EnglishMovies - Titanic : A great global press conference with James Cameron and Jon Landau
By Mulder, Los Angeles, 02 february 2023
On the occasion of its 25th anniversary and just a few days before Valentine's Day, James Cameron's masterpiece Titanicreturns to the cinema in a restored 3D HDR and HFR version. This will provide viewers with outstanding image and sound quality and allow them to rediscover the mythical couple formed by Rose and Jack as never before - and on the big screen. A symbol of the transgression of forbidden love (everything separates our heroes, except their youth and their unwavering affection), TITANIC is one of those rare films that can be seen over and over again without ever tiring of it...
Titanic is a 1997 American epic romantic disaster film directed, written, produced, and co-edited by James Cameron. Incorporating both historical and fictionalized aspects, it is based on accounts of the sinking of the RMS Titanic and stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ship during its ill-fated maiden voyage. Also starring are Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Gloria Stuart, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Victor Garber, and Bill Paxton. Upon its release on December 19, 1997, Titanic achieved significant critical and commercial success, and then received numerous accolades. It was praised for its visual effects, performances (particularly DiCaprio, Winslet, and Stuart), production values, Cameron's direction, musical score, cinematography, story, and emotional depth. Nominated for 14 Academy Awards, it tied All About Eve (1950) for the most Oscar nominations, and won 11, including the awards for Best Picture and Best Director, tying Ben-Hur (1959) for the most Oscars won by a single film. With an initial worldwide gross of over $1.8 bilLeon, Titanic was the first film to reach the bilLeon-dollar mark. It remained the highest-grossing film of all time until another Cameron film, Avatar, surpassed it in 2010.
During the Titanic global press conference we were lucky enough to get James Cameron's answers to one of our questions. You can find just below our transcription of this unforgettable press event
Jon Landau : Hello, and welcome to the global press conference for the 25th anniversary release of Titanic. I'm producer Jon Landau here with director, writer, producer, editor, Jim Cameron. Thanks for joining us today. I'm gonna be asking a few question myself to kick things off with Jim. And then we'll try to get as many of your questions in as possible. Please submit your questions using the quick Q&A function on the Zoom. So, Jim, I want to start with --
James Cameron : Yes, Jon.
Jon Landau : [laugh] People often ask --
James Cameron : You know, we worked together for 30 years.
Jon Landau : I know. So it's a shorthand. so people often ask how but I would like to ask why did you want to make a movie with Titanic as a backdrop ?
James Cameron : Well, it's a really interesting question. Going really back to the start of it, I was fascinated by Titanic from the time I started working with the people at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who were doing all the robotics and stuff that I was interested in when I made The Abyss. But of course, they had gotten famous, those robotics had gotten famous for the finding and initial exploration of the Titanic by Robert Ballard. And I met Robert Ballard and I saw all the amazing stuff that they were doing. Started thinking about Titanic. So then I watched A Night to Remember. You know, the very famous black and white film from 1960 or '61, can't remember. And I thought, wow, what an amazing backdrop for a love story that would make. And if you recall, when we pitched it at 20th Century Fox, I went in with a big book of paintings of Titanic by Ken Marschall.
Jon Landau : Ken Marschall, yeah.
James Cameron : The famous, you know, Titanic artist. And I flipped it open to the centerfold, which was a big double truck image of Titanic, you know, sinking, the life boats rowing away, the rockets going off. Absolutely gorgeous image. And I said to the head of 20th Century Fox at the time, I said Romeo and Juliet on that.
Jon Landau : On Titanic.
James Cameron : And that was it. That was our pitch. You know. Well, you know, then we had to go write the script and all that. But that's how the whole thing got started.
Jon Landau : Right. And Titanic, we're past even a hundred years of its sinking. Why do you think that the ship and the tragedy resonate so much just culturally?
