"Titanic" is a great film, a film for all time. They talk about him mainly with admiration and delight, experiencing a glut of lofty emotions. He is not just loved - he is valued as an outstanding heritage of world cinema. The director of Titanic created an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the next generation of geniuses, a spotlight pointing to the only true path of perfectionist cinema.
Masterpiece
The deafening and ubiquitous success of the film, awarded the eleven Oscars (a repetition of the Ben-Hur record (1959) directed by William Wyler), was absolutely not expected by anyone. Even in his wildest forecasts, the director / producer / screenwriter James Cameron did not guess the box office sum of more than $ 300 million - and was mistaken. In Canada and the United States, this tape exceeded the box office of $ 600 million, and worldwide - $ 1.8 billion. And in Russia, with all its drawbacks, the Titanic film distribution system, only in the halls equipped with stereo sound, scored a record $ 5 million collection mark. And all this is due to the fact that the director of the film "Titanic" came up with a brilliant turn of events and a fresh look at the tragedy that has long been familiar to everyone. He found absolutely no doubt subject to, and most importantly, a win-win storyline, composed solely on the basis of genuine historical facts.
National Geographic as a muse, Russian bathyscaphes as technical support
Cameron seriously thought about writing the script for the Titanic film after receiving a birthday present from an old friend of Lewis Eberneti - he handed him a treatise on the history of the construction and wreck of the legendary ship. And he inspired to start creating a film of the same name documentary project of the National Geographic channel. For more than seven years, its creator worked on the script. In 1995, the future director of the Titanic made about two dozen dives to the sunken ship. Technically, this was possible thanks to the Russian bathyscaphes “Mir-1” and “Mir-2”, which are on the balance of the vessel “Akademik Mstislav Keldysh”. Each immersion session lasted several hours, but the deep-sea time frames are no more than 15 minutes. Just enough for the film was enough in a specialized deep-sea camera, which was created by brother of the director Michael Cameron. For greater efficiency, James ordered the creation of a model of the vessel, which was intentionally reduced by 33 times, and, of course, individual frames were modeled on a computer.
Start
On September 16, 1996, filming began on a specially-built studio on the Mexican coast. The scale of the process was global: the ship’s layout was only 38 meters shorter than the original, and the ocean “played” a pool with a displacement of 4 million liters. Thanks to innovative techniques and computer graphics, 40 extras were effectively transformed into 2,000 passengers (the "motion capture" technique and the "chromakey" effect, which is used to replace the background in the video). Computer graphics gave the film the surrounding surface of the water, frolicking dolphins and even the naturalness of the foam generator iceberg covered with a thin layer of wax. The director of "Titanic" was very categorical in his demands. Such a professional and detailed-verified approach to work during the shooting process allowed him to achieve amazing realism, the credibility of all episodes.
It would be better if we built it!
But computer graphics still could not solve all the problems. James Cameron could not quickly sink the model of the ship, as required by the storytelling. After the ship breaks into two parts, its bow had to sink extremely quickly, however, due to its buoyancy, the model did not want to quickly sink under water. Then the director of the film “Titanic” suggested filling the entire airspace between two adjacent compartments with water, drastically raising the layout and immediately flooding it, so that the water does not have time to leak from it. And the idea worked. There were still problems with the front of the ship - the model in real size did not have a nose, and each episode was finished on a computer. When James found out how much these special effects cost the movie, he exclaimed in frustration: “It would be better if we built it!” As a result, the director of "Titanic" lost not only the 8-millionth fee, but also all percent of the box office, after the producers found out that the planned budget for the picture was quite seriously exceeded; instead of the planned 135 million - as much as 200.
Kate, Leo, Horner and Cameron
Cameron's obsession was contagious, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet agreed to participate in the project long before the final approved version of the script for the film, based only on preliminary drafts of the maestro. The picture depicting a beautiful half-naked Rose (however, like all other sketches, drawings in Jack's album), was made by the director himself, and the viewer sees exactly his hands in the frame of the drawing process. To record the dominant soundtrack, James wanted to attract Enya. But after her refusal, he turned to an old acquaintance James Horner, with whom he had already collaborated in the process of shooting the painting “Aliens”. The music written by the composer strangely resembles the style of Enia's music, so the director nevertheless achieved the desired result.
The best indicator is the viewer's love
The audience is a complex structure of subjective opinions and visions, and it cannot be deceived or destroyed in any way. However, almost without exception, the pictures created by Cameron are not only enduringly popular, but also the fanatical devotion and love of the army of fans, numbering millions. The master shot two of the highest grossing films in the history of mankind: “Titanic” and “Avatar”. It was he who created the intriguing “Terminator universe”, as he was the director of the first two episodes: “Terminator” (1984) and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991). James Cameron (films “Aliens”, “Abyss”, “Solaris”, “Dark Angel”, “Sanctum” - confirmation of this) will undoubtedly go down in the history of cinema as an obsessed genius.