James Cameron Interview

You just made a movie about a boat that wanted to be the biggest boat ever, the most elegant, about a pretentious boat, let's say, and you made a movie criticizing that, but you made a three hour, $200 million movie. Is this the proper way to do this?

A pretentious movie?

Aren't you afraid that your movie might not make it like the boat itself? Have you ever thought of that?

Never thought of that. Any other questions? No… to be fair to your question, yes of course we thought of it. I've lived with this for five years and so the lesson of the Titanic I think I understand very well. You have to understand, the Titanic was sunk by people who had utter and complete confidence in their way of doing things and in their civilization and in their creation which was this beautiful ship. We never had that kind of confidence. We always understood that this film was a risky film, that it fell outside of conventional Hollywood wisdom. Conventional Hollywood wisdom says that if you make a film over a certain budget figure, that film must create a franchise possibility, it must create characters that can be in sequels, it must be able to be merchandised, and put into toys and videotapes and theme park attractions and so on, and the idea of making a film at this scale which is essentially a romance, essentially a film about emotions and relationships, is really very antithetical to Hollywood thinking, so the fact that the film is expensive is a product of my desire to do the Titanic story correctly, and the ship itself was very big and I wanted to show it, I wanted to show its wonder. Bear in mind that the film is not just a warning, and a caution, although it functions on that level, but it is also a celebration of the ship. You can't appreciate the sinking, if you can't appreciate the ship. And no one has ever really seen it on film before, it's never been done right.

The Titanic is full of wonderful stories, and you chose to tell a fictitious story. Why?

There have been somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen films made about the sinking of the Titanic, all of them did more or less what you said which is to show all of the interesting stories, set up all the many characters. But my feeling was that in doing the many, you ultimately in a way do nothing, in the sense that you're not able to penetrate a certain level of emotional involvement. By creating a fictional love story we ask the audience to open their hearts to that relationship and in so doing they open their hearts to the emotionality and the poignancy of the greater event, which I consider to be a profoundly sad tragic event, and one from which we can certainly take many simbolic warnings, so that was the thinking there.

It's rumored that an hour and a half of the movie is not in the final print. What happened?

Worrying about what was taken out of the film is a little bit like worrying about the chunks of rock that are lying around on the ground after a sculpture is made. You have to cut away in order to create the shape. The editing is really in a sense the last draft of the script. It's the time at which you really find in the journey of discovery which is a movie, which is the making of a movie, what your film is about. The things that were taken out are things that I don't miss. At some point I may put them back in a Laser Disc version, some of them because I think they're interesting little tidbits of the historical telling of the Titanic story but there's nothing significant that was removed that one would miss, and every cut strengthens the picture. Although I'm quite happy that someone who has seen a three hour fourteen miunte film is regretting the loss of more material. I think that is a compliment.

Did you want your movie to be the most expensive film ever?

No, certainly not. We actually searched for techniques to make the film as cheaply as possible without compromising the vision of the film. We knew we were making a very ambitious film. We knew we didn't want to skimp on the visual impact of the recreation of the time period, of the costumes, of the sets, of the beautiful interior details of Titanic, and of course of the spectacle of the sinking. It was not our intention to make such an expensive film. Our actual budget was $120 million and in the course of creating the new filming studio in Rosarito Beach in Baja (California, Mexico), and creating one of the largest sets ever done and figuring out how to move it and physically sink it, we incurred some rather significant cost overruns. Bear in mind if we had not experienced those cost overruns we would have been maybe the third or fourth most expensive film of the year, and in fact if you think of it on a minute by minute basis, we were probably less expensive per minute than films like Starhsips Troopers or Speed 2—sorry, Fox brothers. I think the point one takes from that is that every year we will be seeing several films which go beyond the cost of prior films. It sounds very impressive to say the most expensive film ever made, but, last year there was the most expensive film ever made, and the year before that there was the most expensive film ever made, and so on, and it will continue that way into the future, because the cost of film production is going up so rapidly, it's going up much more rapdily than the base level of inflation. My personal estimation to make the types of films that I make, the cost has aproximately quadrupled in ten years, which is far in excess of the inflation rate. So when people tell you "Oh, yes, fine. Cleopatra would have cost more if adjusted for inflation", I submit that Cleopatra would have cost twice what 'Titanic' did, if adjusted for the current cost of film production versus what it was when that film was made in, I think, 1961. And certainly there are at least a dozen other major epic films that would have cost in excess of what 'Titanic' made because you can't just track it on inflation. You have to track it on the cost of film production dollars.

What do you think about Oscar nominations?

I don't really know what to think about that. It's never really been an issue on any of my previous films other than for technical categories such as sound or visual effects, but now people are talking about best actor, best actress, best picture, things like that. That's certainly very flattering. I think that because the film is also seen as a big mainstream piece of Hollywood production, and in recent years the Academy has supported independent film production. I think this may not necessarily be realistic, although I think it does reflect the fact that people are obviously gettig a strong impact from the film, which I take as a compliment.

