Narrator: 'Cameron's dives on the real Titanic ultimately provide more than just footage for his movie.'
Cameron: 'We were bringing back something from the wreck that the world could share, without touching it or disturbing it in any way. We were bringing back images. Certainly from me personally, but for us the production collectively, that after that point everything else had to live up to that level of authenticity. We have to keep what happened there in the back of out minds all the time. There were moments when it just got too eerie.
Narrator: 'It is a time in history when men hold their machines above the powers of nature; and each class knows its place. The Titanic is a symbol of the times - a dangerous blend of optimism and arrogance. Director James Cameron has to go beyond merely telling the story of a ship on a tragic voyage. He must create an emotional window into the past that will bring history to life like never before. His eyes and ears are two fictional characters from opposing worlds - Jack Dawson from the lower decks and steerage, Rose DeWitt Bukater from the upper decks of opulence and first class.'
Cameron: 'If you care about people and you care about these characters, you can appreciate the tragedy at a microcosmic level. They will provide an emotional doorway for the audience to appreciate the true tragedy of what happened to the Titanic.'
Ken Marschall, Titanic Visual Historian: 'The Titanic is so overshadowed by the disaster, one does not tend to think about what went on the four days before the ship hit that iceberg'.
Narrator: 'This calm before the storm is a time when Jack and Rose introduce us to life on the Titanic, from the realm of the lower decks to the refined domain of high society.'
Cameron: 'You can't tell the story of the Titanic without telling the story of the American upper class.'
Narrator: 'Titanic's illustrious passenger list includes hotel financier John Jacob Astor, Scotland's Countess of Rothes, Mining millionairess, Molly Brown, Colonel Archibald Gracie, Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon and his wife Lucile.' [all the actors bear a striking resemblance to their photos]
Don Lynch, Titanic Historian: 'You could just walk around the dining table and you could tell who the people were in almost every instance, without being told. There was an effort by Jim to make these people look the way their photographs look. He cast people based upon their appearance.'
Narrator: 'The camera places countless other historical characters in his story: Titanic's designer, Thomas Andrews, the manager director of the White Star Line Bruce Ismay, its crew, such as the celebrated Captain Edward J. Smith, and the ship's famous band. The film includes the nameless faces of the Third Class passengers, hopeful immigrants from around the world. They left their homes and families in search of prosperity and the promise of a new life. Rich and poor, famous and obscure, the society of an age is embodied in the passengers of the ship.'
Cameron: 'To comprehend the tragedy of the ship, you had to understand the ship. If you did appreciate the ship, you could appreciate the sinking. So you had to appreciate it in terms, the subjective terms, that people felt about it before they knew they were on the Titanic.'
In showing the power and size of the ship, Cameron comments: 'We decided to really ride the ocean, to really drive up the speed to pound the ocean and drive this leviathan forward; and you have got hundreds of stokers down below throwing coal into these big furnaces. The big crankshafts turning over, and engines. These four storey high engines You see the guts of the ship. You see the power of it, the satisfaction of the officers who run the ship and their sense of domination of the elements.'
Narrator: 'To fully illustrate this sense of power and optimism, Cameron must do more than tell a story with words. He must reveal it with images and reconstruct not only the objects of an era but suggest the aura of the time. Under the guidance of the Titanic's foremost historians, Cameron and his team build more than a movie set. They create a striking duplicate per se.'
Lynch: 'The interiors, as with the exteriors, were done with such attention to detail that I can't think of it as a set. To this day, I still call it the Titanic.'
Narrator: 'From the depths of the sea, the decks of the Titanic come to life once again. The ship's gymnasium appears exactly as it did in 1912. First Class suites once again exude the lustre of the glided age. The grand staircase is transformed into the living colour of reality'.
Marschall: 'To look down from that well of the First Class staircase, to look up and see the dome, to go down deck after deck and end up on that D Deck landing with that beautiful candelabra, it is really I believe unprecedented attention to detail.'