James Cameron : You know, the story never seems to end for people. You know, there have been much greater tragedies since the Titanic. I mean, World War I, you know, tens of millions of people died. World War II. There have been all kinds of tragedies. But the Titanic has this kind of enduring, almost mythic, novelistic quality. And it has to do with, I think, love and sacrifice and mortality, right? The men who stepped back from the lifeboats so that the women and the children could survive. You know, there's something very elegant about the whole thing. There's something, you know, kind of about human hubris and the fact that the ship was considered to be unsinkable, but they operated it badly, and it did sink. You know, it's a reminder that, you know, of when we put too much faith in technology and in our own intelligence, what can happen. But I think it's that enduring kind of feeling of heartbreak. You know, that feeling of loss and sadness and all of the things combined just make it such an amazing story. So we planted our story on top of what was already an amazing story. And I think that the two stories, in a sense, elevated each other. I think that because of the movie now, people know more about the history of Titanic, 'cause we were very, very accurate in the historical part. And people will remember it I think longer as a result of that. So, you know, I think it was just our, you know, good fortune that we had such a great cast, and that they delivered such amazing performances, and the music was so beautiful and all those things. And I think we took it very seriously at the time getting the history of it right. Even though it's a fictional foreground story, the history wrapping around it, we were meticulous in that
Jon Landau: you did a lot of research and then Don Lynch.
James Cameron : Yeah, we had Don Lynch who was the Titanic Historical Society chief historian. He was one of our advisors. Ken Marschall. We went to the actual wreck site itself and imaged the wreck itself. And we set a bar for ourselves. It was very high for the historical component of it. And I think that has helped remind people down through future generations. I'm speaking from now. We're at one full generation now down from the release of the movie. And I think the movie's gonna be around for a long time, reminding people of that historical story. That real tragedy that happened.
Jon Landau : And that really lands me really to the first of a wave of questions that have come in from the people who are online with us today, which is why do you think that the movie itself still resonates so much with audiences today?
James Cameron : I think there are a lot of reasons, and there are a lot of reasons for different people. So let's take young women, for example, who were, since this question is from the audience, I'll speak to the audience. Let's take young women, for example. A lot has been made of Leonardo DiCaprio's appeal. Okay, grant you, I'll grant you a hundred million dollars of our box office for Leonardo DiCaprio's appeal to 14-year-olds. What I think was really happening is that young women are at a point in their life in that kind of, you know, post-adolescent period, mid-teens where they're being told by society not to be who they are. Not to be the amazing, unlimited people that they really are and they're being told to sit down, shut up, pull in that corset, you know, and do what society expects. Do what, you know, male-dominated society expects and all that. And this was a movie about Rose, Kate Winslet's character. Her fulfilment as a person. And yes, Jack was a catalyst for her, but she went on having survived Titanic, we see at the end of the movie, all those photos that show that she lived a full life. She realized her full potential. And I think that speaks to the female side of the audience, and men who care about such things, you know, which I do as a father of daughters and so on. So I think that's part of it. I think the heartbreak of the story. I think the sadness. I think the beauty. The beauty of it. You know, the love. The beauty of the love story that culminates tragically. I think, you know, you can have a rom-com and they can kiss at the end and, you know, go off into the sunset. But there's something much more powerful, I think, about a love story that has loss in it. That has separation in it. And of course, there's no separation more permanent than death. And the end of the movie, you know, the very ending of the movie shows them being reunited. Now is it in an afterlife, or is it just Rose's, you know, as a very old woman, 103 years old, imagining what being reunited with Jack is? Maybe it's just a celebration of her memory and the most important thing that happened to her in her life as a very young woman, remembering that at 103 so vividly that she believes that she must someday be reunited with him. So you can have a secular interpretation of that, or you can have a religions interpretation of that, however. Or a yearning. A kind of spiritual yearning. 'Cause we all experience love as human beings. And if you're a parent and you have children, if you have a spouse that you love or a partner that you love, you can't imagine the finality of mortality and being separated. So we yearn for something. We yearn for that possibility of being reunited. And that's where the movie ends. So I think a lot of the appeal of the film is about the journey that you go on. The beauty, the spectacle, the music, all that. But also, these themes and these ideas that are in it that culminate to that ending.
Jon Landau : And I love what you said, is that each person sees something different in it. And you could take it differently. I just even remember at the ending, people saying to me, "Old Rose, was she alive in the bed? Was she not alive in the bed?" And it's like --
James Cameron : Well, there's a funny story around that. So if you want to know the answer, at least in terms of my touch. As the filmmaker. So, the actress that played Old Rose, Gloria Stewart, said, "All right, so am I supposed to be alive here or dead?" I mean, she was pretty crusty. We loved --
Jon Landau : Loved her.
