People are being mean about our film, and it hasn’t even come out yet?” I remember being quite baffled and confused by that in ways that, if I’m honest with you, I’m still baffled and confused by.

KATE WINSLET ( TITANIC LEAD ACTRESS) I was aware of all that negativity, and I remember being quite upset by that, because all I had done was quite innocently gone off and done the job and worked really hard, and I was really excited about this film and all the lovely friends I’d made. Nobody ever said Gone With the Wind or one of those that went a little out of control but ultimately worked. MECHANIC Everyone thought we were idiots and that this was Waterworld or Cleopatra. I don’t recall another instance where a film was singled out for that kind of abuse. Every day, they’d do a little box on the front page talking about how much we were over budget and schedule and anything negative they could find.

JON LANDAU ( TITANIC PRODUCER) We had TIME magazine with a headline that I think was “Gulp, Gulp, Gulp.”ĬAMERON There was a thing called “Titanic Watch” in Variety. So that’s what I walked into: it was out of control, and people put their heads in the sand. Jim went off and did everything - like change way more effects into practical - to theoretically control costs. He built the ship and all that. But he just did not have enough time, and he had a release date and a budget that were both impractical. So it was to put him under pressure to try and get him to do something else by making the conditions too harsh. It was the general rule that people didn’t want Jim to venture out of his lane, which was sci-fi, and here he was making a large-scale romantic epic. The film was, to me, under-budgeted and put under time pressure, because Peter didn’t really want to make the movie. Both Chernin and Mechanic ultimately answered to Rupert Murdoch.īILL MECHANIC (FOX FILMED ENTERTAINMENT CHAIRMAN) Things went off track essentially from the get-go. But after production got underway, it quickly became apparent that the film was going to cost considerably more, which became the problem of Bill Mechanic, the newly hired Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman.

president and COO Peter Chernin “Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic,” the exec authorized his company’s subsidiary 20th Century Fox to make Titanic for $110 million, a sizable but not unprecedented budget. TITANIC SETS SAIL AMID PREDICTIONS OF DISASTERĪfter hitmaker James Cameron pitched News Corp. King Charles III Coronation Concert: When to Watch Tom Cruise, Katy Perry, Lionel Richie, Take That, New 'Doctor Who' and Winnie-the-Pooh

Titanic by Diane Hoh