Titanic would be shot very differently today, director James Cameron says as he recalls epic shoot for movie, now remastered for 4K video
- Director recalls the logistics of filming what was then the most expensive movie ever, using a full-size replica ship, and explains he’d do it differently today
- He marvels that fans of the movie – for whom he has just finished a 4K video remaster – still argue about whether Jack could have fitted on that door with Rose
Near, far, wherever they are, what are the most extreme lengths a Titanic fan has gone to in their love for James Cameron’s epic 1997 disaster romance?
Some have set out to clock thousands of lifetime viewings of the 11-time Oscar-winner, says the filmmaker.
“I think there’s one fellow that has set a goal to see it 10,000 times,” Cameron says. “It’s a long film, so I don’t know. He might not live long enough to pull that off.”
Then there’s Grammy- and Oscar-winning recording superstar Adele, who made a special request of Cameron and producer Jon Landau for her Titanic-themed 30th birthday celebration in 2018.
“We loaned the Heart of the Ocean to Adele for her birthday,” says Landau of the blue diamond prop necklace Rose (Gloria Stuart) drops into the ocean at the end of the film. Of Adele’s party, he says, “They built a grand staircase, all these things. That’s right up there for me.”
More than 25 years later, Cameron took about a week out of his packed Avatar franchise schedule this year to oversee a 4K remastering of his groundbreaking modern classic, a fictionalised retelling of the famous 1912 sinking that cost US$200 million to produce.
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A two-disc 25th anniversary 4K Blu-ray and box set hit shelves in early December.
The long-awaited remaster is presented in Dolby Vision HDR and Atmos audio and is the first of six Cameron films heading to shelves in 4K – the others are The Abyss, True Lies, Aliens, Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water.
Like Titanic, which was previously re-released in cinemas in 2012, 2017 and again earlier this year, Cameron’s undersea thriller The Abyss had a one-day 4K showing in cinemas in North America on December 6.
Speaking on Zoom with his Lightstorm Entertainment partner Landau ahead of the 4K home video release, Cameron flashed back to the making of Titanic, for which an 800ft (244-metre) full-scale replica ship was partially constructed in Rosarito, Mexico – a set the Avatar auteur says he would create very differently with today’s technology, using smaller set pieces extended via CGI.
At the time, Titanic was the most expensive film ever made, owing to the scale of sets and sequences that required complex engineering and massive resources. “We never panicked,” Cameron says with a laugh. “The studio panicked. It’s our job not to panic.”
The director admits there were miscalculations in logistics even before cameras rolled. “It was hundreds of miles of cabling, all the Musco lights in Hollywood at the time,” remembers Cameron. “The scale of everything was beyond anything we could imagine in terms of our prior experience.
“At the time we thought, wow, there’s no way this movie could ever make its money back. It’s just impossible. Well, guess what?”
One cut they made to help staunch the ballooning budget was to scrap an entire set planned to be canted at a three-degree angle, instead sticking to two other sets: a level one for pre-iceberg scenes and a second one tilted at six degrees to replicate the sinking of the ship.
“We compromised the three degrees and we saved US$750,000,” says Landau.
Another cheat: “We only cast short extras so it made our set look bigger,” says Cameron. “Anybody above 5ft 8 (1.73 metres), we didn’t cast them. It’s like we got an extra million dollars of value out of casting.”
After opening in cinemas on December 19, 1997, the film became the highest-grossing film of all time – until Cameron beat his own record with Avatar in 2009.
“If the studio had had their way, they would have cut the entire ship sinking,” says Cameron. “The smartest thing we did was to do the sinking last. It wasn’t because of strategy – it was simply because you sink the set last because otherwise it doesn’t look so good the next morning when you bring it back up.”
The box set further immerses Titanic fans into the world of the film. includes sheet music for Celine Dion’s theme song “My Heart Will Go On”, replicas of the boarding pass and menus given to passengers on the ill-fated journey, and notes written by Rose to Cal and from Jack to Rose in the film.
Among the five hours of bonus and legacy features in the two-disc set are new in-depth peeks at how Cameron pulled off Titanic, combining real footage with miniatures, green screen and other filmmaking techniques.
“I think we could take 20 shots in the movie and ask somebody, is that a visual effects shot or is that not? And they’d have them all wrong,” says Landau.
Perhaps most important of all, Cameron has included the intriguing 2023 NatGeo special Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron, in which he took to a hypothermia lab in New Zealand with a team of scientists and two stunt performers to settle the question once and for all: could Jack have fitted on that floating door?
“I was tired of people banging on year after year,” says Cameron, who put Jack and Rose through every conceivable scenario in freezing temperatures to see if they both could have survived.
“The funny thing is, people are still arguing about this 25 years later,” he says. “I guess that’s a good problem to have.”