Cameron: 'We didn't take any liberties at all with the physical design of the ship, and tried to take virtually no liberties with the "accepted" history'.
Narrator: 'The historical events that Jack and Rose encountered are authentic, from minor events to key moments of significance.'
Cameron: ' Everything that happens around Jack and Rose is very accurate. It was happening to those people, at that moment in time, in very much that way. They happen to be running through it, seeing and experiencing it, bouncing of it and in some cases even affecting it. I walked them through pylons of events that are known to have happened.'
Narrator: 'Attention to historic events can be seen even in the smallest of details. The hymn song at the Sunday morning mass actually ended with the ironic lyrics "for those imperil on the sea". When ice fell onto the ship after impact with the iceberg, steerage passengers were actually seen playing soccer with it. It was common practice for engineers to heat their soup in the steam pipes, as depicted when chief engineer Bell gets the order - stop. It was reported that as the ship was sinking passengers were actually reprimanded for destroying property. Elements of the scene of Jack sneaking onto the First Class deck were based on an actual photo taken aboard the Titanic as she sat in Cherbourg before departing for Queenstown. Father Biles, a Catholic priest travelling Second Class, did actually lead a large party of passengers on the stern of the ship as she was sinking.'
Cameron: 'Whenever you see something that is just about the Titanic, and not about Jack and Rose, it's accurate, and it's there because it is part of that greater drama'.
Narrator: 'A wealth of information exists regarding the physical aspects of the Titanic and the era in which she existed, but there are many dramatic events that remain shrouded in mystery.'
Lynch: 'There always will be stories about the Titanic that are controversial. I don't think you can have a subject that fascinates so many people and not have people debate over things that happened that night, who did what, who behaved how.'
The Director as Historian
Cameron: 'We would have to go in and do the research and find out what
people were doing and saying and thinking and how they were acting, who
was a coward, who was heroic, who died nobly.'
Narrator: 'The challenge for James Cameron and the historians is to piece the puzzles together and present the events in the most accurate light possible.'
Cameron: 'When you spend two years cross-referencing everything that everybody either wrote or said about something, you find a lot of conflicting stuff, but you find enough reinforcement on a given thing that you can start to peg it.'
Narrator: 'But coming to a consensus on what really happened is no easy
task. Many of the controversies suggest that someone is lying. In one scene,
Cameron portrays White Star Line Managing Director Bruce Ismay telling
Captain Smith to increase Titanic's speed, although both men knew
that an ice field lay dead ahead. Ismay still pushes for speed. Did Bruce
Ismay try to influence Captain Smith? According to maritime law, no persons
on board have authority over the captain. Some say this conversation took
place. In the Senate hearings following the disaster, First Class passenger
Mrs Elizabeth Lines spoke out: "It was Mr Ismay who did the talking. I
heard 'We will beat the Olympic and get into New York on Tuesday',
in those words." Ismay's one word rebuttal would tell another story -
Question: "Did you ever have occasion to converse with the captain
about the movement of the ship"
Ismay: "Never."
Lynch: 'I am of the opinion that the meeting of Ismay and Smith in the reception room really did take place. I think it is a very true part of the movie.'
Narrator: 'But why did Captain Smith buckle under Ismay's pressure. He had been repeatedly warned of the looming icefield ahead. Perhaps, the captain was unconcerned because the bridge didn't receive all the warnings.'
Lynch: 'There is a very critical one that the wireless officers never gave to the captain.'
Narrator: 'The radio room was busy transmitting what they thought were more important messages - private communications of the ship's paying customers. This appears in a scene that did not not appear in the final version of Cameron's film. The scene portrays the Titanic's wireless operators responding to ice warnings from another ship in the area. The rude rebuttal appeared to have worked. The warnings went unheeded and the rest is history. One of the most disputed events reported about the sinking is the manner in which Third Class passengers were treated.'
Cameron: 'There were certainly reports by a few surviving steerage people of gates being locked, steel gates. So yeah, I think it happened.'
