Pick up you bastards.
[PHONE RINGING]
Is there anyone there!
Yes.
What do you see?
Iceberg, right ahead.
Movies are a special medium in how
they can tell ordinary stories in an extraordinary way.
From powerhouse performances to scores that impact us
on a deeply emotional level, every moving piece
is a part of a whole.
For Titanic, filmmaker James Cameron
used over an hour of carefully crafted stunt work and set
design to tell the story of ordinary people
in an extraordinary circumstance.
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Being one of the highest grossing movies
of all time on the cusp of its 25th anniversary,
Titanic doesn't need a whole lot of context.
Written and directed by James Cameron and released in 1997,
Titanic went on to gross over $2.2 billion.
The story focused on Rose Dewitt Bukater played by Kate Winslet,
a teenager forced into engagement
to preserve her family's wealth, who
falls in love with a young lower class artist named Jack Dawson,
played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
Even before the film's release, the word Titanic
had already become synonymous with abject failure, hubris,
and shipwrecks.
We as an audience knew going in how
this movie was going to end.
The ship would sink.
But the reason people still flocked
in droves was Cameron's penchant for entangling emotions
with high level spectacle.
In a lot of filmmaker's hands, the sinking
of the Titanic with its frenzied shots, quick asides, and myriad
of characters would be disorienting,
but working with stunt coordinator Simon
Crane and visual effects supervisor Mark Lasoff,
they were able to make a movie that not only awed you
with its attention to detail but told
quick, concise stories about the ordinary people
aboard the ship.
In order to do that, Cameron constructed
a near lifesize replica of the Titanic, much of it
made from rubber to protect the performers and a water tank
to contain it.
The tank alone cost $40 million, and there
are countless miniatures, hydraulics
to tilt each half of the ship, extras with rollers attached
to their clothing so they could slide more easily,
and on and on.
While it's impossible to practically recreate
a crash of that magnitude, Cameron shares a trait
with most gifted directors, an ability
to get creative with their problem solving.
When filming the sinking, the bow of the ship
was able to tilt six degrees with the stern able
to tilt up to about 180 degrees.
Cameron cleverly used Dutch angles
turning the camera on its roll axis then composited
in a waterline to give the illusion of sharper angles that
gave the feeling of sinking.
All of this helped the performers really
sell the feeling of weightlessness on screen.
As opposed to the famous clip of Batman and Robin
scaling the building wall, we immediately fear for the people
as they dangle and hold tight for survival.
It's not impossible to watch behind-the-scenes footage
and think of classic Hong Kong wire work,
but instead of the almost ethereal floating sensations
of those films, the stunt team imbues weight and impact.
As the carnage carries on, we get brief snippets
of various passengers and crew dealing with the inevitability
laid out before them.
It's here we start to get flashes of Cameron's strongest
suit, his empathy and adoration of love stories.
Much has already been said about the Titanic
being a love story first and the examination of one
of nautical history's greatest disasters second.
Cameron himself stated he pitched the movie as Romeo
and Juliet on a shipwreck.
Cameron's entire filmography is filled with love stories
from two people fighting desperately
to rekindle their marriage in True Lies
to the time travel inevitability of true love in Terminator.
There are so many threads in everything
he creates that tries desperately
to understand the most basic of human emotions.
That fixation is the perfect complement
to his technical ability and curiosity.
In order to make those small moments work,
Cameron knows he has to give us something
visually appealing, which brings us to Captain Edward John
Smith.
Played by Bernard Hill and based on his real-life counterpart,
Captain Smith was well liked amongst the upper class
and was for all intents and purposes
an accomplished seafarer on his literal last voyage.
Cameron avoids any sort of blame game, most of which
had all been debunked after the real-life sinking.
There's Smith and he's standing there,
and he's got the iceberg warning in his [BLEEP] hand.
Excuse me, his hand.
And he's ordering more speed.
Instead, what we're presented with
is one of Cameron's most striking visual moments.
