It’s been a quarter century since the historic epic Titanic, directed by James Cameron, hit the big screen on December 19, 1997, and became one of the highest-grossing films of all time. A technical and artistic marvel, Titanic forever changed the cinematic landscape with its groundbreaking set design and special effects, won over audiences with its romantic plotline, and catapulted the careers of now A-listers Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
The film portrays the tragic sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic during its maiden voyage across the Atlantic on April 4, 1912, from the perspective of two young passengers of different social classes — Rose DeWitt Bukater (played by Winslet) and Jack Dawson (played by DiCaprio) — who fall in love onboard and are forced to navigate the deadly disaster unfolding in the background. Even 25 years later, the film holds multiple records and is etched in pop culture memory. But how much do you know about what went into making Titanic? From the massive, custom-designed set to Kate Winslet’s famous improvised scene and the film’s controversial ending, discover seven facts about Titanic in celebration of the film’s 25th anniversary.
No Film Has Won More Academy Awards Than “Titanic”
Titanic swept the 1998 Academy Awards, winning 11 of the 14 awards for which the film was nominated, including Best Picture and Best Director. That matched a previous record set in 1960 by the religious epic Ben-Hur, starring Charlton Heston. Only one other film since then has equaled Titanic’s awards haul — The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King in 2004 — but as of 2022, none has exceeded it. In addition, no film to date has secured more than Titanic’s 14 nominations, a record the film shares with the 1950 comedy All About Eve and 2017’s La La Land.
Titanic was not only an awards success but also a box-office juggernaut. It held the worldwide record for highest lifetime gross for more than 20 years. The current record-holder is 2009’s Avatar, also directed by James Cameron, but Titanic still holds the No. 3 spot, just behind Avengers: Endgame. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Titanic kept playing in theaters for nearly 10 months after it was released.
The Watery Set of “Titanic” Held Nearly 17 Million Gallons of Water
The film’s epic story required an elaborate custom-designed set that cost an estimated $20 million to build. The set’s primary feature was a horizon tank, a specialized tank that allows filmmakers to film an ocean scene with a view of the horizon without plunging actors into the middle of an actual ocean. There are only a handful of these tanks in existence worldwide.
According to the technical journal JOM, the tank built for the film at Fox Baja Studios near Rosarito, Mexico (where the majority of the shots were filmed), was the largest shooting tank in the world at the time, containing nearly 17 million gallons of salt water. This allowed for a 774-foot-long set of the ship itself, although not everything was filmed in the giant tank. The dining room and the staircase, for example, were constructed on a hydraulic platform at the bottom of an interior tank, and were designed to be flooded with water piped in from the ocean.
After shooting wrapped on Titanic, Fox continued to use the giant tank for other sea epics, including Pearl Harbor (2001) and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), until they sold the studio in 2007 to a group of local investors. Since then, recent projects filmed there include the second season of Fear the Walking Dead and the Netflix project Selena: The Series.
A Utah Video Store Once Charged $5 To Make “Titanic” More Family-Friendly
Titanic earned its PG-13 rating in particular with two famously sexy scenes between Rose and Jack — one in which Rose poses nude so Jack can draw her portrait, and another where the pair steam up the backseat of an automobile in the cargo hold. Even though all we see in the latter scene is a hand against a steamy window, it was too much for some viewers — so the owner of a small video store in Utah came up with a creative solution. Sunrise Family Video in American Fork, about 25 miles northwest of Provo, began charging customers $5 to edit one or both of the racy scenes out of their home VHS copies. For an extra $3, employees would cut out any other scene customers wanted removed. The service was apparently popular, even after Paramount Pictures threatened legal action — by September 1998, the wait time for the service was five weeks.
James Cameron Drew the Iconic Nude Portrait of Kate Winslet’s Character
In the film’s famous portrait scene, Rose instructs Jack to “draw me like one of your French girls.” But it wasn’t actor Leonardo DiCaprio who sketched the portrait of Rose reclining in her suite wearing only the “Heart of the Ocean” diamond — it was, surprisingly, James Cameron.
The director, also a talented sketch artist with a background in life drawing, used reference photos of Winslet to make the finished product, which he wanted to get exactly right. “I figured it was time to put all that time I spent doing life drawing to work,” he reflected in his book Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron. In the film, the sketch eventually ends up in Cal’s safe, but in real life, it ended up in the hands of the highest bidder, going for a reported $16,000 at auction in 2011.
A Mysterious Poisoning Incident Plagued the Crew During Filming
While filming in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in August 1996, more than 50 people working on Titanic — including star Bill Paxton, producer Jon Landau, and director James Cameron — were sent to the hospital after eating a late-night meal and beginning to feel confusion, nausea, and other strange bodily effects. (Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio weren’t filming in Nova Scotia at the time.) It certainly didn’t help that the dish apparently responsible for the incident — a chowder that crew members alternately described as lobster, clam, or mussel — was apparently quite delicious.
It was later determined that the cause of the incident wasn’t food poisoning, but rather someone who spiked it with PCP, a hallucinogenic also known as angel dust. Paxton, Cameron, and set painter Marilyn McAvoy have all recalled the ensuing chaos in the press over the years. Cameron got lost on a set that he’d built himself and later got stabbed with a pen by another crew member feeling the effects. At one point, there was even a conga line. The person responsible has never been found, even though local police apparently investigated the incident for more than two years. Cameron suspected a disgruntled crew member who had been fired the day before for starting trouble with the caterers.
Spitting On Cal Was Kate Winslet’s Idea
In a memorable scene from the film, Rose’s fiancé Cal (played by Billy Zane) grabs her arm as she attempts to run away from him, so she spits on him. The original script called for Rose to stick Cal with a hat pin — but Kate Winslet decided to spit in his face instead. Cameron called the move “genius,” a callback to the scene in which Jack taught her to “spit like a man.” Winslet reportedly swished K-Y Jelly around in her mouth beforehand for maximum effect.
Zane, however, wasn’t as thrilled about the change, especially after filming multiple takes. “There are few things you remember as well as being spat upon, let [alone] 17 times,” Zane told Entertainment Tonight in 1997. Still, he “felt being on the receiving end of that juice was better than preparing it in one’s mouth prior to launch.”
James Cameron Insists That Jack’s Death Was Necessary
One of the most controversial scenes in Titanic is Jack’s watery death at the end. Many contend that there was plenty of room for him to survive on the wooden board that Rose was floating on in the icy waters after the ship sank. The TV series Mythbusters even aired an episode on the topic in 2012. The show ran multiple simulations to determine whether Jack’s survival was possible, but in most scenarios, they found that Jack’s death was inevitable, as the weight of their two bodies would have sunk the board too low in the water.
To James Cameron, however, the question misses the point entirely. “The script says Jack died. He has to die,” he said in response to the Mythbusters episode in 2012. “So maybe we screwed up and the board should have been a little tiny bit smaller, but the dude’s goin’ down.” Cameron doubled down on his stance in a 2017 interview with the Daily Beast: “Look, it’s very, very simple: You read page 147 of the script and it says, ‘Jack gets off the board and gives his place to her so that she can survive.’ It’s that simple.”