James Cameron : We loved Gloria. Gloria was cool. She's, "Am I supposed to be alive or dead?" So I went into this long diatribe about I want it to be ambiguous. I want the audience to interpret it however they want to, and blah-blah-blah. She said, kinda like crap, "Am I holding my breath or not?" And I thought about it for a long second, and I went, "Hold your breath."
Jon Landau : There you go.
James Cameron : So there's your answer.
Jon Landau : There you go. So, Emmanuel Itier from France asked, "From the filming, is there one memory" --
James Cameron : Ee-tee-yay.
Jon Landau : Itier. Stands out of for you, a memory from the actual filming on the set?
James Cameron : Oh, there are so many. I mean, they come to me in vivid flashes. I remember the making of the film almost better than I remember the movie itself, strangely. 'Cause I remember all the setups. And, you know, there was the tilting poop deck where you were up there with your wife and one of your boys. Jamie strapped in with a safety harness as you went up to, you know, 130 feet in the air or whatever it was, as that thing went up to 90 degrees. And you're kicking your feet and everything. That was pretty funny. The very last day of shooting, the very last shot, I was in a wet suit, scuba gear, and hockey goalie knee pads in the bridge. When we fired off all the squibs and blew in, and the water came rushing in. It was a 15-foot head of pressure. There was me and the Polish stunt guy who was playing the captain. Who had a spare air, you know, rigged up his back and down his arms, so he had a regulator in his hand. And the water in the glass and everything just poured in. Hundreds of tons of water came smashing in. And it was like a punch in the face. I got the shot, and then everything went black 'cause you couldn't see anything. And I didn't know if he was alive. He didn't know if I was alive. And that was the last setup of the entire shoot.
Jon Landau : I remember.
James Cameron : And I remember thinking about all of the trials and tribulations we had in front of us in post-production, getting this movie done. And I said, "Lord, just take me now." [laugh] Then they pulled open the hatch, and they pulled us out. We were okay. [laugh]
Jon Landau : Yeah, so I remember, just for me, and I think together, we walked up on the ship the first time. It was painted. And we walked up the catwalks onto the deck of the ship. That was pretty amazing, too.
James Cameron : Well, I mean, the set was seven hundred and 50 feet long. It was about a hundred feet, little over a hundred feet, shorter than the real Titanic. But people have interpreted that incorrectly. They've called it a 90 percent scale miniature. It's not. Or 90 percent to scale. It's not. It's a hundred percent the scale of the real ship. We just took, like, a bread slice out here and a bread slice out there, bread slice out there, to kind of shorten it up a little bit. So, we didn't have to build the full eight hundred and 80 feet. But it's actually a hundred percent scale. In fact, we even cast only shortish extras.
Jon Landau : I remember.
James Cameron : So, we made the ship feel even bigger.
Jon Landau : Bigger, yeah.
James Cameron : Yeah. No extras over five foot eight were allowed to be cast. 'Cause all it took is one six-foot-four guy to make your whole ship look small.
Jon Landau : That's true. So, now I have a question from Italy, from David, which is, working with Leonardo at the time, could you foresee the incredible, you know, actor and talent on a global stage that he was gonna become?
James Cameron : Well, look, Leo's Leo, and Leo is who we know him to be at the time. And I'd love to say I had a crystal ball and I'm so prescient that I could see that he would have this incredible career and multiple Academy Award nominations and all that. What we knew at the time was he was a really, really strong actor, a really gifted actor. And he seemed to have unlimited possibility. Now, just because an actor has unlimited possibility doesn't mean that they will go on to realize that, which he has done. James Cameron : And the same thing with Kate. She has gone on to realize the promise of her early brilliance. When we cast her in Titanic, she was 19. Leonardo was, I think, 20 at the time. And they were each a year older by the time they were, you know, a year older by the time we were done shooting. And it didn't take us a year to shoot, but they had each had a birthday during the photography. But they were young, you know? They were young, but they were both already well on their way. I also think it's fair for us not to take credit for launching their careers. You know, Leo had already done Romeo + Juliet, which lofted him into that kind of leading man position.
Jon Landau : Right. Mm-hmm.
James Cameron : And teed up beautifully into Titanic. And Kate had already done a number of really notable performances up to that point. So, we were just lucky to catch them at that exact moment in their career. And I think it's safe to say we did launch them to the next level.
