“A temper like you wouldn’t believe”: the only director Kate Winslet was “genuinely frightened” of
Most of the biggest filmmakers in Hollywood are notoriously difficult to work with. You have to wield a certain level of confidence to get that far up the industry’s ladder, so you’ll often find some pretty intense men at the top.
Kate Winslet discovered this for herself when she worked on the biggest movie of her career, a film she owes a lot to, yet one that didn’t come without struggle. When she was just 21 years old, the English actor landed the leading role in Titanic alongside heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio. She starred as the wealthy Rose, a survivor of the sinking ship, but you don’t need me to tell you that; I think most of the world’s population has seen Titanic.
Whether you find the movie a moving epic or a melodramatic Oscar-baiting weepy, you can’t deny the sheer impact that James Cameron’s film had on Hollywood. Its special effects were crazy, and the ship wasn’t going to go down without hundreds of millions of dollars. This large budget ensured that it really did look like a real shipwreck was unfolding on screen, which saw corridors and rooms flooded with water that actors really had to wade through.
Filming was intense and exhausting, and Winslet admits that you could feel the tension that Cameron carried as he directed such an expensive project that involved so many people. You can’t even imagine the stress he must’ve been feeling, but that doesn’t mean he had to take it out on others, and yet, of course, this high-pressure environment wasn’t going to give the cast and crew an easy-going director, because Cameron was a nightmare.
Reflecting on her experience of shooting the film in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Winslet noted how long the days were, sometimes shooting between five in the morning and until one next morning.
“It was every man for himself on the set; you had to ensure that you snatched some sleep during the day, with a black eye mask on. Sometimes you’d find yourself having lunch at two am or breakfast at four pm. It was very disorienting,” she said.
It was Cameron’s temper that proved most difficult, though, especially for an actor who was relatively new to Hollywood. “He’s a nice guy, but the problem was that his vision for the film was as clear as it was. He has a temper like you wouldn’t believe… As it was, the actors got off lightly. I think Jim knew he couldn’t shout at us the way he did to his crew because our performances would be no good.”
So, while Winslet wasn’t the main victim of his stress, it seems like it was the crew who received most of his emotional outbursts, and she still felt the tension, describing him as “a really tough nut to crack”, admitting, “There were times I was genuinely frightened of him”.
Despite this, Winslet wasn’t put off working with him again, and she reunited with him for Avatar: The Way of the Water over two decades later. Older and certainly wiser, Winslet was probably less scared to be directed by him this time.
