The iconic 1997 scene Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t want to shoot: “Just fucking sell it!”
Throughout cinema history, plenty of iconic scenes – whether out of sheer greatness, quotability, or just utter ridiculousness – have been immortalised in the public consciousness.
We all know the Psycho shower scene, even if, somehow, you’ve not actually watched the whole movie, but equally, everyone knows Nicolas Cage shouting “Not the bees!” in that terrible remake of The Wicker Man that no one asked for.
Clearly, an iconic scene doesn’t always come down to quality, sometimes it’s just the fact that a certain movie moment is so unforgettable that it emblazons itself into the minds of everyone who watches it. And in some cases, it’s hard to figure out if a scene is actually good or not, just because so many of us remember it so clearly. I hate to say it, but Titanic has a lot of these moments.
It’s a divisive film. I’m not much of a blockbuster fan, especially when they’re super sentimental, but James Cameron’s epic romantic disaster gets me in floods of tears every time. But not everyone – like my dad, who claims he fell asleep watching it in the cinema back in 1997 – is so keen. To many, it’s an overblown, overly saccharine journey into pure sentimentality, designed to manipulate the audience into crying.
So, while that “I won’t let go” scene sends some of us into a teary-eyed mess, others roll their eyes, questioning why both Jack and Rose couldn’t fit onto the floating debris and survive. And what about the sex scene in which Rose’s hand rather hilariously smacks the carriage window?
Titanic is full of iconic moments, with one of the least controversial of the film’s many memorable scenes arguably being the one in which Jack declares, “I’m the king of the world!” Yet, it’s actually the one sequence that Leonardo DiCaprio wasn’t sure about.
You’d think that such a scene wouldn’t face any opposition, but when Cameron improvised the line for DiCaprio to say while up on the crane shooting the sequence, the actor simply replied with, “What?” He didn’t sound all that convinced.
“It was made up on the spot. I was in a crane basket, and we were losing the light, and we had tried this and tried that, and we’d tried this line and that line, and nothing was really working,” Cameron told Ali Plumb.
Adding, “And I literally was just coming up snake eyes, and I said, ‘All right. I got one for you. Just say, I’m the king of the world, and just spread your arms out wide and just be in the moment, and just love it and celebrate the moment.’”
The scene proved much harder than it needed to be as DiCaprio kept questioning what he was meant to say, but eventually he gave in to Cameron’s demands and created one of the movie’s most iconic and, in retrospect, bittersweet moments: “He goes, ‘What?!’ I’m getting this over the walkie-talkie. ‘What?!’ I said, ‘I’m the king of the world, just say I’m the king of the world. But you’ve gotta sell it.’ And he goes, ‘What?!’ I said, ‘Just fucking sell it!’ So then he gets up there, and [says it].” Thank god he agreed.
