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02:25:00 Kate Winslet’s near-death experience
It’s likely somewhere in this scene where Kate Winslet says she nearly drowned. In a remarkably frank LA Times interview from May 1997, months before the movie was released, Winslet showed off her bruises and scratches from the recently wrapped Titanic production. In one take, the coat she’s wearing—Cal’s coat, diamond in pocket, of course—got snagged on the gate as she tried to swim past it. “I had to sort of shimmy out of the coat to get free,” she said. “I had no breath left. I thought I’d burst. And Jim just said, Okay, let’s go again.’ That was his attitude. I didn’t want to be a wimp so I didn’t complain.”
02:27:17 A salute from Mr. Murdoch
First Officer William Murdoch is probably the film’s most prominent crew member aside from the captain; the score’s best track, “Take Her to Sea, Mr. Murdoch,” is even named after him. But Murdoch’s descendants didn’t think the film did right by him, particularly for repeating the never-confirmed rumor that he committed suicide on board. In the spring of 1998 a Fox executive traveled to Murdoch’s hometown of Dalbeattie, Scotland, to personally apologize for the portrayal, particularly for showing Murdoch accepting Cal’s bribe money. Fox even donated money toward the local school’s William Murdoch Memorial Prize, but that year’s winner, teenager Lyndsay Moffat, was less than impressed: “I was quite surprised that Hollywood listened to a small town like Dalbeattie, but I still feel it’s too little too late.”
02:29:02 “We are dressed in our best and prepared to go down as gentlemen!”
That is supposedly a variation of a quote from Benjamin Guggenheim, son of the dynasty-building Meyer Guggenheim and brother of Solomon Guggenheim, the namesake of the famous museum. Benjamin was famous in his own right at the time of the sinking, and was fondly remembered by survivors; one purportedly wrote in a letter, “The billionaire Benjamin Guggenheim after having helped the rescue of women and children got dressed, a rose at his buttonhole, to die."
02:30:30 “Nearer, My God, to Thee”
If you’ve heard any Titanic myth debunked, it’s probably that the band may not have actually played this mournful hymn in their final moments. But did you really think the movie was going to squander this opportunity?
02:31:21 The dramatic true story of the old people in the bed
The couple are based on Isidor and Ida Straus, another pair of Titanic A-listers—he was a co-owner of Macy’s—who entered into legend when they each refused to get into a lifeboat, Ida supposedly telling Isidor, “Where you go, I go.” A deleted scene from the movie recreates the moving scene. But the family connection somehow doesn’t end there. Isidor and Ida’s great-great-granddaughter Wendy Rush was the wife of Stockton Rush, the OceanGate executive who was piloting the submersible that imploded on its way to the Titanic site.
02:34:37 Slippery when wet
The drowning sequences are some of the most wildly complex in the entire movie, and much of the reason the Titanic production earned a reputation for going over time and over budget. Plenty of shots could be accomplished with miniatures and models, but this one, with screaming people? All of it happened for real, and in 60-degree water. Watching the behind-the-scenes footage it remains shocking there weren’t even more injuries.
02:37:37 “How did we get here?”
Leonardo DiCaprio was fairly press shy even before Titanic made him the world’s biggest star, and didn’t talk much about his experience on set even in a big Vanity Fair profile pegged to the movie. This moment, as the bow of the ship tips precipitously into the air, is one of the few he did get into: “All of a sudden I’m being, like, towed up on the back of a poop deck with a harness around my waist. There’s, like, 200 extras cabled on with bungee cords, stuntmen ready to fall off and hit the cushioned girders. And then there’s three cranes around us with huge spotlights. Kate and I just looked at each other like, How did we get here?”
02:38:30 “This is where we first met”
If you were watching morning TV in early 1998, you saw this particular clip a lot—DiCaprio’s mouth weirdly mushed up against Winslet’s head has been lingering in my brain ever since.
02:39:20 Sliding down the deck
Look closely or indulge in some freeze-frames and you can see the wheels underneath the actors sliding down the deck, or the elements of the deck made out of foam so they could bounce off of them harmlessly. Sure, there’s plenty of CGI people, just like in the beginning of the film, but that’s a whole lot of real people flying through the air.
02:45:45 A sea of humanity
So, so many people swimming in that tank, which was not actually freezing but not all that pleasant either. According to Kate Winslet, other people—herself included—peed in the tank. There were some fake people in the mix too, something extra Ellen Mower learned the hard way. “Some jerk swam over me and dunked me,” she remembered for a 25th-anniversary local news piece. Turns out the jerk was DiCaprio. “I looked at him and he looked at me and he says, ‘Oh, I am sorry, I didn’t know you were real,’ and I said, ‘That’s okay, I have been told that I play dead well.’”
02:46:27 No room on the raft
Do we really have to get back into this “dumbass” debate? We’re sticking with Cameron, Kate Winslet, and her paddleboard: There was just not enough buoyancy to keep Jack up there too. Moving on!
02:53:04 A future star holding that flashlight
That handsome young officer marshaling a lifeboat to go back for survivors is played by Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd, who would have his big Hollywood moment a few years later as the star of 2005’s Fantastic Four. He’s holding another of the movie’s anachronisms that people still love to debate: There were almost definitely no flashlights on the lifeboats, though there was a “flashlight cane” belonging to a passenger named Ella White, which went up for auction in 2019.
02:54:02 A sky full of (altered) stars
This insert shot of the night sky is maybe the only time in history Cameron gave in to the critics. When Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out that the original field of stars was inaccurate for what would have been visible that time of year in the North Atlantic, Cameron changed it for the film’s 2012 rerelease.
03:02:30 The mystery of the PCP chowder
At last, we arrive at the strange tale of the PCP-laced chowder, served to the crew during a night shoot in the Nova Scotia portion of the film—aka, the present-day stuff we’re seeing here. Bill Paxton was the only actor affected, and he wound up in the hospital alongside Cameron, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (who allegedly led a conga line through the hospital hallways), set painter Marilyn McAvoy, and many more. The whole incident happened before the production moved to Mexico and nearly drowned Kate Winslet, but quickly became part of the legend of Titanic’s challenged production. Even now, the PCP chowder culprit has never been found.
03:03:30 The most notorious deleted scene
Be warned: Once you see this, you may never see Titanic the same way. Rather than silently drop the Heart of the Ocean back into the sea, Gloria Stuart’s Rose was originally supposed to have a whole confrontation scene with Paxton’s Brock Lovett, explaining to him in the most literal imaginable terms that “only life is priceless, and making each day count.” In the commentary Cameron says that the first time he and his team watched a cut of the film in the editing room, they knew the scene had to go. In the words of Lewis Bodine, “That really sucks, lady!”