Cameron is an accomplished visual artist himself.
It's, in fact, his hand drawing Kate Winslet
like the proverbial French girl.
He's an artist who has an inner understanding of composition
through his lens.
As the ocean water begins to bend the windows to its whims,
Captain Smith holds fast to the ship's wheel.
When the water crushes through and begins to envelop Smith,
Cameron has the actor crowd over the wheel.
His shoulders slightly rise, the water high above him,
a sense of inevitability and acceptance
in just a few brief seconds of film.
Moments like that litter the back half
of Titanic, impressionistic paintings that
make the viewer take a breath and reckon
with what's happening.
Down in the boiler room as two men struggle to shut a door,
we watch them thrash relentlessly
against the face of a rushing tide.
It's these small moments where we can't help but wonder
if they'll make it and make us forget that we already
know the answer.
Cameron doesn't give us just moments of defeat though.
He elegantly moves back and forth
between spectacle and emotion.
As the ship's band famously plays,
water begins to surround them.
Their dedication feels like a victory.
It's the same when we watch an elderly couple lie together
just like we presume they always have.
Then there are moments that seem to perfectly marry
his visual storytelling and tendency
to push the technical envelope.
In an article with before and afters
for Titanic's 20th anniversary, key animator Andy Jones
recalled animating the now infamous propeller man.
After Cameron told him the shot felt off,
Jones stated he wanted me to double check the math on it.
I assured him that the distance and rate
of speed the figure was falling was correct.
He then asked me to double the distance
he falls from after hitting the propeller to the water.
It's that simple understanding that something was off kilter
so the logic needed to be slightly bent that
bears much of Titanic's weight.
That inclination more than likely
comes from Cameron's understanding
of horror and thriller tropes.
The Terminator is widely considered a slasher movie,
and while Aliens was much more action
than haunted house in space, there
are still moments of terror.
There's a reason comedy and horror have so much in common,
and it's often attributed to its reliance on timing.
And timing is something Cameron clearly understands.
When one man falls from the ship and clips off a table,
there's a hurried acceleration in his spin, one that probably
isn't too realistic, but as Cameron
insisted with the propeller, it felt harder.
In a more literal usage of timing,
it's been found that if you count only the time spent
on the ship and not the present-day scenes,
the over three hour runtime clocks in at two hours and 40
minutes, which is the time most believe it
took the actual ship to sink.
That level of attention to detail
just adds to the overall feeling of immersion
that Titanic still carries.
There are meticulously crafted interiors and props,
the usage of practical effects and stunt work
married to breakthrough CGI.
There's a real-world tangibility that
gives us an emotional link his later work with the Avatar
franchise sometimes lacks.
And that's not to say that those movies are lesser by any means.
Only that there's a dissonance between real people acting
in frame on set and motion captured actors
in a computer-generated world.
The technical prowess is groundbreaking and changing
what stories can be told, but it's
important to remember that there was a moment in 1997 where
Cameron perfected how to make a blockbuster.
It's this melding of Cameron's obsessions,
his steadfastness on creating a feeling that
makes the stunts of Titanic stay with us a quarter of a century
after its release.
Otherwise, the entire thing would
come across as either cold and technical or completely
voyeuristic.
Hollywood has a long history with disaster movies,
and as an audience, we love to watch conflict.
Most often that's an antagonist and protagonist
going head to head over conflicting ideals.
But what better antagonist than nature or our own hubris
and what better conflicting ideal
than our want to live and love.
Movies like Titanic don't carry on because they're impressive.
They stay with us because they gave us a feeling.
Part of that feeling comes from us being able to relate,
and a large part of that relatability
is thanks to the hardworking stunt
performers and crew who showed us
what humanity really can accomplish
in the face of disaster.
So what do you think?
What were some of your favorite moments of triumph or defeat
during the movie?
Let us down in the comments below.
And while you're here, why not check out
some of our other stunt videos below?