Lynch: 'It was very segregated. You had your little barriers here and there, with your little signs saying First Class passengers only beyond this point and gates and things that were locked because there was separation between Second and Third Class passengers. That even carried over when they hit the iceberg'. "They tried to keep us down in out steerage deck. They did not want us to go up to the First Class place at all. There was one steerage passenger, but just as he was going through a First Class gate, a fellow came along and shoved them back down into the steerage place, Daniel Buckley, Third Class passenger"'.
Narrator: 'For years these voices from the Third Class were ignored. But why?'
Lynch: 'There was such respect for people from the upper class, that if you had a choice between getting a steerage passenger or a ship's officer or a First Class passenger you are going to go with the First Class passenger, or the ship's officer'.
Cameron: 'If any survived who were responsible for the trapping of people below, they certainly never said anything'.
Narrator: 'The degree to which passengers were trapped below will always remain a mystery. Almost immediately after the sinking, rumours began to circulate that officers were shooting passengers as they rushed the lifeboats. Second officer Lightoller attempted to squelch the accusations.'
Lynch: 'Several officers used their guns even if Lightoller lied a little bit about it at the inquiry. Lightoller testified that he didn't use his, but he admitted privately that he did. The instances where you see guns fired in the movie are all accurate. But whether people stood in the line of bullets or not, I can't say that happened or not'.
Narrator: 'Cameron's movie does show people getting shot and new information helps to support his portrayal in the film. Two days after the movie was released, a document that has never been published in English surfaced. It was written by a steerage passenger, a Norwegian survivor of the tragedy: "You do become serious when you see something so terrible. It seems to me that I can still hear the cries for help and some were shot when they wanted to crowd their way up into the boats, Karl Albert Midtsjo, 19 April 1912"'.
Narrator: 'But why did anyone have to die. If there had been enough lifeboats, would the death toll have been so high?'
Lynch: 'You didn't have to have more than 16 lifeboats on any liner, and the Titanic had 20. She met the law, and being an unsinkable ship, they did not think that they would need them. Who would have thought that the Titanic would sink? Today we have hindsight, and we can look back and say well yeah unsinkable ships do sink. In 1912, it never occurred to them that the Titanic would go out into the ocean, and have to leave all her passengers there in little lifeboats'.
Ruth Becker-Blanchard, Titanic survivor (1899-1992): 'Of course the first lifeboats were not full. Of all the women, all said we are not going out there and float on the ocean. We would rather stay on a boat that was safe.'
Narrator: 'At one point Captain Smith called the life boats back so they could be filled to capacity. This scene was shot but never included in the final version of the film. The crew manning the life boats were reluctant to go back.
Lynch: 'Molly Brown was willing to go back to where all these people were screaming and everything, but quartermaster Hitchens talked her and the other ladies out of it. What could they do?'
Narrator: 'Not one of the half filled lifeboats responded to the Captain's command. Captain Smith knew there was no hope left. He was last seen on the bridge of the ship.'
Cameron: 'I don't know what happened to the captain. Nobody does. If he went to the wheel house, what we show in the film is probably what happened to him. But it could have been anything.'
Narrator: 'His body was never recovered'.
Ruth Becker-Blanchard: 'They were sending up rockets for help. I remember that very clearly. we saw these people, these 1500 or 1700 people, screaming and jumping from the decks, screaming for help, but we couldn't help'.
Cameron: 'We recreated something that must have been incredibly horrific for those people to go through. In fact most of them died.'
Recreating the Historical Event
Narrator: 'Since 1912, of the most perplexing and complexing controversies
surrounding the Titanic revolves around her final moments. In order
to portray them accurately, Cameron has to know precisely what happened.'
Eva Hart, Titanic Survivor (1905-1996): 'I saw the horror of that ship, and I maintain from that moment until his day that ship broke in half as it sank. I know it's true.'
Narrator: 'Second Officer Charles Lightoller gives a different account
to the investigation in New York: "Question: Was the vessel broken in two
in any manner or intact?