Jon Landau : Yeah. But also, Leo, you had to convince Leo for this part.
James Cameron : Leo initially wasn't that interested in the part. And it was misquoted lately that I said he thought it was boring. He didn't think the movie was boring. He thought the movie was cool. He thought his part, boring may be the wrong word, but was not challenging enough. He was looking for challenge. He wanted, you know, he had played, you know, Gilbert Grape, who was obviously developmentally challenged in some way. And he played a drug addict in Basketball Diaries. And, you know, he wanted to have a problem. He wanted to have something to rage against. And it wasn't there on the page. And I had to convince him that playing that guy that doesn't have an obvious problem coming in, who is in fact the one who's the more emotionally mature and adult of the two people. So, that the transfer of energy and the love story is from Jack to Rose. And she grows as a result of it. I said, that is gonna be a harder thing to do. And it's only when I convinced him of the challenge of his character that he became interested. He didn't think it was hard enough. And so, you know, and anyway. Look, it kind of shows you the fragility of the whole casting process. And, you know, movies that we remember, that we love, there are so many places that they could've gone off the rails, when you hear the story of how they were made. And casting is the one biggest fail on just about any movie that doesn't quite make the grade. And we got, you know, we got extraordinarily lucky in our choices.
Jon Landau : Let's talk about the casting of Rose. Because that was a different process where, talk about finding the right Rose and doing a real screen test. That's a question from Cecile in France.
James Cameron : Yeah. Yeah. So, Cecile, what we did was, we saw a number of young actresses. And Kate was one of the ones, 'cause I also wanted to know that somebody really wanted to do it. Kate expressed a lot of interest and enthusiasm for the character. She believed she could do it. I wasn't convinced. And in fact, I was a little nervous about the fact that she had played in so many period dramas before that. She was getting a reputation of corset Kate. And the last thing I wanted was corset Kate being in a movie where one of the most memorable scenes is her being put into a corset, which was obviously a visual symbol of her being restricted by society and by her family and all those things. So, I kind of almost didn't even want to see her at first. But I met her. She was spectacular. She was Kate. And so, we asked to do a screen test. And so, we did a proper screen test like they did in the old days, with 35-millimeter camera. We built a set and all that sort of thing. It wasn't just kind of an audition, you know, wearing jeans. You know, so we put her in wardrobe, did her hair, did everything. And it was partly to see if she could sort of do a Mid-Atlantic, upper crust American accent, as a British girl from British working-class family. You know, could she do that? And secondly, it was partly training for myself to see how I would react as a director working in a kind of period idiom, which I had never done. We hit it off in that process. We cast Kate, and then Kate was very generous with her time in working with our potential Jacks as they came along, including Leo.
Jon Landau : Right, and I think when she left the Leo rehearsal she did, when Leo came in, she wrote you a note and she signed it Rose DeWitt, right?
James Cameron : That's two separate stories. One is, after she had done our audition for her, she sent me a note and a single red rose. And she said, "I'm your Rose." And it was like, okay, Kate. You get it. You want to do this. It's like, we get it. And by the way, we will make our own decision. But Kate is a very forceful personality and she does sort of manifest her will into the world around her. And that's very apparent as she goes on. And now she's producing her own films and so on. She was very enthusiastic when she came out of the reading with Leo. And, you know, I'm not blind, deaf, and dumb. I could see the chemistry between them. She reiterated that afterwards. And she said, "He's the guy. He's the guy."
Jon Landau : There you go.
James Cameron : So, that's pretty much Kate in a nutshell.
Jon Landau : So, Sven from the Netherlands wants to know, is there anything that you would do differently today if you were making the movie today, than we would've done back then?
James Cameron : You know, the funny thing is, that, you know, my impulses as a filmmaker, my aesthetic and all those things, hasn't really changed that much. Yes, I, you know, I don't get to run that experiment 25 years later. And have not made Titanic back then and be making it now, I'm sure I would still be interested in the subject. I'm sure I would still tell it as a love story. I'm sure I would still focus on the emotions. In terms of how we did it, the actual technique, everything is different now. We would've used a lot more CG. We would've built a lot less set. We would've used a lot of CG crowds, 'cause we know how to do that now. We know how to make it, you know, indistinguishable from actual photography. So, our approach to it would be very different. James Cameron : The end result, I don't think would be different. Probably not at all. Given, what's you're baseline for your question? The script. Let's assume the script existed. And we didn't make it 25 years ago and we finally got around to it now.
