Director James Cameron has reflected on the making of Titanic in a new interview, where he also revealed that he only cast short extras on the set in order to make the ill-fated ship look bigger.
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Cameron was talking to the Los Angeles Times for the film’s 4K remastering and home video release as part of the film’s 25th anniversary celebrations before he opened up about the casting and the size of the set.
“The scale of everything was beyond anything we could imagine in terms of our prior experience,” he told the publication. “At the time we thought, ‘wow, there’s no way this movie could ever make its money back. It’s just impossible.’ Well, guess what?,” he joked, reflecting on the box office smash that the film became.
Titanic became the highest grossing film of all time until 2009, where Cameron’s Avatar broke Titanic’s record.
Speaking about the film’s casting, he continued: “We only cast short extras so it made our set look bigger. Anybody above five foot eight, we didn’t cast them. It’s like we got an extra million dollars of value out of casting,” he said, explaining how the strategy helped them to also save money.
“If the studio had had their way, they would have cut the entire ship sinking,” Cameron continued. “The smartest thing we did was do the sinking last. It wasn’t because of strategy — it was simply because you sink the set last because otherwise it doesn’t look so good the next morning when you bring it back up.”
Back in July, Cameron said he first warned the world of the threat AI posed in 1984, but the industry “didn’t listen”.
In an interview with CTV News, the filmmaker referenced his sci-fi classic Terminator when asked what he thought of AI’s rise in the entertainment industry. “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen,” Cameron said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Cameron said he didn’t believe the technology behind AI would be able to replace writers, saying: “It’s never an issue of who wrote it, it’s a question of, is it a good story?”
“I just don’t personally believe that a disembodied mind that’s just regurgitating what other embodied minds have said — about the life that they’ve had, about love, about lying, about fear, about mortality — and just put it all together into a word salad and then regurgitate it … I don’t believe that have something that’s going to move an audience,” Cameron continued.
James Cameron’s most recent film was the 2022 sci-fi epic Avatar: The Way of Water. That film scored a four-star review from NME that said: “Bigger, bolder and definitely better than the original, Avatar: The Way Of Water pushes the technical boundaries of cinema without feeling like a science experiment.”