Lightoller: Absolutely intact
Question: On the decks?
Lightoller: Intact sir"
Ruth Becker-Blanchard: 'When the ship broke in half, of course, it broke in half between the four funnels. The stern stayed up for about a minute or so, then it went down. That's the way we saw it.'
Narrator: 'First Class passenger Colonel Archibald Gracie also reports to the inquiry: "The Titanic's decks were intact at the time she sank and when I sank with her. There was no indication then of any impending break up of the deck or the ship"'.
Cameron: 'You start to realise that history is really just a kind of consensus hallucination. It is really what the people who survived said what happened.'
Narrator: 'The accounts given by the officers and the upper class passengers became accepted as fact. It's their version of events that earlier films about the Titanic portray.'
Cameron: 'What we have really seen that is incredible in our mind is that we have seen the ship at an angle going down into the water blazing with light against the starry night, and there is a stateliness to the way we perceive the sinking of the Titanic. It was unstately if you were on the ship. It was a rocket sled ride. It was a roller coaster.'
Narrator: 'In 1985, any doubts about the way the ship went down were laid to rest when Dr Robert Ballard first discovered the wreck and mesmerised us with the first images of the Titanic since 1912. These eerie scenes filmed by Ballard from his sub served as a fresh reminder of the awful tragedy. Ballard also discovers that the Titanic's bow is separated from the stern by almost half a mile with a debris field in between them. The controversy of whether the Titanic split apart is finally put to rest.'
Cameron: 'We have got the wreck. We know what it looks like. We have been there and we photographed it, and we have got what people said they saw as it sank; and I put those together and drew lines between between those two things, and that's what the film represents. And I have tried to account for it in the way we have done our computer simulation within the film and the way we have shown the actual ship going down. I believe the point at which the ship would have broken was the point at which it was at its maximum height out of the water...' [documentary then uses the words of the salvage crew - written by the script writer James Cameron to explain the rest].... "so now as the bow goes down, the stern rises up, slow at first, and faster and faster, until finally she has got her whole ass sticking up in the air. And that's one big ass, we're talking 20, 30,000 tonnes. The hull is not designed to deal with that kind of pressure, so what happens, she splits right down to the keel and the stern falls back level. Then as the bow sinks, it pulls the stern vertical and finally detaches. Now the stern section just kind of bobs there like a cork for a couple of minutes, floods and..." [Cameron comes in] and just goes vertically straight down - what is described as an elevator ride by the baker. He had climbed to the very aft rail, right up by the flag pole. He was sitting up in the air, 150 feet, and rode it down. He said it felt like an elevator.'
Cameron: 'If you were a Third Class passenger male you stood about a 1 in 10 chance of surviving. Nobody from the engine room survived. These people were doomed and they knew it.'
Narrator: 'The only way to experience the true horror of those awful moments is to put real people aboard a ship and film scenes exactly as they happened 85 years ago.'
Cameron: ' We realised, my God, we were going to have to build a big chunk of this ship to really pull off this story in its scope, the way it's been written, and to do it in a satisfying way that is significantly beyond what has been done before. If you are not really breaking new ground, what's the point?'
Narrator: 'The largest single movie set ever constructed for a film takes shape. It becomes the stage for a powerful human drama.'
Jon Landau, Producer: 'Our characters are also in the height of the action. As the ship goes down, we get to experience what really happened. We stay on the ship until the final throes of the sinking.'
Cameron: 'We wanted to convey some sense of the rapid destruction of the interior of the ship that would have happened when it really took its final plunge. Pressure built up very rapidly. Water came blasting into the windows and into the glass dome. I wanted it to be more visceral, more primal, and quite frankly to be more terrifying.'
Leonardo DiCaprio, 'Jack Dawson' in the Titanic (1997): 'The thing started to tilt and you would just see thousands of people clinging for dear life and people flying to the left and right of you. Seeing people falling from the tilted ship just like little ants, just took me right there.'
