Anyone who has seen Titanic knows that the ship
itself is one of the movie’s biggest stars. Just as we needed the perfect
actors, we also had to “cast” the Titanic correctly. We had historic photos,
blueprints, and James Cameron’s deep research and creative vision to guide us but
translating that into a physical structure was a monumental challenge. We had
to design a ship that would serve the needs of filming while still looking and
feeling authentic. Beyond that, we had to create the ocean where this ship
would repeatedly sink and rise during production.
The biggest hurdle was clear: find a location, construct the
ship, and make an artificial sea all in one self-contained environment we could
fully control. It took nearly a year of scouting. We looked everywhere, from
coast to coast and beyond. For a brief moment, it seemed an abandoned quarry
near the Gdańsk shipyard in Poland might work. I’ll never forget that trip just
before Christmas where the local crew secretly held a holiday party, closing
the curtains so they wouldn’t get in trouble for celebrating a religious
holiday so soon after the Soviet era.
Ultimately, we found our answer in an unexpected place:
Rosarito, Mexico. It seemed improbable after all, the real Titanic sank in the
icy North Atlantic, not under the blazing Baja sun. But when I stood on forty
empty acres by the sea, I could picture it all the ship, the dock, the frigid
ocean, the love story unfolding between Jack and Rose.
Walking those dusty acres, I began sketching ideas on a
napkin where the massive water tank would go, where we’d build the ship’s
decks, dining rooms, engine room, and first-class cabins. I knew instantly this
was the place. The only issue? Convincing Jim Cameron.
That’s where we hit a roadblock. Jim refused to visit the
site until 20th Century Fox gave us the green light, but the studio wouldn’t
approve the budget until we had a confirmed location. A perfect catch-22. Fox
wouldn’t budge, and Jim wouldn’t move. Eventually, the studio relented, and by
then, Geoff Burdick and his team had already built a detailed 20-foot model of
the Titanic to show how it would look in Rosarito.
When we arrived, I tried to beat Jim to the site so I could
set up a proper presentation. But Jim, being Jim, was already awake before
dawn. We drove down together, and the moment he stepped out of the car, he
started analyzing everything. “Landau! There are lights over there! There’s a
hill! How can this possibly be the middle of the ocean? Send everyone home this
will never work!”
A crew member quietly said to me, “Jon, that’s exactly what
you predicted he’d say.”
I knew his process by then. He always resisted at first,
then rethought. He needed to make each decision his own. Twenty minutes later,
after slightly shifting the model’s angle, he yelled again: “Landau! This is
perfect! This is the only place we can shoot the movie!”
Titanic would go on to become the most expensive
movie ever made at the time, with the budget nearly doubling before it wrapped.
The production required a near life-size ship replica, groundbreaking visual
effects, and even expeditions to the actual Titanic wreck site.
Post-production lasted for months. Entire scenes we’d
labored over ended up cut. Meanwhile, the press wouldn’t stop circling.
Reporters snuck onto sets, rumors spread like wildfire people claimed we’d
spent over $200 million and called Titanic the next Ishtar or Waterworld.
Inside Fox, the whispers were just as bad: too long, poor acting, broken
effects. None of it was true, but gossip can be powerful perception becomes
reality.
Through it all, the one opinion that mattered most belonged
to Rupert Murdoch. One day, Jim and I bumped into him in the hallway. I joked,
“We must be two of your least favorite people right now.” Without missing a
beat, Rupert smiled and said, “I’ll wait until I see the movie then I’ll let
you know.”
When the film was finally ready for a test screening at the
Mall of America, tension was sky-high. Jim went ahead to scout, while I flew in
with Fox executives Tom Rothman and Peter Chernin. As the plane crossed the
country, Peter turned to me and teased, “Jon, do you think any studio out there
is saying, ‘Let’s hire that producer who went 100 percent over budget’?”
I shot back, “Maybe not but do you think they’re saying,
‘Let’s hire the executive who green-lit that project’?” That was our
relationship full of mutual respect and sharp humor.
At the screening, we sat in the back as the movie began. The
word TITANIC filled the screen and the crowd was dead silent. One
minute, two, three. We thought we were doomed. But soon after, everything
changed people were crying, cheering, totally swept up in the story.
Afterward, when the moderator asked if anything confused the
audience, nearly every hand went up. Turns out, they’d all been told they were
coming to see Great Expectations, another Fox film and they thought Titanic
was just the trailer! It took them a few minutes to realize they were actually
watching the movie itself.
And once they did, the rest was history.
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