| 'Titanic Hit Potential' | 'Epic Enthralls' | 'Titanic Fight For Respect' | 'Life's Eternal Struggles On Screen' | 'Titanic Sinks Critics' | 'No Sparks For Pair' |
Tomorrow is D-day for the most expensive movie ever made - and the stars and man who conceived, wrote and directed it. It's the day the $300 million blockbuster Titanic has its American premiere and the movie world will pass judgment on film maker James Cameron and Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
Titanic (M). At Hoyts City and Tea Tree Plaza, Greater Union Marion and suburban Wallis theatres.
One of the defining moments in this story is when our young hero wins a ticket - in a card game - for the Titanic’s maiden voyage.
The last time something called Titanic had this much momentum, it hit an iceberg. James Cameron's movie epic, however, is going full steam ahead with a huge, diverse crowd on board and no obstacles in sight.
Despite screen sparks, Kate Winslet says nothing went on between her and Titanicco-star Leonardo DiCaprio after the camera stopped. "We were really like brother and sister," says the actress. "There was never any of that 'I fancy you, do you fancy me?' Never. Never any kind of flirting went on." But the love scenes? "We'd just tease each other and call each other nasty names and comment on how bad each other's breath was. It was really like a member of the family. Honestly. Genuinely."
Titanic , which has to take in more than $550 million simply to break even, sails into Adelaide cinemas today, making us among the first in the world to see the gigantic production.
The film world believes the story of the "unsinkable" Titanic, whose sinking after colliding with an iceberg took the lives of 1515 of the liner’s 2224 passengers, will be a landmark in the film industry - not only for the cost but its remarkable, brilliant special effects. I’m one of the lucky few to have previewed the stunning film and its special effects are, indeed, stupendous.
If the response of the Tokyo Film Festival last month is any guide, Titanic will be titanic at the box office and for the careers of Cameron, who has dabbled with costly special effects in Terminator 2 and True Lies, Winslet and, especially, DiCaprio.
At the Tokyo premiere the 22-year-old actor’s arrival was blocked by 2000 frenzied fans - most of them young women. Organisers had to hustle him through a back door. His stage remarks were drowned by cries of "Leo" and "Romeo", a reference to his hit role in Aussie Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. DiCaprio told the crowd the 183-minute Titanic was "a long journey - it made a man out of me".
The crowd cheered. It was a sensational moment for the young actor, who began his career at three in an American TV version of Romper Room, was nearly kicked off for uncontrollable behaviour and once said he wanted to become an actor so he could be cool and all the girls would see him.
It would appear that moment is at hand.
Since the huge success of Romeo, DiCaprio, the hottest star in Hollywood, sifted through the big scripts, sorting out what to reject first.
After six-and-a-half months of filming, Titanic was not what he and his agent had in mind.
"Going into the movie I knew there was the unknown of how far over budget or how far over schedule the film would go," says DiCaprio.
"It was almost certain that would happen - you are making Titanic"
DiCaprio has made mainly smaller, lower-budget films .
"For the most part I have hated big-budget Hollywood films," says the man who landed in the most expensive film ever and now carries some of its box-office hopes for the nervous investors 20th Century Fox, which handles in film outside the US, and Paramount Pictures, which is looking after the domestic market, where it’s tipped to knock Jurassic Park from the number-one spot.
"I didn’t want to prejudiced against this because it was a big-budget film, It had all the elements of a good film."
DiCaprio remained silent during the long shooting schedule when there were rumblings that he and Cameron didn’t agree about how his character, Jack Dawson, should be played.
Cameron’s script follows the fictional on-board romance between 17-year-old Rose Dewitt Bukater - Winslet, also 22, a wealthy engaged American - and poor artist Dawson.
Their romance is played out against the opulent backdrop of the Titanic’s ill-fated maiden voyage.
It’s revealed in a present-day operation headed by Brock Lovett, played by Bill Paxton.
The discovery in an artist’s sketch of a beautiful, naked young woman wearing only a fabulous diamond necklace, leads to the woman, still alive at 101.
She travels to the salvage site in the Atlantic and tells her story.
"There’s a certain amount of joyousness and tension between any director and actor," says DiCaprio. "It was never like Jim and I would argue all day, or even argue hardly ever.
"Jim is obviously a demanding director in the sense that somebody has to be captain of the ship, no mun interned.
"There obviously were things people disagreed on, but it wasn’t out of control like everyone says."
