The idea for Titanic was born out of James Cameron's desire as a deep-sea diver to explore the Titanic's shipwreck for himself. Cameron had become an ardent deep-sea explorer after producing his 1986 science-fiction film The Abyss, and is one of the only men ever to have explored the Mariana Trench. Cameron became interested in the Titanic after seeing an IMAX film with footage of the shipwreck. Cameron convinced Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, who jointly produced Titanic, to provide funding for him to descend to the Titanic's actual wreckage using the Russian research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh.
In order to connect audiences emotionally with the human tragedy of the event, Cameron pitched the film as "Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic," given the way that the main romantic plot of the film uses the trope of "star-crossed lovers." In the process of mounting his lavish production, which was at the time the most expensive Hollywood project ever made, Cameron consulted blueprints, photographs, first-hand testimonies, and a trove of historical artifacts in order to make his reproduction as faithful as possible to the original.
Given the unprecedentedly ambitious scope of the production, rumors began to swirl around Cameron's demanding and perfectionist behavior on set. As the production exceeded its original budget and fell behind schedule, the studios braced themselves for an enormous failure. Production was halted at one point after a disgruntled crew member spiked Cameron's dinner with the dissociative drug PCP. Many cast members developed colds and kidney infections after being exposed to cold water during filming.
Cameron uses the frame narrative of treasure hunter Brock Lovett as a way to initially pique the audience's attention. Like Brock, many viewers had probably never seriously contemplated the tragedy of the event, which quickly passed into the stuff of legend for subsequent generations of Americans. Cameron was also able to capitalize on a revival of interest in the Titanic, after the wreckage was rediscovered in the North Atlantic in 1985, as its last remaining survivors were nearing the ends of their lives by the 1990s. The 101-year old character Rose Dawson Calvert symbolizes, among other things, the passage of time—the power of her memories is what drives the magical, cinematic illusion that transports audiences back to Southampton, 1912.
Critics praised Cameron, who was known primarily for directing action and science-fiction films, for his skillful mounting of a classic, even old-fashioned, Hollywood melodrama. The film to which Titanic was most often compared in the press was David O. Selznick's Gone With the Wind, another three-hour-plus hour romantic epic that revolves around tragedy, loss, and disaster. Cameron uses exaggerated archetypes, like the incomprehensibly evil Cal Hockley, or the saintly, angelic artist Jack Dawson, in order to rouse the audience's emotions and invest them in the fates of the characters. In this way, Cameron is able to create extraordinary suspense and viewer engagement, despite the fact that the audience already knows that the ship will sink.
As an exemplary melodrama, Titanic renders everything from moments of ecstatic joy, such as Jack's "I'm the king of the world!" exclamation, to shocking tragedy, such as a mother putting her children to sleep to die. Cameron uses fluid, sweeping camerawork, a swooning score by James Horner, and a script full of memorable one-liners, to create a sense of heightened reality. Cameron once described the Titanic as, "a great novel that really happened," and aims to craft a long and complex story, filled with numerous secondary and tertiary characters whose fates intersect with Jack and Rose's. Upon winning the Academy Award for Best Director, James Cameron famously exclaimed, "I'm the king of the world!"