Have you seen 'Titanic', the Broadway musical, what did you think of it, and did you have it mind while filming your movie?

The Broadway play I was completely unaware of. I've been planning this film for five years, I've been working on it exclusively for three years. I don't know, frankly, at what point the Broadway musical was planned. I was not aware of it until about a year ago, so it certainly didn't enter my thinking in any way. My script had already been written. I've seen it. I think it's a nice production. I think that the constraints of physically staging an event that takes place over such a vast area as the ship is very difficult onstage. Obviously they had to concentrate on character. And of course they made the decision to stick to only known historical characters, so in a way it's kind of a singing version of 'Night to Remember'—I don't mean to put it down. It's obviously a work from the heart, the way our film 'Titanic' is a work from the heart. They're just very different things.

If you have the chance to do it again, how would you go about it?

It's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. This is a very very complex film. It's easy to look back and say "I don't think I would have changed anything within the body of the film". I'm very very happy with the film. I think it might have been wise for us not to commit to a summer release date, which I think was unrealistic from the beginning. It was unrealistic for the following reason: when we elected to do the film by creating our own brand new facility (which we did in Mexico as most of you know), we thought that we had numbers based on doing that, and we had numbers based on building the set. But the people who were building the set and the people who were building the studio were really separate people. When they all had to work in the same space at the same time, then it created inefficencies. I think that for us to have linear-processed a little bit more—to have built the studio first, then build the set, just like every other movie that's ever been made—probably would have been a better strategy. But it would have meant sacrificing summer in advance, and it's a very hard thing for studios to do. Sometimes they only commit to a big movie because it is a summer picture, a film that they see as allowing them to dominate the summer marketplace. I never frankly saw 'Titanic' as particularly as a summer film versus a winter film, so when we pushed back it didn't bother me that much.

Do you think a change of date will affect the film?

I think we're in better shape now than we were in summer. If we'd come out in summer we would have had less time to play through, because now opening before Christmas, we'll have the soft January-February season to play into, because we expect that this is the sort of film that because it doesn't have as many play times per day or during a given weekend, it's gonna take longer for the number of people that want to see the film, to see it. In the way that 'Dances With Wolves' played for three or four months and eventually made $175 million at that time, whatever it was, five, six years ago, which makes it quite the megahit. There are different ways for a film to earn money, and a film that plays for three hours-plus needs to earn it out over more time. So this is actually a better strategy for us. It was a blessing in disguise.

What inspired you to write this great love story?

I've been looking for a love story of some kind to tell, and all my films spend a lot of time on relationships, and are in my mind more character-driven than most genre pictures, but I wanted to do a film that was outside a classifiable genre, so that the relationship aspect of the film could be seen more clearly and not clouded by science fiction or other interpretations of the material. I would say that the inspiration really comes from the subject itself, the Titanic. When I was doing research for 'The Abyss' back in '87 or '88, I asked to meet Robert Ballard, who discovered Titanic—I wasn't interested in Titanic, I was interested in submersibles, and submersible robot systems and all the things that they were using to explore Titanic, but I was interested in it for another film that had nothing to do with Titanic, but in the process of that he showed me the tapes of their discovery of the ship and I just sort of caught the excitement of these people who had found this thing, and I went back and studied the history of it. The human history of it is absolutely fascinating. We only touch on a small part of what is great about this story and this event in the film. I think we represent it very well. You can study it for years and it continues to be compelling, and of course what's compelling about it is that you have a disaster where people have time to quietly contemplate their impending deaths, so it becomes a kind of allegory for human mortality, for the psychology of individual mortality, and also as a kind of microcosm for a worldscale apocalypse, because in this film we don't see much outside of these two ships, and of course Titanic is the world of the movie for the most part, so in a way it functions as a kind of metaphor for the end of the world and how different people respond to that in terms of man's relationship to God, a person's sense of individual nobility, wether a person responds as a hero or a coward, wether they're capable of self-sacrifice—all these are themes that I find very interesting and 'Titanic' represents an opportunity to deal with them all, so it was a very very exciting and fertile background story in which to tell a love story against. Because what I wanted to do was get the love story resonating against the background story and viceversa, kind of like a melody and a counter-melody, like a piece of music, and I think that the enhanced poignancy of the Titanic event--which anybody who reads about it will feel—feeds and intensifies the love story, and conversely, the love story provides us with a way of feeling drawn into the event, so at a certain point while wacthing the film, you feel like you're on the deck of that ship, and it's an experience that you're going to go through in a much more real way maybe, than you thought of it before, from watching your documentaries, or documentary-style films, like 'Night to Remember' for example—and once again I don't mean to diss 'Night to Remember', I think it's a very good film, but we wanted to go beyond that. Films build on the films that go before them. If we didn't go beyond we'd be wasting everybody's time.

This was only part one of the interview, the rest will show up within a few weeks.

A huge thanks to "Zej" for letting www.movie-page.com use this great interview :-)