Twenty-five years after its premiere, “Titanic” returns to movie theaters around the world and the film’s famed director, James Cameron, believes that viewers can recognize a current metaphor for this story, with current problems such as social inequality and the climate crisis.
“What if the topic is current? The topic is more relevant than ever”, Cameron said in a small meeting with the press, making an analogy with the crisis that his characters went through in the film and the climate crisis affecting humanity today. Cameron peaked his then already renowned film career with the premiere of “Titanic” in 1997, a film based on the actual catastrophe of the British liner of the same name that sank at the beginning of the 20th century, killing 1,500 people.
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The film presented in the style of “Romeo and Juliet” the romance between Jack, a low-class youth and Rose, a wealthy teenager, whose destinies crossed by chance in the first expedition of the English ship to the city of New York. The director, who had already had box office hits like “The Terminator”used the most innovative technological advances of the moment and addressed themes such as impossible love and survival, and made a portrait of the injustices and inequalities of social classes.
In fiction, a huge ship is sinking and only the upper class have the resources to survive and deal with it. This was for Cameron a metaphor for daily life at the time, and with regret he confessed that he still is even more so these days. “The crisis we face now is called climate change, we see it coming straight at us, we can’t turn the boat, it’s exactly like the fucking iceberg and we’re going to crash head-on into it“, he explained.
In this context, the director lamented that, as in his film, the upper class will be the ones that will be saved from the disasters caused by themselves and their ambitions. “Rich people have full throttle on the ship of human civilization. They’re headed for that damn iceberg and when we collide with it, it will be the poor nations that suffer and the rich will pass by… because the rich always do,” he said.
The director recalled the tough casting process he carried out to find the two stars who would star in the film and confessed that he had to convince Leonardo DiCaprio to be a part of the film, since he refused to play Jack. “He was looking for a challenge in his career, he had played a drug addict in ‘The Basketball Diaries’ and wanted a problem, something to rage about,” he said.
Cameron finally convinced DiCaprio and he, in turn, was convinced by Winslet that she was the Rose he had been looking for. “I wasn’t sure, I was a little nervous because she had acted in several period dramas before, but I met her and It was spectacular, it was Kate“, he commented.
Cameron narrated that one of the gestures that Winslet had with him to win the role was to send him a red rose with a note that said: “I am your Rose”. “For me it was like, we get it, Kate, you really want this part,” she teased.
Titanic returns to the big screen. SPECIAL/20TH CENTURY STUDIOS.
A LASTING SUCCESS
“Titanic” won 11 Oscars out of 14 for which it was nominated in 1998., among them for best film. The film remained the highest grossing in history for more than a decade and currently ranks number three on the select list with more than 2,194 million accumulated dollars.
The technological deployment generated images that have been reflected in popular culture, such as the shocking sinking of the ship, and the controversy over whether Jack could have been saved or not will continue to live among his fans. For the professor at Syracuse University (USA) and founder of the Bleier Center for Television, Robert Thompsonthe film’s box office success was due to the exact combination of “state-of-the-art effects, with a simple and timid love story,” he said.
The academic agreed with Cameron that the film was made to be seen in movie theaters, but considers that it is a work that “far from perfect” and that probably one of the film’s “most enduring legacies” could be the many parodies it has inspired over 25 years. Now, the film once again returns to theaters after being re-released in 2012, 2017 y 2020this time for its first quarter of a century.
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