Titanic: why did James Cameron only cast extras under 1.72 m?

A funny idea that paid off for the film and saved money.

While Titanic is about to be released on 4K Blu-ray next month, James Cameron spoke behind the scenes of the filming with the Los Angeles Times. He recounts the technical challenges linked to the creation of this pharaonic production (200 million dollars budget, madness for the time), as well as the totally crazy sets set up to recreate the shipwreck in the most possible way. possible realistic: The scale of the film was beyond anything we could have imagined. At that point, we said to ourselves that it was impossible for the film to be profitable. Simply impossible. Well guess what? » Now ranked the fourth highest-grossing film of all time, with 2.2 billion in revenue worldwide, Titanic was the first for twelve years.

Which did not prevent the production from making savings, as producer John Landau tells us. One of the planned platforms was simply removed, avoiding an expense of $750,000. Originally, James Cameron wanted three different versions of the boat: one before the impact with the iceberg, another at three degrees of inclination and a final one at six degrees of inclination. The three-degree one therefore disappeared since it was deemed unnecessary.

Furthermore, Cameron explains in the article that he “cheated” with the extras: “ We only cast short people to make our set look bigger. Not everyone who was taller than 1.72m was caught. It’s like we won a million dollars » compared to the cost of the special effects that would have been necessary to render the scale of the Titanic on screen.

And the director specifies that “ if we had followed the studio, they would have completely cut the whole shipwreck (…) We were very smart to sink the boat at the last moment. It wasn’t a strategy, but if we had submerged it first, it wouldn’t have looked like anything the next day. »

Leonardo DiCaprio found Titanic ‘boring’ and didn’t want to make the film