What You Need to Know About ‘Titanic’ on Its 25th Anniversary

What does Winslet think?

At a press event for the 2022 James Cameron blockbuster Avatar: The Way of Water, Winslet (an experienced swimmer) said, “If you put two adults on a standard paddleboard, it becomes immediately extremely unstable. I actually don’t believe that we would’ve survived if we had gotten on that board. I think that he would’ve fit.

“So you heard it here for the first time: Yes, he could have fit on that door, but it would not have stayed afloat.”

Winslet turned 21 the day they filmed Jack’s death scene

She told Oprah that as they bobbed on the raft in water so cold it gave Winslet hypothermia, she whispered to him, “Leo, it’s my birthday today.” He replied, “Sweetie, I really don’t care.”

DiCaprio couldn’t have drawn Jack’s sketch of Winslet naked

But Cameron did — his original sketch of her sold for $16,000. “People ask me to sign that a lot,” Winslet told Yahoo! Movies. She always says no and notes that Cameron actually sketched her in a bathing suit.

Their steamy hand-on-the-Model-T-window love scene was improvised.

Winslet says that it wasn’t in the script and that she and DiCaprio invented it.

Was Jack’s line “I’m the king of the world!” in the script?

No. Cameron told the BBC he came up with the line on the day of shooting while in a crane high above DiCaprio on the ship’s prow. He shouted, “Spread your arms out wide and just be in the moment and just love it.” Puzzled, DiCaprio said, “What?” But he nailed the line.

Winslet came up with a line that probably pleased Titanic ’s many female viewers more

While shooting the sinking scenes, she had the inspired idea to have Rose notice where they were on the deck and say to Jack, “This is where we first met.”

The Titanic set had lots of offscreen drama

The shooting days were often 14 hours long, and Cameron screamed so much the crew dubbed his bad-mood persona as “Mij” (Jim backward). Eating real caviar for take after take in the scene where low-born Jack must learn which fork to use while dining with Rose’s snobbish family, DiCaprio looked at the authentic 1912-style White Star Line silverware, according to Vanity Fair, and asked, “Which one of these do I use to lobotomize myself?”

Other times, he was gaily singing like Ethel Merman or nursing his pet lizard Blizzard back to health after a truck ran him over or exultantly learning to polka with Winslet for the rollicking dance scene with the lower-class passengers or getting booted from a bar with his pals for “dancing inappropriately.”

And it had its own real-life disasters

Winslet chipped an elbow bone, and when her coat caught on a prop while underwater, she thought she’d drown. Then Cameron made her do the scene again. In Avatar: The Way of Water, she did an underwater scene holding her breath for seven minutes, 14 seconds, allegedly breaking Tom Cruise’s breath-holding record in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.

Someone poisoned the crew’s food with PCP — “angel dust”

“So all of a sudden, here’s 150 crew members stumbling into the emergency room of a very small hospital at 1 in the morning,” cast member Bill Paxton told Larry King. “Some people are freaking out, some people are conga dancing, some people are euphoric. I knew I was pretty stoned on something pretty bad. We thought the clams had been left out in the sun or whatever. I said to Jim, ‘This is bedlam, I’m gonna wander back down and just drink a case of beer.’ That seemed to help me.”

One crew member stabbed Cameron in the face with a pen; he bled and laughed.

Speaking of bodily fluids, you wouldn’t have wanted to swim too close to the movie stars in the sinking scenes.

“Yes, I admit to sometimes peeing in that water,” Winslet told Rolling Stone. “You didn’t want to have to get out and go to the bathroom, which would take half an hour with corsets and dresses and all that sort of thing.”

Titanic caused tears for the performers as well as audiences

Winslet burst into tears reading the script, cried for an hour after filming emotional scenes, and again last year when she reunited with DiCaprio. Frances Fisher, who played her haughty mom — and now Winslet is 47, two years older than Fisher was in 1997  — cried her eyes out at the film’s end when Titanic premiered at London’s Royal Albert Hall. She told Vulture that her makeup ran, so she asked the guy seated next to her, Prince Charles, “Your Royal Highness, do you mind if I borrow the doily on your chair to wipe my tears?” He gave it to her, saying, “It’s a marathon, darling.” Fisher kept the doily and her costume’s uncomfortable corset and plates, silverware and a tablecloth from the Titanic dining room.

Cameron hopes people will celebrate Titanic ’s anniversary by no longer asking him if Jack might’ve lived at the end

He told the Toronto Star, “It’s like Romeo and Juliet. It’s a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality. The love is measured by the sacrifice. … Maybe after 25 years, I won’t have to deal with this anymore.”