Cameron peers at ‘Titanic’ through a new perspective
Even the director had no idea what it would become
LOS ANGELES — Long before it sailed into theaters in 1997, many predicted
Titanic would sink. Including its director. “The studios had me utterly convinced that there wasn’t a chance it could make a dime,” says James Cameron, whose film, once the biggest of all time, is released with a 3-D makeover today.
Well beyond its $130 million budget and weeks past its shooting schedule, Titanic — at $200 million, the most expensive movie ever shot — seemed destined for the depths of flopville. The one question, Cameron recalls, “was how many tens of millions of dollars” the film would lose.
Instead, it sailed to $601 million, the all-time box-office champ until Cameron’s 2009 3-D epic, Avatar, earned $761 million and bumped it to No. 2. Now,
Titanic gets its own 3-D makeover, though Cameron says the technology isn’t what spurred the rerelease.
“There’s a whole new generation who have never seen it on the big screen,” he says. “As much as I love the 3-D, the most exciting thing is just getting Titanic back into theaters.”
Getting it to theaters originally was a feat in itself. And when it hit theaters on Dec. 19, 1997, Titanic didn’t make much of a splash.
Sure, it was the No. 1 movie of the weekend, edging out the James Bond thriller Tomorrow Never Dies by $3.5 million. Yet Titanic’s $28.6 million debut seemed . . . normal. Wasn’t this to be the epic of all epics, the movie to whisk moviegoers into an unimaginable hybrid of reality and spectacle?
Instead, some critics shrugged. Or worse. “What really brings on the tears,” griped the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan, “is Cameron’s insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities.”
Cameron, too, felt defeated. “It barely eked out being No. 1,” he says. “I thought we were going to lose $50 million.”
Fans, though, loved the film and were soon singing a different tune: namely, Celine Dion’s monster hit My Heart Will Go On. The concert of events surrounding Titanic — the effects, the love story, the song and pinup boy Leonardo DiCaprio — “changed Hollywood for good,” says Tom O’neil, author of Movie Awards.
Saved by Christmas rush
He says the film’s slow churn to the box-office title, along with its record-tying 11 Academy Awards (including best picture), accomplished “something very few movies were able to pull off at the time: being big and good. James Cameron showed what was possible on film.”
Cameron says he knew that if fans liked the movie, it would have a chance to turn a profit because of its release in winter, once a graveyard for commercial films.
The director persuaded Paramount Pictures to keep the film in thousands of theaters through the Christmas rush, believing that “if we can implant ourselves in the popular consciousness, going into January, there is not going to be any competition. January is a very soft month. And a three-hour movie needed time to play. We had legs beyond our wildest dreams.”
Film historian Leonard Maltin says Titanic was one of the few “to appeal to every sector of the moviegoing public.”
“Kids were interested because of this new teen heartthrob,” he says of Dicaprio. “Old people were interested because there’s always been a fascination about what happened on Titanic.”
There was fascination, too, about Titanic the movie. Without the picture, O’neil says, we wouldn’t have seen the current 3-D push or have taken movies like The Lord of the Rings as serious filmmaking.
Cameron “made technology a part of the storytelling, and did it in sci-fi, action and fantasy — genres that critics like to poohpooh,” he says. “We used to define movies as blockbusters or art-house. Titanic made it clear you could blend them.”
Angst among the stars
Not that many have tried. Despite the film’s financial success, few movies have tackled the scope of Titanic, which required Cameron to make a dozen deepsea dives to the real wreck for research. “Cameron had such hubris, such bullheadedness to get his vision on screen, I’m not sure anyone could copy that,” Maltin says. “Everything fell into place for it.”
And much sprang from it. DiCaprio had a torn relationship with the film: He became Hollywood’s hottest romantic lead but felt his acting in the film was overlooked (and famously snubbed the Oscar ceremonies when he wasn’t nominated).
Co-star Kate Winslet, who clashed with Cameron on the set, earned a best-actress Oscar nomination (she lost to Helen Hunt in As Good as It Gets) and “became one of our young grande dames,” O’neil says. “She never lost that luster.”
And with Titanic, Cameron joined the ranks of Steven Spielberg and — well, just Spielberg — as one of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmakers.
“The momentum of his movie, its sheer size and storytelling, swept away any complaints,” Maltin says. He adds that he doesn’t suspect another true-tale film to reach Titanic’s heights.
“Few stories have captured the world’s imagination quite like the voyage of Titanic,” Maltin says. “You had the ambition of building the world’s biggest ship and declaring it couldn’t sink. You’ve got bravery, sacrifice, poignancy — all real, all laid out in front of you before you even layer in a romance. I’m not sure we’ll get that combination of circumstances again.”
Says Cameron: “We certainly demonstrated that a long movie can make money . . . And we demonstrated that you don’t have to release in the middle of summer to be a blockbuster.”
Cameron felt the tide shift personally as well. “It changed Hollywood’s opinion about me as a filmmaker,” says Cameron, director of two Terminator films and Aliens. “Before that, I was an action guy and a science-fiction guy. After Titanic, they had to take me more seriously.”