‘It’s crazy that nobody died’: the survivors of James Cameron’s traumatic Titanic shoot
The making of the $200m epic involved mass walk-outs, giant tantrums and a terrified Kate Winslet – as recalled by cast and crew
“This is gonna be the biggest movie ever.” James Cameron was right. Titanic, which premiered 25 years ago this month, was a beast. Not content with being the most expensive film ever made, it would go on to become the highest-grossing of all time, earning well over $2 billion, not to mention a wheelbarrow full of Oscars. When it was finally knocked off its perch in the box office records, it was by Avatar, a film directed by exactly the same man.
But, judging by the accounts of the people on set, Titanic’s success was not achieved without turmoil and tears. “It was the hardest film absolutely I’ve ever done,” said a then 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio. “There were times when I was genuinely frightened of him [Cameron],” said Kate Winslet, who, also 21, was afraid she was going to drown while filming some of the underwater scenes, and was cruelly called “Kate Weighs-a-lot” by Cameron. “Jim has a temper like you wouldn’t believe.”
Last week, Winslet – who stars in the upcoming Avatar sequel – acknowledged Cameron was under immense pressure. “In those days there was no space for him to say, ‘It might not work.’ He had to make it work. There were all those conversations about this huge film, Titanic. I can’t imagine the pressure.”
The film was never an obvious moneymaker. When Cameron pitched a $120 million drama “about feelings” to Fox, he remembers them saying, “Okaay – 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?” In addition, Cameron was clearly unimpressed with DiCaprio’s negative energy when the actor turned up to audition with Winslet and, initially, refused to read. DiCaprio too needed a lot of convincing about the project. He said at the time, “My opinion of huge movies like this that are special-effects-oriented has always been to stay away from them ‘cause they seem to me to lack a lot of content.”
The film recruited a huge number of British actors, on account of the ship having been built in Belfast and set sail from Southampton on its doomed journey to New York City. James Lancaster, who is Irish and played the real-life passenger Father Byles, remembers being so committed to his part that he learned the entire Book of Revelations passage that his audition required. He then had to travel to Dublin for his father’s funeral. There, his brother presented him with a passage to read at the service. It happened to be, word for word, the exact speech Lancaster had learned for the audition.
The bulk of Titanic was filmed in Rosarito, Mexico, where the crew built a model of the ship that was around 775 feet long, almost 90 per cent of the size of the original passenger liner. Jason Barry, another Irish actor, who played Tommy Ryan, is one of many who remembers the colossal size of the operation. “It was one of those last movies where they actually built it. I had never been on anything of that scale.” The ship sat on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in a purpose-built 360,000-square-foot pool that could house 17 million gallons of water. To anyone looking at it from the street, unable to see the scaffolding and mechanics behind it, it would have appeared to be the real thing. The actors remember it being beautiful. “My father was literally in tears when he saw this ship all lit up with smoke coming out of the stacks,” says Mark Lindsay Chapman, who played Chief Officer Wilde.
The front section of the ship was on hydraulics, meaning that as the boat began to capsize it could be tilted into the water. The end of the boat, approximately 100 feet long, could tilt up to 90 degrees until its nose was in the air. “At about 40 degrees you started slipping,” says Lancaster. “It’s hard to show on film how terrifying it was.” For many, this – along with the production’s attention to detail, down to using exactly the same engraving on the cutlery – made the replica feel eerily convincing.
Around 150 stunt performers worked on the film’s gargantuan number of physical sequences, and, as the sinking was simulated, they slid down the deck (some with rollers attached to them) into rubberised components of the ship; some were on cables; dozens leaped off the ship, landing inches away from one another. “How nobody died on that, I think is pretty crazy,” says Lancaster.
The reason nobody died was that the stunts were carefully orchestrated. Simon Crane was the film’s stunt coordinator. He remembers Cameron showing the team a model of the boat, which he tilted to 90 degrees. He proceeded to drop little model people “like a handful of marbles” onto the miniature. “This is what I want to see,” he said. Crane and his crew put down thousands of boxes – later transformed to water by CGI – for the stunt performers to jump onto.
One of the stunt team, a group who came from countries like Mexico, the US and the Czech Republic, was Rocky Taylor. Inevitably, he says, there were some injuries during filming. One man landed on his ribs in the water, breaking them in the process. “That was quite naughty,” he says. Chapman remembers one stunt man breaking his leg and another breaking his arm. As Crane says, “In the stunt world it’s not how far you fall that’s gonna hurt you, it’s how quickly you stop.”
The days and nights on set were often 18 hours long and they were arduous, sending people “delirious”, says Barry. The vast number of performers combined with the logistical complexity of the film meant that for the majority of the time, actors were sitting around with nothing to do. “Everything took forever,” says Danny Nucci, who played Fabrizio. Affairs happened; marriages broke down. “We referred to it as the love boat,” says Crane.
