Twenty years ago this
December, James Cameron’s Titanic sailed into theaters. It was made for a then-record breaking
$210 million, and proceeded to break more records at the box office with a haul
that has grossed over $2 billion. It was nominated for 14 Oscars and ended up
collecting 11 overall, including for best picture and director for Cameron.
Audiences went home with tears in their eyes and Leonardo
DiCaprio and Kate Winslet’sJack and Rose in their hearts.
Time
to bring out the tissues again. Cameron has recently remastered his classic,
and Titanic will return to theaters beginning December 1, this time
in a laser-projected Dolby Vision
format the filmmaker hopes will see wider industry adoption. Ahead of
that re-release, on Sunday, the National Geographic Channel will air the
documentary Titanic: 20 Years Later with James Cameron.
Cameron
spoke with Vanity Fair recently about some of Titanic’s
unanswered questions, what a sale of the 20th Century Fox movie studio would
mean for him, and how his work on the Avatar and Terminator franchises
is progressing.
Vanity
Fair: Do you think any movie studio in 2017 would greenlight a movie
like Titanic today?
James
Cameron: They’re greenlighting movies twice that expensive.
But
different ones.
It
was a very peculiar set of circumstances that even got that film greenlit in
the first place. It was an anomaly and of course I’m lucky and grateful that it
happened. But I don’t think the industry has changed that much in 20 years when
it comes to risk aversion. They were risk averse then, and they’re risk averse
now. And all the trends everybody’s always talking about, “Oh, well it’s only
franchises, it’s only comic books.” You know what? It was that stuff back then.
It’s not like we’re getting any smarter.
Kate
Winslet has a role in one of the Avatar sequels,
which you’ve said partly take place underwater. Can you tell me about it?
"She
does, and she’s very excited about it. She blazed through for a couple of days
of rehearsals and saw the world that we had created, and how we do the work,
and she’s very excited. She plays a character who’s part of the Sea People, the
reef people. The one thing she did do is demand that she do all her own water
work. I said, “All right, that’s fine, we’ll have to teach you how to free
dive.” The other actors are up to three- and four-minute breath holds. We’ve
already been doing underwater capture. We did a scene last week with six
teenagers, well, actually five teenagers and one 7-year-old underwater holding
their breath for a couple minutes and acting, actually doing a dialogue scene
under water because they speak kind of a sign language.
One
question that people ask me a lot about Titanic, and I’m assuming
they ask you this a lot, is at the end, why doesn’t Rose make room for Jack on
the door?
"And
the answer is very simple because it says on page 147 [of the script] that Jack
dies. Very simple. . . . Obviously it was an artistic choice, the thing was
just big enough to hold her, and not big enough to hold him . . . I think it’s
all kind of silly, really, that we’re having this discussion 20 years later.
But it does show that the film was effective in making Jack so endearing to the
audience that it hurts them to see him die. Had he lived, the ending of the
film would have been meaningless. . . . The film is about death and separation;
he had to die. So whether it was that, or whether a smoke stack fell on him, he
was going down. It’s called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for
physics reasons."
Well,
you’re usually such a stickler for physics . . .
"I
am. I was in the water with the piece of wood putting people on it for about
two days getting it exactly buoyant enough so that it would support one person
with full free-board, meaning that she wasn’t immersed at all in the 28 degree
water so that she could survive the three hours it took until the rescue ship
got there. [Jack] didn’t know that she was gonna get picked up by a lifeboat an
hour later; he was dead anyway. And we very, very finely tuned it to be exactly
what you see in the movie because I believed at the time, and still do, that
that’s what it would have taken for one person to survive."
Given
the nudity and violence, how did Titanic end up with a PG-13 rating?
Did you have to make a case to the M.P.A.A. for it?
"Maybe
it’s the haze of time, but I don’t recall it being controversial. When we
submitted it we did say that the nudity was artistic and not erotic. And I
guess they bought that. And at the time, I think their standard for a small
amount of frontal nudity above the waist was more relaxed than it is now. Which
is a little bizarre, but there you have it."
What
do you remember from the night Titanic won the Oscars?
"I
remember almost getting in a fight with Harvey Weinstein and hitting
him with my Oscar."
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