A Midnight Meeting Sent James Cameron Storming Off Of The Titanic Set
(To celebrate "Titanic" and its impending 25th-anniversary re-release, we've put together a week of explorations, inquires, and deep dives into James Cameron's box office-smashing disaster epic.)
Those who were around for the 1997 release of James Cameron's film "Titanic" will likely recall that the knives were out. Stories of the film's production troubles were widely reported, the budget ballooned to unimaginable proportions (the final price tag was in the $200 million range), and many were skeptical about the film's ability to make money. "Titanic" was initially meant to be a summer release, but its opening was pushed back to December 19, 1997, right in the middle of awards season. Perhaps to Cameron's relief, the film opened at #1 at the box office.
It stayed at #1 at the box office until the release of "Lost in Space" ... the following April. "Titanic" was watched multiple times by a great many people, and became a legitimate phenomenon, the biggest movie of all time. As of this writing, it remains the third highest-grossing film ever, although "Avatar: The Way of Water" is sneaking up on it. "Titanic" might be considered the pinnacle of a certain kind of pop filmmaking, featuring amazing special effects, a good-enough love story, and plenty of heart-rending dramatic moments — watch everyone drown! — for the masses to cry about. It also attracted no small amount of vitriol, and many to this day consider "Titanic" to be grievously overrated.
After its massive success, one might have to consider the film's large budget and troubled production appropriate risks and natural to the filmmaking process, but it certainly didn't feel like it at the time. Indeed, there were moments during production where it looked like "Titanic" might, well, sink (to recycle a commonly used boat metaphor that too many pundits latched onto in 1997).
In a 2017 book excerpt printed in the Hollywood Reporter, the filmmakers recall the time Cameron charged off of the set in anger.
'Everyone thought they were going to lose money.'
The book was Stephen Galloway's "Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker," the 2018 biography of the Paramount executive that was present for "Titanic." The book articulates many of the film's issues. Cameron, for one, was seen as something of a dictator, often losing his temper and berating people on set. Cameron built an enormous scale model of the actual Titanic in an outdoor ocean soundstage in Mexico, and construction took far longer than anticipated. Russell Carpenter was the film's cinematographer, but he was only hired after Cameron fired his first DP. Several cast members caught the flu, causing delays. According to Fox executive Bill Mechanic, the film was losing three out of every five shooting days to one malady after another. This caused Mechanic to travel to Mexico and talk to Cameron as soon as he could ... about making massive cuts to the film's script.
Mechanic recalls the meeting, held in the wee hours, right when he arrived. He said:
"Jim exploded. [...] It was 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, and if he'd had a gun in his trailer he would have shot me. The gist of it was, 'If you're so f***ing smart, you direct the picture.' And he walked off. He stormed out of his trailer, pulled his chauffeur out of the car, and sped off. He was screaming. I said, 'Shut down the shoot until he calls me,' and got in my car and drove back to L.A."
Not the end
Mechanic doesn't recall the eventual phone call that got Cameron back to the set — or any concessions that either of them might have made — but the director would eventually return. The shoot was to be 150 days, and everyone was run ragged. The most expensive movie of all time (at the time) was shut down in the middle of the night.
Cameron's return, sadly, did not end the troubles. It seemed almost assured that "Titanic" would be a fiasco, and almost everyone was panicking. Paramount executive Lansing, the subject of the book, recalled that everyone was eager to wash their hands of the whole mess, happy to distance themselves from a runaway production overseen by an angry egomaniac. Only Mechanic, she recalls, managed to keep the production afloat (again, apologies for the pun). Lansing said:
"It was terrible. The picture was going over and over. Everybody had written it off: 'It's going to be the biggest disaster ever.' But Bill kept believing in the film when a lot of other people at that studio didn't."
The current grosses on "Titanic," which include a 2012 3-D retrofitted re-release, now tops $2.1 billion. It was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, only the second film in Academy history to have done so. It won 11 of them. It spawned one of the biggest pop songs of all time with Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," and has been included on various AFI Best-Of lists.
In this one instance, it seems that the headaches were all worth it.