British actor Winslet, who came to fame in Heavenly Creatures and scored an Oscar nomination for Sense and Sensibility never imagined her first Hollywood experience would last so long, most of it spent in chest-deep freezing water wearing a corset and flowing period dress.
She says she also learnt the hard way how publicity can run for and against.
During an interview she told the reporter how difficult it was to work with Cameron and talked of seemingly endless takes and tantrums thrown when the slightest thing went wrong.
When Winslet saw her words in print she was horrified.
She says there was a lot of bad press at the time and it didn’t help the perception of the film. "People were looking for a lot of bad things to say about the movie, just because it was costing so much money," she says.
"In the end the film was a product I cared about. It was very hard for Jim because he had such a clear vision of what he wanted, one of the extraordinary pluses of working with him."
The big boss remains enthusiastic about his stars.
"I love my cast, they’re great," says Cameron.
"Before the fact, I would have thought about Kate and said, ‘Probably not right’. But you have to keep a pretty open mind.
"You find out who people are and then you start superimposing this image of who they are on the character as you’ve conceived it, and then you start to say, ‘Do they bring something that makes the character more?’
"In the case of Kate and Leonardo it was, ‘Wow, we can do things I’ve never really thought to’, and that’s when casting becomes exciting.
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How unlucky can you get? Talk about life dealing a rotten hand. Yes, an ample dose of black humour is a vital component in director James Cameron’s vision of THE great sea disaster - nominated for eight Golden Globe Awards.
Like the lookouts in the crow’s nest who turn to watch lovers canoodling - and miss spotting the iceberg until it’s too late. Fateful moments aside, this production is an awesome blend of storytelling, history on tragedy on a vast scale (1500 dead from 2200).
Cameron, in a visionary touch, opens his film with a real dive on the wreck. It’s a sick trick, probing the great ship with hi-tech submersibles and taking us into the former grandeur in search of a priceless necklace.
Into the today scenes comes an old woman who survived the 1912 sinking and as she watches the TV monitors enter the old ballroom and light again those gracious bedrooms, she tells her story. This sets us up beautifully for a truly wonderful story of love found and then lost.
The winners in the new movie are the two central players, Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack, a young steerage passenger and artist, and gorgeous Kate Winslet as Rose, aristocratic and betrothed to a pompous scumbag (a great Billy Zane).
The other outstanding feature is the ship - beauty, boldness, solid, fabulous … unsinkable.
Titanic, the movie, from the outset captures a time and moment of arrogance, when the biggest was the best; the largest structure ever built by man is a microcosm of class struggle that will some become a newspaper headline.
All lost because of a huge chunk of ice - and the refusal to believe the juggernaut could hit it. Jack and Rose find love and rebellion are a great mix on the floating palace. There are unforgettable scenes - they couple breathing in a promise of love while standing on the bow at sunset; hot passion in the back seat of a car in the hold - and the freezing moments before death.
As we watch - and hear - the story unfold through the eyes of an old woman, there is the knowledge we know what these passengers don’t. Too late! Ice dead ahead, hard to starboard!
Cameron’s sinking of the Titanic is a real shocker; some scenes will stay with you long after the conclusion. Disbelief, denial, terror, panic and scenes of self-sacrifice all rise to the surface as the ship sinks.
But it is possibly the final sequences in this tremendous picture that are the real grabbers. . . 85 years on, back to the wreck and a final soul-satisfying minute that is positive lump in the throat stuff.
The Bottom Line: Magnificent. Loo Note: At 3¼ hours running time make a toilet stop before boarding.
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Articles in publications such as Entertainment Weekly and Time paint a portrait of an authoritarian auteur who sometimes pushes his cast and crew to the limits and is quick to show his anger on the set.
Trade publications like American Cinematographer, however are more concerned with Cameron’s contribution to the cinematic art and the worthiness of the final product.
The December issue of the magazine contains no fewer than seven articles on the making of the $350 million film and the technology that was used.
"I’ve read about 10 of these how-much-did-it-cost stories and the thing they’ve said to me is that the mainstream press understands so little of the film-making process that money basically is the only thing it can focus on," says film critic David Williams, who visited the set of Titanic.
"If they had gone down to the set and concentrated on anything other than Jim Cameron yelling at people, they would have seen more than 300 technicians and craft people - and 120 extras - at work on any given night. The only way you van approach a movie like this is like a military operation and being Mr Nice Guy just isn’t going to cut it."
Cameron has no trouble defending his management style and on-set demeanor.