Jon Landau : Right.
James Cameron : We'd shoot the same script, we'd have the same values, the cinematography would look the same. But we wouldn't be building a seven hundred- and 50-foot-long set and tying up every [Musco?] light and every bit of cable in all of Hollywood. You know.
Jon Landau : And I'm thankful that we did, though, at that time, because there was something that was great about coming to that set. And you would drive over the hill from two miles away, and you would see the ship on the horizon.
James Cameron : You'd see that ship. It's like, wow, somebody threw away a perfectly good ocean liner over there, which is really what it looked like. When you drove over the hill in Rosarito, you know, in Baja, Mexico, and you saw that ship, it was like, "Man, that's, like, the Titanic sitting there." You saw it from miles away. It was crazy. Yes. So, there's that personal kind of different experience, kind of satisfaction. But we didn't have to build pandora, for real to satisfy ourselves. We built very little of it.
Jon Landau : Exactly.
James Cameron : We built little bits and pieces of sets and did the rest with CG. So, I can safely say we would do the film differently. The outcome wouldn't look different.
Jon Landau : Would be the same. So, Boris from France, the oceans occupy an important place in your main themes of many of your films. Can you tell us about this and the fascination with oceans and its importance to Titanic?
James Cameron : Well, sure. So, look, I got certified as a, this is Boris (Mulderville) from where?
Jon Landau : France.
James Cameron : Oh, okay. So, well, there's an innate relationship between France and the oceans that goes back ages, but certainly is exemplified by Jacques Cousteau who was an inspiration to me when I was a teenager and who I got the idea to actually learn to scuba dive. I was certified as a scuba diver when I was 15. I didn't become a filmmaker until I was 26. So 11 years before I became a movie maker, I was already diving. And then when I could a couple years later when we moved to California, I started diving in the Pacific Ocean and I've spent hundreds, thousands of hours really, underwater all over the world. And then on The Abyss, I got interested in the very deep ocean and the technology required to get into the deep ocean and remotely operated vehicles and robotics and all that stuff. And I had a love of history that nobody knew about, me as a filmmaker, 'cause I'd only done science fiction. I put my love of history together with that technology, and that was the inception of making Titanic. So I came to it with two passions already. One was history and storytelling, and the other one was my love of deep ocean technology and exploration. And they really kind of formed in this kind of amazing creative feedback loop, because when I had finished Titanic, you know, I now had a lot of spare cash lying around that I could use for ocean explorations. So that set off an eight-year period in my life, eight or nine years, where I did seven deep ocean expeditions. We built new robotic vehicles, we went in, we explored the interior of Titanic and the battleship Bismarck. And we dove all over the world with deep submersibles, and that ultimately led to me even building my own submersible eventually and going to the deepest place on the planet. So I currently still have, you know, one foot in the ocean and deep ocean exploration and ocean conservation with, you know, whales and, you know, Secrets of Whales for National Geographic and all that.
Jon Landau : And some new ones there too, right?
James Cameron : Yeah, yeah, and some new ones that are coming up. And then obviously the Way of Water, which is our current culmination of the Avatar, uh, story, which takes us into the ocean and will continue in the oceans going on. So the oceans in my life are, you know, such an inextricable part of my creativity, my passion, the places that I want to go. And when I finally get two weeks of vacation after five continuous years of production, guess where I'm going? Diving. Not gonna say where.
Jon Landau : [laugh] There you go. So Claudia from Columbia, and we touched on this a little bit earlier.
James Cameron : That's pneumonic. You can remember that.
