Titanic James Cameron

Effects

Cameron wanted to push the boundary of special effects, and enlisted Digital Domain and Pacific Data Images to continue the developments in digital technology he pioneered on The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Many previous films about Titanic shot water in slow motion, which did not look wholly convincing.[87] Cameron encouraged his crew to shoot their 45-foot-long (14 m) miniature of the ship as if "we're making a commercial for the White Star Line".[88] Afterwards, digital water and smoke were added, as were extras captured on a motion capture stage. Visual effects supervisor Rob Legato scanned the faces of many actors, including himself and his children, for the digital extras and stuntmen. There was also a 65-foot-long (20 m) model of the ship's stern that could break in two repeatedly, the only miniature to be used in water.[87] For scenes set in the ship's engines, footage of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien's engines were composited with miniature support frames, and actors shot against a greenscreen.[89] In order to save money, the first-class lounge was a miniature set incorporated into a greenscreen backdrop behind the actors.[90] The miniature of the Lounge would later be crushed to simulate the destruction of the room and a scale model of a First-Class corridor flooded with jets of water while the camera pans out.[91]

An enclosed 5,000,000-US-gallon (19,000,000 L) tank was used for sinking interiors, in which the entire set could be tilted into the water. In order to sink the Grand Staircase, 90,000 US gallons (340,000 L) of water were dumped into the set as it was lowered into the tank. Unexpectedly, the waterfall ripped the staircase from its steel-reinforced foundations, although no one was hurt. The 744-foot-long (227 m) exterior of Titanic had its first half lowered into the tank, but as the heaviest part of the ship it acted as a shock absorber against the water; to get the set into the water, Cameron had much of the set emptied and even smashed some of the promenade windows himself. After submerging the dining saloon, three days were spent shooting Lovett's ROV traversing the wreck in the present.[52] The post-sinking scenes in the freezing Atlantic were shot in a 350,000-US-gallon (1,300,000 L) tank,[92] where the frozen corpses were created by applying on actors a powder that crystallized when exposed to water, and wax was coated on hair and clothes.[65]

The climactic scene, which features the breakup of the ship directly before it sinks as well as its final plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic, involved a tilting full-sized set, 150 extras, and 100 stunt performers. Cameron criticized previous Titanic films for depicting the liner's final plunge as a graceful slide underwater. He "wanted to depict it as the terrifyingly chaotic event that it really was".[24] When carrying out the sequence, people needed to fall off the increasingly tilting deck, plunging hundreds of feet below and bouncing off of railings and propellers on the way down. A few attempts to film this sequence with stunt people resulted in some minor injuries, and Cameron halted the more dangerous stunts. The risks were eventually minimized "by using computer-generated people for the dangerous falls".[24] A Linux-based operating system was utilized for the creation of the effects.[93]

Editing

Cameron said there were aspects of the Titanic story that seemed important in pre- and post-production but became less important as the film evolved. He omitted the SS Californian, the ship that was close to the Titanic the night she sank but had turned off its radio for the night, did not hear her crew's SOS calls, and did not respond to their distress flares. A scene involving the Californian was cut, according to Cameron, "because it focuses you back onto that world. If Titanic is powerful as a metaphor, as a microcosm, for the end of the world in a sense, then that world must be self-contained." He said its omission was not "a compromise to mainstream filmmaking" but "about emphasis, creating an emotional truth to the film".[30]

During the first assembly cut, Cameron altered the ending. In the original version, Brock and Lizzy see the elderly Rose at the stern of the boat and fear she is going to commit suicide. Rose reveals that she had the Heart of the Ocean diamond all along but never sold it, to live on her own without Cal's money. She allows Brock to hold it but tells Brock that life is priceless and throws the diamond into the ocean. After accepting that treasure is worthless, Brock laughs at his stupidity. In the editing room, Cameron decided that by this point, the audience would no longer be interested in Brock Lovett and cut the scene, so that Rose is alone when she drops the diamond. He also did not want to disrupt the audience's melancholy after the Titanic's sinking.[94] Paxton agreed that his scene with Brock's epiphany and laugh was unnecessary, saying "I would have shot heroin to make the scene work better ... Our job was done by then ... If you're smart and you take the ego and the narcissism out of it, you'll listen to the film, and the film will tell you what it needs and what it does not need."[95]

The version used for the first test screening featured a fight between Jack and Lovejoy after Jack and Rose escape into the flooded dining saloon.[96] The scene was written to give the film more suspense, and had Cal offering to give Lovejoy, his valet, the Heart of the Ocean if he can get it from Jack and Rose. Lovejoy goes after the pair in the sinking first-class dining room. Jack attacks him and smashes his head against a window; this is why Lovejoy has a gash later in the film. Test audiences said it would be unrealistic to risk one's life for wealth, and Cameron cut it for this reason, as well as for timing and pacing reasons. Many other scenes were cut for similar reasons.[96]

Heart of the Ocean

For the Heart of the Ocean design, London-based jewelers Asprey & Garrard used cubic zirconias set in white gold[97] to create an Edwardian-style necklace to be used as a prop in the film. The studio designed and produced three variations, very similar but unique and distinguishable in character. Two of them were used in the film while the third went unused until after the film had been released. The three necklaces are commonly known as the original prop, the J. Peterman necklace and the Asprey necklace.

The third and final design was not used in the film. After the film's success, Asprey & Garrard were commissioned to create an authentic Heart of the Ocean necklace using the original design. The result was a platinum-set, 171-carat (34.2 g) heart-shaped Ceylon sapphire surrounded by 103 diamonds.[97] This design featured a much larger inverted pear-shaped Ceylon sapphire with a subtle cleft to resemble a heart. The chain for this necklace also featured a mix of round, pear, and marquise cut white diamonds. The bail also featured a heart cut white diamond with another round cut diamond attached to an inverted pear shape diamond which was then attached to the cage of the main stone. The necklace was donated to Sotheby's auction house in Beverly Hills for an auction benefiting the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and Southern California's Aid For AIDS. It was sold to an unidentified Asprey client[98] for $1.4 million (equivalent to $2.62 million in 2023), under the agreement that Dion would wear it two nights later at the 1998 Academy Awards ceremony. Since then, this necklace has not been made available for public viewing.