Most of the actors – including Leonardo DiCaprio – stayed at the same hotel in Rosarito. There was a free bar from 6-8pm, where the tequilas flowed. Barry remembers going out in Rosarito with DiCaprio and girls flocking to DiCaprio like magic. “He was a free spirit; he wasn’t closed off in any way.” Charlotte Chatton, who played aristocrat Madeleine Astor, remembers DiCaprio playing video games in his down time and having an iguana in his dressing room. David Blaine was around, says Barry, doing magic for DiCaprio, who Winslet has said was “miserable” on set.
The production was so chaotic that actors would often be flown from the US to the set, have their costume and makeup applied, and return without having filmed anything. Lancaster remembers this happening to him several times. “Every time I got on that flight down to Mexico, there was another half-dozen accountants going down to figure out what the hell was going on,” he says. Barry had a friend who was in two scenes but spent five months on set. As the film rolled on and on, its budget bloated, eventually stopping at $200 million. “I think most people were walking around, going, ‘What a waste of money’,” says Chatton. There was a worry that Cameron was making a film that would be a gigantic flop like Heaven’s Gate. “It was sink or swim for him,” says Nucci. “Pun intended.”
Chapman remembers that the executives at 20th Century Fox, the studio stumping up the initial funding for the film, didn’t share Cameron’s confidence that the expense would be justified. “We’d been in the production for a couple of months,” he says, “and they were panicking because the budget was getting bigger and bigger.” While on the phone, one young man from Fox proposed that a scene from the film be cut to save money. Cameron grabbed the man’s phone, says Chapman, and threw it across the ship, asking Chapman to check if it had reached the other side. Then he said, “Chief Officer Wilde, escort these a---holes off my ship.” On another occasion, he said, “If you want to cut my film, you’ll have to fire me. And to fire me, you’ll have to kill me.”
Cameron is obviously the subject of many conversations with the cast. “If the world ended tomorrow, I wanna be with Jim Cameron,” says Nucci. “He’d figure it out. He is extremely intelligent.” Various people say that the director knew how to do the job of almost every person on set. Unfortunately, this led to him wanting to control every aspect of the production. “I know the camera guys had issues with him because sometimes he would just grab the camera off them and start filming it himself,” says Barry. “He’s a very dominant, alpha male kind of guy – it’s his way or the high way.” Nucci says, “He was out of his mind. He was a screamer.”
“I think he was always slightly mad,” says Chapman, who says that the director wasn’t sleeping or eating properly while filming. “If he didn’t get a certain amount of grub, he’d have this f---ing meltdown.” Cameron, who said, “Sleep’s overrated,” according to Chapman, had devoted three years of his life to the film and felt the pressure enormously. “I was crying frequently,” said Cameron. “The studio was crying. Everybody cried.” His behaviour was so erratic, in fact, that he constantly fired and had to rehire members of the production. “I just remember there was one day that we came in and were told that the whole sound department had quit,” says cast member Linda Kerns, who played a woman in third class.
Crane, who refers to the director as “the shark with the black eyes”, remembers a showdown with Cameron. As filming was drawing to a close, the director shouted at a group of stunt performers for supposedly getting something wrong. Crane leaped to the defence of his team. “So he started shouting at me. By this stage I’d been on the movie a year and I sort of lost it and told him what I thought of him. And he said, ‘OK, you’re fired.’ And I said, ‘OK, thank you’ and as I turned around, all 120 stunt people walked off with me.” The issue was resolved but it wasn’t pleasant for anyone involved.
Members of the production repeatedly worked without the 12-hour breaks their contracts demanded, meaning that they began to earn higher rates of money. After six months, Kate Winslet would have been able to buy a small house with this additional income alone, says Nucci.
The various elements of stress and chaos ended up having a profound impact on the cast and crew. For the vast majority, it remains the biggest film they have ever played a part in. Titanic helped Chatton realise what the reality of the film industry could look like. “It did contribute to me not wanting to be an actor any more,” she says.
When Fannie Brett-Rabault, who played Madame Aubert, asked producer Jon Landau if he would repeat the experience, he said, “No.” Friends told Barry that DiCaprio didn’t enjoy working on the film. “I’ve never heard Leo mention James Cameron at all,” says Barry. Chapman believes Cameron didn’t particularly want DiCaprio in the role in the first place; there was allegedly little warmth between the two. In subsequent interviews, DiCaprio has thanked Martin Scorsese for the success of his career, which Chapman perceives as unfair to Cameron.
But those who worked on the film all say that there was a real magic to the experience. “It was tough but we kept the faith,” Winslet said at the premiere. Needless to say, the stratospheric success of the film ensured that none of its main players ever needed to worry about work again. And Titanic has made its mark on popular culture in a way that few other films can claim to. “It was a crazy, crazy thing,” says Lancaster. Chapman remembers talking to Cameron on the bridge of the ship one day. “You know,” said Cameron, “they won’t make anything like this again.” He may well have been right.
This article was originally published in December 2022