KATE, LEO & HOW I STOPPED MY TITANIC SINKING

There was a really dark period when I had a razor blade taped to my screen where I was cutting the film, and above it I had a note that said: “Use this in case the film sucks!” It was a way of reminding myself that the only way out of this was to make a good movie,’ recalls Titanic director James Cameron.

He is discussing the 3D release of his epic drama, 15 years after the original film propelled Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet to international stardom, collecting 11 Oscars in its wake and breaking all box-office records. With a worldwide gross of more than US$1.8bn, it was the first film to reach the billion-dollar mark, and would remain the highest-grossing film of all time for 12 years – until Cameron broke that record with his next film Avatar, surpassing Titanic’s sales in 2010. Perhaps what made Titanic’s success most remarkable, however, was its triumph over a tidal wave of pundits claiming the film would sink harder than the actual ship.

Hollywood collectively sniggered at Cameron’s fanaticism with detail, reconstructing an almost full-scale model of RMS Titanic in Baja California, making it the most expensive film ever made at that time with a budget in excess of US$200m, and also one of the longest commercial films at 194 minutes.

Although it was a fictionalised account of the ship’s sinking on its maiden voyage – largely featuring the romance between DiCaprio’s below-deck dreamer Jack and Winslet’s upper-crust Rose – Cameron has long been a shipwreck fanatic remaining in close touch with the various Titanic expeditions. It is no accident that this latest release is timed to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the day the doomed ship set sail on 10 April 1912. Not known for his modesty, you could forgive Cameron for shouting ‘I’m the king of the world!’ when he took to the stage to collect his Best Director Oscar in early 1998. As everyone knew, that was the most famous line in Titanic, yelled by DiCaprio as he leaned into the wind on the prow of the doomed vessel.

And it was with that quote that Cameron finally got his own back on all the naysayers who had said the film would flop and were now seated just yards away from him. ‘My worst memory was just the feeling that everybody was against us,’ recalls the director today when we meet on the backlot of Fox Studios in Los Angeles. ‘There was a lot of negative press that made us look like the biggest nincompoops in Hollywood history. But we just had faith that we were doing something that was cool, something that had quality. And I think it’s really exciting to bring Titanic back to the big screen after it’s been gone for 15 years.

‘There’s a whole generation of people that has never seen the film in a movie theatre. I’m a strong believer in the theatrical experience in general, but specifically for this film and especially in this format. When people commit three hours to sit in a dark room and share this journey with these characters, they will find it very powerful and emotional. If you’re watching on an iPad and texting and making calls at the same time, it’s a different experience.’

Always on the cutting edge of film technology, he explains the 3D conversion process. ‘Every shot in the whole film becomes a visual effect. We used a team of 300 artists who assigned depth to every object and every part of every character in the frame. They process it and then they show it to me, and I go through it frame by frame to get the depth right. Then they do what we call “clean up”: handpainting in the missing information. Every time you start moving objects around in a flat picture that was photographed 15 years ago, you have to paint in the missing part of it and it must be done flawlessly. We sharpen the edges and turn it into a beautiful, clearer picture than we ever had before turning it over to the 3D guys.’

Talking about casting DiCaprio and Winslet, he recalls: ‘I wanted a young, dewy Audrey Hepburn-type of actress. We looked at all the young promising actresses at the time and Kate’s name was on that list. She already had this nickname, “Corset Kate”, because she’d done period pieces, but everyone kept insisting I meet her. So she did an oldschool filmed screen-test, which nobody does any more, and she absolutely blew us away – she was fantastic. There was no question about her being our Rose.’

Remarkably, DiCaprio almost didn’t get on board Titanic: ‘He did a flawless chemistry read with Kate and they’re both absolutely brilliant and so now I had to have him in the movie at any cost. I didn’t say that to him, of course,’ smiles Cameron, now 57. ‘But then he decided he didn’t really want to do it. He was looking for a conflicted, tormented character. If you look at Leo’s choices, Jack is the only character he’s ever played who isn’t tormented.

‘He’s always looking for a guy who is under a cloud, or who has a shadow over him. Finally I said, “Look, I don’t think you should do this movie because I think you still need this crutch, your Richard III hump.”

‘So then he wanted to do it because he realised how hard it was to play Jack. Until he understood the challenge of the role he wasn’t interested. I was so disappointed when he got short shrift in the Oscar nominating process when the rest of the film was celebrated so much, because Jack is not Leo. Jack is a beautiful acting creation. But I spent two months talking him into doing the film, and apparently it’s still like that with Leo. Baz Luhrmann was telling me the other day he still had to talk him into doing The Great Gatsby.’

James Cameron has just returned from the ocean deep, after descending, alone, to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a truly remarkable achievement that he captured on film. More than any of his other films, Titanic has real personal resonance for Cameron: ‘I made the film because I wanted to explore the wreck. We dived it 12 times during the course of making the film in 1995. That was my first deep ocean expedition.

‘Since then I’ve done six additional expeditions, of which two more were to the Titanic. I’ve done 33 dives to the wreck and explored its interior. ‘There‘s nothing quite like that experience.’

Titanic 3D in cinimas now

‘LEO’S FATTER NOW, AND I’M THINNER’

Titanic star Kate Winslet has had a few slightly cheeky comments of her own to make as the film that made her a global star is relaunched in 3D. Including a few about her co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio.

‘We do look very different, we’re older,’ she joked on TV show Daybreak. ‘Leo’s 37 now – I’m 36. He’s fatter now – I’m thinner.’

Kate also revealed how hard it was to watch her performance again. ‘I put my glasses on and I sat there all excited, and then the second my face came on, I was like, “Oh my God, make it stop, somebody make it stop, turn the sound down. Is that what we looked like?”

‘It was completely bizarre, it was like somebody saying we’re going to take a home video that we made of you that’s three-and-a-half hours long and we’re going to make the world watch it all over again.’