Where Titanic was filmed
Bringing 1997's Titanic to life was a massive undertaking.
Unsurprisingly, James Cameron's epic — which tells the story of the British luxury passenger liner's tragic maiden voyage in which more than 1,500 passengers died when the vessel was sunk by an iceberg — was not filmed on location. A few shots of the real shipwreck do appear at the beginning and end of the movie, but bringing in giant replicas — not to mention hundreds of extras — to the middle of the ocean was too ambitious of an idea even for the perfectionist director.
Cameron got his start in the industry as a special effects artist before becoming the filmmaker behind some of the highest-grossing movies of all time. (Titanic used to be number one until Avatar surpassed it in 2010.) His passion for deep sea exploring also came in handy when directing this blockbuster, though there were many gossipy articles describing the shoot as a disaster and Cameron as a madman in the months before the film debuted in December 1997. But after it became a megahit, the press changed its tone, and Titanic went on to win 11 Oscars, including Best Picture.
Twenty-five years later, here's a look at the various sets and filming locations used during the production of the beloved doomed romance.
The wreckage
Cameron ventured all the way to the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean to film the wreckage of the famous RMS Titanic. (He's been there 33 times, in fact.) After the ship sank on April 15, 1912, nearly 75 years went by before a team of American and French researchers located it 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland in 1985. Cameron was not part of that team, but he did see footage of the ship shot by Dr. Robert Ballard on the evening news. "I thought 'My God... that's incredible. They're using this space technology to go into the past like a time machine.' And something clicked right then," Cameron told Empire in 1998. Thus, the idea for Titanic was born.
20th Century Fox Footage of the Titanic wreckage used in the film
Before Cameron started writing his script in 1995, he went on an expedition to the wreck, located over 12,500 feet beneath the surface. "I wasn't scared," Cameron told Empire of his reaction to seeing the ship for the first time. "I'm not claustrophobic and I love diving. For me, it was like landing on the moon." The pressure that deep in the ocean is several tons per square inch, so the crew had to use a tiny robotic camera fitted with a 35mm lens to shoot inside and around the wreckage over the course of 12 dives. That footage appears in the ghostly underwater scenes that bookend the movie, making the montages all the more haunting. Cameron later returned to the Titanic for a 2003 documentary, Ghosts of the Abyss, where he explored the wreck with actor Bill Paxton.
The ship
Most of Titanic was shot in Baja California, Mexico, on a massive series of soundstages built for the movie. The complex known as Baja Studios and its massive water tank have since been used in filming oceanic adventures like Deep Blue Sea (1999), Pearl Harbor (2001), and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003).
20th Century Fox Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in 'Titanic'
Here, members of the Titanic crew built a scaled replica of the RMS Titanic that was about 10 to 15 percent smaller than the real thing, broken into pieces that were scattered around the lot. The bow of the ship, where Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) share their first kiss, was constructed on a hinge that could tilt as the boat later "sank" into the "ocean." Other sets were suspended in a 17 million-gallon tank, and footage from each piece was combined with smaller models and computer graphics to create the illusion of a complete ship.
Titanic was originally greenlit with a budget of $125 million, but Cameron went way past that as the shoot, and then editing, dragged on and on. The final number ended up being around $200 million — which was well worth it, considering the movie has since made $2.24 billion worldwide — although some outlets reported $285 million at the time. Pre-release coverage of Titanic largely consists of Cameron defending his spending and denying wild rumors that leaked from the set, most of which were eventually disproven.
20th Century Fox The 'Titanic' sinks on set
One weird true story is the tale of the PCP-laced chowder. While filming took place in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a province near where the real ship sank, a mysterious troublemaker (or troublemakers) caused chaos on set by spiking the crew's late-night meal of lobster chowder with PCP. No one was hurt, but dozens of people, including Cameron and Paxton, spent the night at a local hospital coming down from their highs. A 2017 Vanity Fair article describes chaos at Dartmouth General, as crew members laughed maniacally while speeding through the halls in wheelchairs. Someone even started a conga line. Thankfully, 87-year-old Gloria Stuart, who played the older Rose, dined out at a restaurant that night.
The engine room
Cameron insisted on being as historically accurate as possible when re-creating the doomed ship for Titanic. The crew was so thorough that they even stamped the logo of the White Star Line — the prominent British shipping company that owned the Titanic — on the bottom of the china used in the dining hall scenes just as they were on the real ocean liner. But Cameron was never quite satisfied with attempts to precisely re-create the engine room, so the production briefly moved to the SS Jeremiah O'Brien, a Liberty ship built during World War II that's currently docked at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco.
20th Century Fox
The SS Jeremiah O'Brien had an engine type similar to the RMS Titanic, but its engine room was smaller than the one on the ill-fated ocean liner. That's where Cameron's love of high-tech effects came into play: The actors performed the engine scenes in front of a green screen, and their images were composited into footage of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien blown up to the appropriate size. The final product is seamless, which is very impressive considering the lighting, close-ups, and general chaos.
The ocean
The scenes where Jack and Rose are stranded in the freezing cold waters of the North Atlantic — and the site of the famous door controversy — were shot partially on the massive Baja Studios set and partially at the Belmont Plaza Pool in Long Beach, Calif., an iconic swimming palace that was demolished in 2014. The Belmont Plaza had once hosted the men's 1968 Olympic swimming trials, which made it one of the few pools in L.A. big enough for this Olympic-sized production.
20th Century Fox The 'Titanic' cast spent long hours floating in giant tanks and pools
Many of the complaints about the making of Titanic concerned the long hours cast members spent floating in these giant tanks and pools. At one point, Winslet told the press that she had almost drowned when her coat caught on a gate. Luckily, the water was actually quite warm — the clouds of breath seen in the film were all added in post-production. In a 2012 interview with PEOPLE, Cameron denied rumors that he refused to allow his cast to use the bathroom mid-water scene: "Everyone could go to the toilet, but they were encouraged not to go in the tank — which I think was happening!"
As they were filming those fateful final scenes, DiCaprio hung onto Winslet until the very end: "When we did the underwater footage at the end, Leo was a certified scuba diver at that point and I was not," she told PEOPLE in the same interview. "He really did look after me. He was totally brilliant — he wouldn't leave my side."
The artifacts
If you want to see artifacts from the RMS Titanic with your own eyes, you have a couple of options. An especially excellent museum is the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which has a permanent Titanic exhibit featuring such haunting displays as a pair of leather shoes from a 19-month-old boy who drowned and pieces of the woodwork recovered by locals who found them washed up on the beach.
20th Century Fox The plates used in 'Titanic' were stamped with the logo of the White Star Line
Then there's Titanic: The Exhibition, which takes visitors on an immersive, interactive tour with amazing recreations of the ship's interior and exterior, combining relics from the wreck with props and costumes that were made for the movie. Find out more about locations and dates.
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