldysh to cover every horizontal surface. Now that’s being consistent with a character.
The sketching scene on the couch was the first thing Winslet and DiCaprio shot together. The first thing! All the tension and awkwardness in the scene was real.
Cameron drew the picture of Rose himself. She wore a bathing suit for the sitting.
Cameron told his crew to shoot the B-role of the miniature like “we’re making a commercial for the White Star Line”.
Titanic gets dinged for characters and dialogue that lack specificity. Yes, they’re types, but no, it doesn’t matter. If your job is winding a single spool of thread, it’ll be the most interesting thread ever. But if you’re weaving a floor-to-ceiling tapestry, your job is managing contrast between threads rather than the threads themselves.
Tape one MVP: Kathy Bates.
Yes, this really is where the first VHS tape ended.