"If you work on one of my films, you work for months and months at a time," he says.
"I can hire the very best that I can find. I pay them like they’re the best and I want them to perform that way.
"I don’t screw around. I feel like I’m putting together a ball team, and I’m the coach and we’re there to win."
He acknowledges comparisons to General George Patton, but is quick to point out: "I believe in being firm when you have to be firm and being warm and human, too.
"I’ll stand up before the whole crew and admit that I screwed up.
"Everybody honours that kind of dicipline in the sports world - which ultimately creates nothing, other than a fleeting moment of entertainment and achievement - but they don’t honour it in the film world, where you could create something that could last a thousand years.
"The dynamic on a film set is different with every director. I didn’t go the directing school. I don’t know how other people do it, and frankly, I don’t really care.
"Maybe I’m a psycho. I don’t know. I only know what it takes for me to get my movie done."
He contradicts assertions that he pushes his crew to take dangerous chances.
"I’ve always run one of the safest sets in Hollywood," he says. "Only three people were injured slightly out of 6000 stuntman-days. When you look at the film and see the kinds of stuff we were doing, that doesn’t happen by accident."
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Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the film tells the tragic story of the "unsinkable" Titanic which hit an iceberg and sank, taking 1515 people to an icy grave.
The film line. with unbelievable specail effects, concerns Rose Dewitt Dukater (Winslet), a 17-year-old, upper-class American and a free-spirited, young steerage passenger named Jack Dawson (DiCaprio) who fall in love on the voyage.
Also starring are Billy Zane as Rose's fiance Cal and Kathy Bates as colourful Molly Brown.
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This is a film that was supposed to sink under its own $US200 million weight, a three-hour-plus albatross with no reliable box-office stars, minimal gunfire and an ending that wouldn't catch anyone by surprise. Plus, its detail-obsessed director couldn't finish it in time for its scheduled July 4 opening and was being portrayed having gone off the deep end himself.
Yet the most expensive film made has not only floated, it has cruised to make box-office records since its December 19 launch. It's latest milestone is to become the all-time top-grossing film longer than three hours; it was on pace to pass the $US184.2 million mark of the previous record holder, 1990's Dances With Wolves, this past weekend.
Analysts expect Titanic's total US box-office gross to exceed $US250 million, which is what 1997 box-office champion Men In Black earned and which would place it among the top 10 grossing films.
Like its subject matter, Titanic was made with state-of-the-art technology, as you’d expect from the director of Terminator 2 and True Lies. But the secret of its success seems to be that old-fashioned notion of providing something for everyone.
"Titanic has a pretty much across-the-board appeal," says Brian Fuson, box-office analyst for The Hollywood Reporter. "Its (PG-13) rating doesn’t keep you from coming and, when you have Leonardo DiCaprio, he appeals to the youth market. You have a romantic story; I think that draws in more the female demographic. And you have James Cameron and his reputation as a director and all the publicity about the film being the most expensive film ever made."
It’s Romeo and Juliet aboard The Poseidon Adventure. It’s Sense and Sensibility with a body count. It’s the Discovery Channel with amazing production values.
The teen audience is important because they’re the ones most likely to see a movie over and over. But industry experts say repeat business isn’t the most important factor behind the Titanic phenomenon.
"Scream 2 is going to be a $100 million film, and that’s primarily going to be a teen-aged audience base," says Howard Lichtman, spokesman for Cineplex Odeon theatres. "Titanic is already over $160 million, and you’ve already got to be servicing everybody with those numbers."
Douglas Gomery, a University of Maryland journalism professor who specialises in media economics, contends that Titanic is being driven more by its older viewers.
"Titanic is part of a trend in which the movie industry has figured out how to get the baby-boom generation back to the movies," he says.
Part of the appeal, Professor Gomery adds, lies in the film’s classic, predictable structure. He likens Titanic to an old western or melodrama where you know the ending in advance and concentrate on the performances and film-making style.
The consensus is that the film’s delay worked to its advantage. Instead of opening the same day as Men In Black amid the summer blockbuster crunch, Titanic debuted alongside the new James Bond flick and little else that would draw huge crowds during the year’s most concentrated period of moviegoing.
Its highly favourable reception fuelled Oscar talk - it already seems the favourite to win best picture - and great word-of-mouth has kept its numbers in the stratosphere. Its box office jumped 23 per cent in its second weekend and was down a mere 6 per cent in its third. Titanic was able to rack up such high figures while averaging one less showing per screen day because of its length.
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