Jon Landau : Exactly. After 25 years, do you think that the messages and the topics of Titanic are still relevant to today's society in terms of, now not just the characters but the --
James Cameron : I get it, I get it. Well look, I mean, if you think about what the thematic stuff, the subtextual thematic stuff in Titanic is, Claudia, let's look at, you know, the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the people who survive and the people who die. So the people in steerage, you know, in the third class, almost all the men died and about half of the women and children died. The people in first class, about half of the men died and almost all of the women and children survived with only one or two exceptions. So you can see that there's a strong disparity between how the poor, you know, what happens to them, their fate in a crisis and what happens to the rich. Well, now here we're facing another crisis called climate change. You know, we've been warned about it for years, we see it coming straight at us, we cannot turn the ship. It's exactly like the freaking iceberg. We're gonna slam head on into it and guess who's gonna suffer the worst? The poor. Not the rich nations that caused it. It was the rich people on Titanic, their impatience to get to New York, and the captain and the owner of the steam ship line understanding that and responding to their rich client base that caused in the wreck in the first place. And it was the poor that suffered, numerically, statistically suffered. So now we got the same damn thing playing out on a global stage with climate change and all the other eco disasters that stand in front of us, because rich people have got the pedal down to the metal on the ship of human civilization. They're going straight at that damn iceberg. And when we hit it, it's gonna be the poor nations that suffer, right? And the rich will skate by because the rich always do, right? So is the theme as relevant now as it was then? I want to say it's more relevant than it's ever been.
Jon Landau : I think you touched on something right there, which is why the movie continues to resonate with audience around the world. This is not just something that plays to any one country, it plays to all these countries that we've been talking to today in everywhere.
James Cameron : Well it's got themes of female empowerment, right? It's a love story. You can forget about all the intellectualization and just go on the ride of pure emotion. You know, and it's emotionally devastating at the end, but somehow strangely kind of bittersweet, and the sweet part of that is the uplift around her fulfillment as a person and her ultimate fate, which is that she got to live to 103 and live a full life, right, and be reunited with her lover. So there's female empowerment, there's a great love story, there's a great sort of epic, tragic, very highly novelistic background that actually happened. There's learning about the history. There's the historical accuracy of the filmmaking that we did. And by the way, they're seeing it in a damn movie theater, which is a whole different experience than seeing it on video or streaming at home. And I could do pages on that.
Jon Landau : Well talk about it a little, 'cause that's one of the questions that I was gonna get to from a lot of different people. You know, going back, people have seen it on home at TV so many different ways. What is different about going to see this movie in the theater?
James Cameron : Well, let's talk about 25 years later. So there's a nostalgia for a lot of people, they remember where they were when they saw it in the movie theater, where they were in their lives and their relationships or whether they were, you know, a naive kid or whether they were already an adult, or all those things. Titanic ties us to moments in time because it has a kind of timelessness itself, right? But the theatrical experience. You know what? TV sets are great, you know? These big panel TVs, they're great, right? And sound systems at home are pretty good these days. That decisive difference that existed 25 years ago in terms of the physical presentation isn't so decisive anymore. But I'll tell you one thing that's fundamentally different about going to a movie theater, you make a decision to get up on your hind legs, go get in your car, drive across town, pay a bunch of money parking, pay a bunch of money for tickets and popcorn, and sit your ass down and spend three hours and 15 minutes going on a ride. You can't pause it, you can't decide to play it out over two or three consecutive nights because it's more convenient for your schedule. You can't multitask, go make dinner for the kids, go order a pizza, get a beer from the fridge, whatever. You can't pause the damn thing, right? So now you're going on a ride and that emotion is starting to build up in you. And you feel a greater sense of presence, and the 3D actually even helps with that 'cause we've upgraded the film. You get to the end of that experience, that three-hour sitting, it's shattering in a way that it's not going to be at home, and people know that. I'm not telling people anything they don't already know. They know that there's something special and it's also a kind of a formal thing that we do in our society now. Anybody can watch anything anytime they want. But you make an appointment with a friend or a loved one or your mom or your son or whoever it is to go and share something in a movie theater. I don't know about you guys, but I got five kids and just trying to get the whole family sat down to a movie at home is almost impossible. Everybody's got their own screens in their own rooms and they're coming and going and they got plans. You make an appointment with someone you love or your friends or whatever to go sit in a movie theater, that becomes a sacred sharing moment for all of us, right ? So it's ultimately not any more about that big screen, it's about that commitment.
Jon Landau : Right. And you talked about sharing it. I think one of the things anecdotally that I've heard over the years is that people want to share it with their friends, they want to share Titanic with their parents, with their children. It's something that should be shared and should be shared on the big screen.
