James Cameron was sweating profusely, but luckily he didn’t have to repeat himself
Although it may seem incredible, Titanic It would not have existed without a short documentary that went straight to IMAX and showed unpublished images of scientists searching for the sunken ship. The film was called Titanica, lasted an hour and a half and was not very successful, but James Cameron ended up fascinated. So much so that He contacted the team that had worked on the film by diving and searching for the ship, and convinced them to be part of his megalomaniac work.. She achieved it, and without millionaire deaths along the way. Quite an achievement seen these days.
My money will go on
For the time, Titanic It was expensive: it cost nearly $200 million, much more than they had originally agreed to give the director. Everyone knows that Cameron goes over budget, but at the box office he recovers everything and more. As he told the producers, they had two possibilities: an expensive and bad movie or a more expensive and potentially great one. They chose the latter. Wise choice.
However, there was a moment when he could have lost all the studio’s trust and millions of dollars: you can see it if you pause the movie at 2 hours and 35 minutes, in the iconic shot in which the water entered the Grand Staircase and ate everything in its path. They only had one chance because it was the same set that had been used throughout filming and therefore could only be destroyed once. They poured 340,000 liters of water on him. Obviously there was no possibility of going back to the beginning.
Luckily, it turned out well the first time and it was not necessary to redo the set again to fulfill the wishes of the always meticulous director. By the way, Did you know that right now it is not even the film that has cost the most money in the history of cinema? At the time it was, but today it has been far surpassed by films that you would never suspect, such as Superman Returns, X-Men 3 either The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. For whatever reason, we are left with Cameron’s crazy things, given the choice.
