"It still gets me every time...to see the sad ruin of the great ship sitting
here, where she landed at 2:30 in the morning, April 15, 1912, after her
long fall from the world above."
--- Bill Paxton as "Brock Lovett" in "Titanic"
"Titanic"'s journey to the screen began more than two years ago, when
James Cameron ventured to the infamous ship's final resting place
approximately 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada and
two-and-a-half miles under the ocean surface. Making it clear that he would
not consider going forward with the production unless he could film the
actual remains of Titanic himself, Cameron's team got to work. The
filmmakers chartered a Russian scientific vessel, the Keldysh , which
housed two of only five manned submersibles ( Mir 1 and Mir 2) capable of
reaching the requisite depths. Cameron's brother Michael Cameron was
enlisted to deal with the many daunting technological hurdles that stood
between Jim and his vision.
Prior to making a series of 12 dives to the wreck site, a number of
technical and logistical problems had to be solved. While there had been
previous efforts to film the wreckage, the images produced were limited by
the extreme underwater environment. The makers of "Titanica," a 1992
IMAX film, kept their cameras inside the submersible, filming through the
vessel's nine-inch-thick porthole. Since this limited both scope and
movement, the first challenge was to design the necessary technology to
liberate the camera, moving it outside of the sub and into a treacherous
environment of freezing temperatures and pressure of over 6,000 pounds
per square inch.
"No one had ever taken a camera that deep before," Cameron says. "The
crushing force of the water would implode any normal camera housing. I
wanted to have it outside in the water, attached to the submersible, but
able to pan and tilt naturally and be able to use wide-angle lenses to get
the most out of the shots. So we had to create a camera system."
Michael Cameron played a key role in this engineering effort. Working with
Panavision and several submergence technology companies, an
off-the-shelf 35mm camera was modified to fit within custom-made
titanium housings on a specially designed pan-and-tilt, remote-operated
platform. A custom lighting system as well as an "ROV" (remotely operated
vehicle) that could be launched from the sub and piloted around and in the
wreck were also designed under Michael Cameron's supervision.
Because of the limited volume of the titanium camera housings, the
camera could only hold one 500-foot roll of film, and reloading was
obviously out of the question. Each sub's three-man crew would also have
to endure a perilous two-and-a-half hour journey (each way) packed in a
seven-foot diameter crew sphere to reach the Titanic wreckage at the
bottom of the sea. Because of such time and space constraints as well as
the 500-foot load limit, efficiency became a critical factor in shooting the
wreckage properly and capturing the best images possible.
"Anybody who's ever shot their kid's birthday party on a home video
camera knows that a half-hour tape goes like that," Cameron says with a
snap of his fingers. "When you're making a 16-hour dive and you have to
rigidly discipline yourself to shoot 12 minutes of film, it's a little scary."
Utilizing a model of the wreckage based on photo mosaics and other
research materials supplied from previous Titanic expeditions, Cameron
and his team held several planning sessions aboard the Keldysh to devise
the optimum camera strategy.
"We had a little pre-visualization bay set up where we would take a little
video camera," Cameron explains, "and mount it on a miniature
submersible with fiber-optic lights that corresponded to the actual light
we'd be using. We would do dry test runs of the shot in smoke, and I would
get the Russian sub-pilots to move their toy subs the way they were going
to move their actual vehicles so that they would understand the shots."
It was not Cameron's aim to shoot a documentary, but a narrative film. But
his director's mind in a sense distanced him from the emotion of the task at
hand. He had to become a passenger to truly understand the significance
of Titanic 's existence.
Cameron recalls, "I went there as a director, so when we made our first
dive, it was 'Shot one, shot two, shot three.' We had a schedule to make. 'I
want Mir 1 here and Mir 2 there.' It wasn't until the third or fourth dive that I
let it hit me emotionally -- the awe and mystery of being two-and-a-half
miles down on the floor of the Atlantic, seeing the sad ruin of this great
ship."
"But we were able to come back with this rich harvest of film and video
images." Cameron continues. "We sent our remote vehicle inside and
explored the interiors. We literally saw things that no one has seen since
1912, since the ship went down. We've integrated these images into the
fabric of the film and that reality has a profound impact on the emotional
power of the film."
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