James Cameron : See, the things is that for a long time, people have been trying to unpack how that movie worked and why in its day it was the highest grossing film in history. If you present valued Titanic into present dollars from 25 years ago, they made $4,000,000,000 plus, right? That's a phenomenon that outstrips almost anything. You know, you can go back to maybe E.T. and Star Wars and maybe all the way back to Gone With the Wind to get something on the same level, but why? You know, people have scratched their heads about why. Well number one, repeat viewing. People would walk out of the theater and they would start making their plans then for who they were gonna ask to go see it. Because people said, I just had an experience I can't even quite explain to myself. I need to share that with X, Y, or Z friend or family member. So people were going back not just to see it again themselves, but to become the gatekeeper of the experience for someone else, you know what I mean? To share what they had experienced with someone else and to be the person that says, I know you don't believe me, but trust me. So it became a test, a test of trust, a test of friendship, a test of family bonds. And they were right because then the next victim would come in and go, holy fuck. And then they'd, you know, well, you can bleep that part, right? But this is how it worked. And people have been trying to unpack this for a long time afterwards 'cause it was really an anomaly in its day. And that leads me to believe, and I hope I'm right about this, that Titanic will always have that value. Because every time somebody new comes along and sees it, they remember where they were and they remember who they were with. We can rerelease this thing in 10 years and 10 years after that. And I'll be gone from the planet and they'll still be –
Jon Landau : People will still want
James Cameron : They'll still want to see
Jon Landau : And getting the same thing out of it.
James Cameron : they'll still want to see it in the theater.
Jon Landau : Right. I think we have time for one more question, Jim. And I'm gonna go up to Michael from Germany. How do you think that this film influenced the modern blockbuster cinema, you know, after its release?
James Cameron : That's a trickier question. I think that the -- some background noise here. I think that one thing became clear right away, is the movie can be three hours long. 'Cause historically before Titanic, the wisdom, which proves not to be true, was that a long movie can't make money. One, people won't go to it. Two, you lose a showing per day. Now in a highly competitive, you know, narrow windowed summer market, that might be true. But coming out of Christmas and playing into January and February and March as we did, we were number one for 16 weeks or 15 weeks, it didn't matter. Because if you couldn't see it this, see it next week, you see what I mean? Or the week after. People eventually found it and then they would go back and see it again and again. And that's why we didn't come down for weeks and weeks and weeks. So the length of a movie is not important, that's the one thing we learned. A movie can feel long in an hour and a half.
Jon Landau : That's right.
James Cameron : And it can blaze past you in three hours and 15 minutes if you're attentive, if you're riveted by what you're seeing or engaged by what you're seeing. So we applied that. You know, Avatar, the first film, is quite a long film. It's, you know, two and three-quarter hours. People said they wanted more. Well, we took that to heart and we made a three hour and 12-minute movie for the new Avatar, and it's doing very well. So I think we busted that myth of running time as an absolute problem. So that's one big thing.
Jon Landau : I know, yeah, yeah. And you know, you talk about the sustainability, about the box office. I'll just point out to everybody that our single biggest day in release was in our eighth weekend, and that was on Valentine's Day. And for the movie to be coming back this Valentine's Day --
James Cameron : It make sense.
Jon Landau : it speaks to the love story that you created. And I want to thank everybody for joining us here today and look forward to sharing Titanic with the world. Thank you very much.
James Cameron : thanks everybody. See you
James Cameron : Thanks, everybody.
Jon Landau : Thanks.
James Cameron : We'll see you.
Synopsis :
Southampton, 10 April 1912. The world's largest and most modern ocean liner, renowned for its unsinkability, the Titanic, sets sail on her maiden voyage. Four days later, it hits an iceberg. On board, a poor artist and a middle-class woman fall in love.
Titanic
Written and directed by James Cameron
Produced by James Cameron, Jon Landau
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Danny Nucci, David Warner, Bill Paxton
Cinematography : Russell Carpenter
Edited by Conrad Buff, James Cameron, Richard A. Harris
Music by James Horner
Production companies : Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Lightstorm Entertainment
Distributed by Paramount Pictures (North America), 20th Century Fox (International)
Release dates : December 19, 1997 (United States), January 7 1998 (France)
Running time : 195 minutes
We would like to thank James Cameron and Jon Landau for answering two of our questions during this exciting virtual press conference
Photos : Copyright Twentieth Century Fox / Paramount Pictures
Transcription revised : Boris Colletier / Mulderville