Titanic: 25th Anniversary Exclusive! Behind The Scenes w/ Kate Winslet and James Cameron | Paramount

We did it with real sunset, which was hilarious because Stuart would go, Sunset's amazing! Go, go, go! And we'd be like, what? And suddenly Leo and I are having to basically climb up this kind of like forklift, extended, protracted thing. So we'd climb up this damn ladder. We're going to miss it! We're going to miss it! So we'd get up there and then suddenly we'd go, ah, ****, action! And then we'd have like two minutes of just endlessly doing this clinch and the clinch and again and the clinch. And then God forbid if we started laughing. Oh my God. I mean, it was really, really honestly hilarious. Hilarious. We shot two takes before we lost the light. The first one, completely out of focus. The second one is out of focus for about four seconds and then it pops in. And that's the one that's in the movie. Once I started working with Leo, we were able to kind of find our own rhythm and it's amazing to kind of look back and think about it all over again. Oh, Leo. We did click immediately right away. He was this kind of mess of long, skinny, uncoordinated limbs and he was just very free with himself and he had this effervescent energy that was really magnetic. And I remember thinking, oh, this is going to be fun. We're definitely going to get along. And we just really did. We just really did. And how we saw the two characters, he's incredibly smart, Leo. I mean, he's a ferociously intelligent man. And he was then very, very curious. So he was really fascinated with the period, the details to do with the boat, the lower classes, where those people had come from, how those people had paid for their tickets. We connected on so many levels. That sense of focus on the craft and still really caring deeply about that to this day. So he'll phone me, hey, sweetie, I need to ask you blah, blah, blah. And he'll, you know, we'll chat about something. And then just a couple of weeks ago, I called him. I was like, Christ, I have to talk to you. Phone me, phone me, phone me. And we'll always just make that call right away. There's no like, hang on, I'll call you tomorrow. It's instant. And that's actually really something, you know, if you think about it in the world that we live in now, to have friendships that bind you and that shared history, it's really something. We decided to build 80% of the actual ship to 90% scale, but only built one side of the ship complete down to the bottom. And that gave Jim enough deck space to shoot the daytime walk and talks, the evening sequences. You could literally walk right from the top deck all the way down to the stern of the ship. And what we had to do, because we had the ocean only on one side, is we needed to flop the film. One of the best examples of flopping the film is actually the departure scene from Southampton Dock. If you were there on that day when we were filming, and you looked at the terminal building next door that said White Star Line, that writing was all backwards. And that was because the ship historically was on the opposite side, and we wanted to be accurate to history. So we flopped that entire sequence. My favorite memories of making Titanic relate to sharing the making of it. When people would come down and they would hear we were making this movie, they had no idea. They would come over a hill from two miles away from the studio, and over the knoll, they would see Titanic there against the water backdrop. And to be in the car with someone when they experienced that, to walk them around our set, to take them to the wardrobe shop and show them all the costumes and the props, that was a big thrill. One of the scenes that we shot early on was Jack saving Rose at the stern of the ship. And that was something that was a nighttime shoot, of course. We were out there, and that deck overhung a giant precipice down below it. We weren't on a soundstage. We were outside and hanging Kate over the railing in her dress, safetying harness her, and Leo pulling her up. You really felt the jeopardy right there on the set. There was harnesses and stuff, because I had to hang over the boat, and even though I was never dangling over the real ocean, and our boat never moved, not once, but it was like a 30, 40-foot drop or something like that. So, you know, I'm sort of hanging off the boat like this, and there's just crew members just wandering around, like smoking and eating sandwiches. I remember thinking, wow, it's tough at the top. And that was another uncomfortable costume, covered in beads, which I kept crushing every time I walked. I was treading on 50,000 beads, so I'd walk along and I'd see this dusty smattering of all the beads I'd just crushed, because they were just at the bottom of the dress. It was a beautiful, beautiful dress, but, you know, climbing over railings, leaping, flinging myself, stamping on, you know, beautiful vintage beading that had been hand-sewn. I kind of really trashed that dress. Creating the illusion of the ship going to vertical was one of the greater challenges. We decided to build a giant teeter-totter of the stern of the ship. It would be at level, but then it could go up, just like a teeter-totter could, up to 90 degrees. I remember the first night we were filming that. If we got it to 90 degrees, we had a cable that we needed to bring it back down. And the first night we were filming, that cable broke. And the set was stuck at vertical. Now, as a producer, I thought it would be really smart to have my wife and 8-year-old son on there to show everybody. I thought it was safe. And there they were, they were stuck there for several hours. Action. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. It was critical that we have that and make it believable so that we could shoot those shots and shoot down into, what at the time was a green screen, to create the whole height of the ship. And we actually had stunt people that had to do falls. We spent a lot of time on the forensic analysis to kind of figure out what was happening during the flooding and the breakup of the ship. How are we going to actually stage this? What does it look like? What did it really do? And what would it have been like to be on that when it's going through all these gyrations? Oh my God, Jack! Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! Hold on! Oh God! Oh! Our largest sinking set was the dining room. And we built that on one of our stages. And we had it on hydraulic cables. And we shot it at a level position first. And then we flooded the tank and we lowered the set into the water on a series of gimbals. You'd hear this hydraulic noise go off. And then we'd be standing on set and we'd be lowering. I think the tough stuff's going to come down very well. Go! So we would be being lowered into cold water before the cameras were even rolling. So all the moments of freezing, freezing, freezing, all those moments, we would have had to quickly get that out of the way. And then suddenly the set's in position and the water's up to here and action. We built a big elevator system so that we could lower a 200 foot by 100 foot by multi-story high set into the water. And we built two different tanks, one interior and one exterior, that could allow us to lower these platforms. So on one set, on the interior stage set, we had the dining room, the full dining room, and at least several stories of the grand staircase. It was huge interior structure. And so, you know, cows shooting at them, they run up. And the thing about that that was amazing is that as all the tables went underwater, you know, row by row, all of the china lifted off because it was all set for breakfast service. These bowls and cups floated. And they kind of tinkled together as the current swirled as the water came in, and it turned into this almost giant ghostly wind chime kind of sound. It was very eerie. And it was just amazing to think, that's what really happened. That's what it would have sounded like if you were really down there in Titanic's dining room as it flooded.