James Cameron’s ingenious trick to save money on ‘Titanic’: “It’s like an extra million dollars”
James Cameron isn’t afraid to spend millions to make his films, but he found a clever way to cut costs when making his first $1billion hit.
If the last three decades of blockbuster filmmaking have taught the industry anything, it’s that betting against James Cameron is always a losing venture. Although many of his films have had notoriously difficult production processes, Cameron never seems to miss in terms of quality or financial performance.
Avatar redefined Cameron’s career after becoming the first film to ever make more than $2billion at the box office, where it still holds the crown of being the highest-grossing film of all-time thanks to a re-release that boosted it over Avengers: Endgame. It wasn’t the first time that Cameron had earned the distinction of making the biggest film ever, as Titanic was an undeniable phenomenon that had a legendary box office run when it toppled Star Wars and Jurassic Park in the late 1990s.
Titanic is the rare film that seemed to envelop all of its competition; in addition to being the first film to cross over $1billion (although it would later surpass the $2billion mark thanks to re-releases), the film tied the all-time record for most Academy Award wins with eleven, a distinction it shares with Ben-Hur and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. As impossible as it may seem, Titanic didn’t feel like a guaranteed success at the time, as some predicted it would be a gigantic failure that would cast Cameron out of Hollywood forever.
Even if Cameron was hot off the success of True Lies and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, both of which had employed groundbreaking computer-generated imagery, the notion of an old-fashioned romantic epic didn’t seem as inherently commercial. Given how much of Cameron’s technical wizardry was ahead of its time, some sceptics predicted that he had finally reached a point where his ambition surpassed his talent.
The challenge that Cameron faced with Titanic was in replicating history, as he couldn’t rely on the vagaries of science fiction featured in his other films. While Cameron could draw from his own imagination when creating the aquatic alien life in The Abyss, replicating a real historical vessel in its entirety required an even greater attention to detail. One of the most striking aspects of Titanic is how massive the ship looks when compared to the cast.
Given that Titanic won the Oscar for ‘Best Visual Effects’, Cameron clearly utilised some next-level techniques to manipulate the size of his sets. However, he also admitted in an interview with The Los Angeles Times that he used a far more basic strategy to create a distorting effect.
“We only cast short extras so it made our set look bigger,” Cameron said. “Anybody above 5 ‘8”, we didn’t cast them. It’s like we got an extra million dollars of value out of casting.”
Saving a million dollars might have made much of a difference when considering the budget of Titanic is estimated to be around $200million; Cameron also hasn’t reigned himself in during the last few decades, as the rumoured budgets for Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash are estimated at as much as $400million.
Nonetheless, there’s a difference between throwing money at a film and using innovative techniques to save it. In Cameron’s case, these clever tricks are why he is still “the king of the world.”