Kate Winslet, 'Rose' in the Titanic (1997): 'If I put my hands like this so that I could not see all that technical stuff, it looked so damn real'.
DiCaprio: 'I just asked myself how did I get here? To be there in those situations, to actually see what it felt like.'
Winslet: 'Just terrible, and it would have been like that, really, really horrific.'
Cameron: 'I didn't think you can do a movie about the Titanic without making the sinking what it was. It really is more psychologically terrifying because when you are in a film, you project yourself into that place with those people, and it's just not a place you want to be.'
Cameron attempts to draw out an historical message or theme from
the movie
Narrator: 'When the Titanic went down, those left on the deck were
plunged into the freezing 28 degree water. Most of them did not drown.
They froze to death. Fifth officer Lowe reported that there were so many
bodies floating on the surface he could not row through them. Among the
dead were Isidor and Ida Straus (Mrs Straus refused the refuge of the life
boats to meet her fate with her husband), John Jacob Astor (his body
was recovered a week later by a passing ship), Benjamin Guggenheim (he
maintained his dignity until the very end), and Thomas Andrews (he was
last seen in a state of shock as the ship he designed sank underneath him).
And the Titanic's band - they played until the final moments. None
of them survived. 1502 people were lost. Many of the survivors suffered
losses that would affect them for the rest of their lives.'
Eva Hart: [Her father] 'he put my mother and I into the life boat and he stood back and helped other people into the boat. He never made any attempt to get into it himself. This boat was lowered away with me beginning to scream because I realised my father was not with me.'
Marjorie Robb, Titanic Survivor (1889-1992): 'One of the last things my father said to me: "It seems more dangerous for you to get into that boat than to stay here with me", but after that he lost his life and we continued to live.'
Ruth Becker-Blanchard: 'It was going down, just slowly, not fast at all, and the night was dark, no moon. A very dark black night and that boat was just beautiful. All the lights in the boat were on. Just a beautiful sight. It was going down quietly and the lights were going under the water as it went down. And I remember that very plainly, that was a beautiful sight, and it was a terrible sight because we could see that the boat was going under the water.'
Eva Hart: 'I was petrified and I could not take my eyes off it; and I really mean that'.
Marjorie Robb: 'But the great Titanic was then a broken ship. So it was a terrible moment for everybody to face.'
Ruth Becker-Blanchard: 'We could not help anybody. We had 65-70 people. We couldn't help any. We were standing room only. We couldn't take another soul in our boat. So we rowed away as fast as we could.'
Cameron: 'You know 1912 is a very interesting time. In the first decade of this century there was a rapid explosive growth in science and technology, unlike anything that had been experienced before.'
Lynch: 'Big, Better, conquering nature. There was no end to what man could do. If we just put our little noggins in gear we could conquer anything.'
Leonardo DiCaprio: 'Everyone started to get a real ego about it, to make things that were larger than life, and actually claim that something was unsinkable.'
Cameron: 'And the sense was that everything was only going to get better and better and nicer and nicer. And what was in store for people beyond the first decade - two world wars, nuclear weapons and many problems that we live with, all of which are the fall out of the technological revolution of the twentieth century. So the Titanic is this wonderful metaphor for that.'
Narrator: 'In many ways the wreck of the Titanic was a wake up call for the twentieth century. Man was dealt a harsh reminder that he was not the most powerful force in the universe.'
Cameron: 'Nature is never going to be dominated. We are a part of it, and we have got to ride with it, figure it out, but we're not just going to steam over the top of it, and that's what they thought they could do in those days. They thought they could pave the world. They thought they could drive their big metal ships across the ocean with impunity; and it just isn't that way.'
Narrator: 'In the filming the Titanic, James Cameron did more than just recreate a tragedy. He brought the past to life.'
Lynch: 'To me, the movie is like a time capsule. It has captured 1912
and what it was like to be on board an ocean liner at that time. It's a
time capsule that is opened up for all of us to see.'