In the month of December of 2017, it was 20 years since James Cameron's Titanic sailed to the cinemas. He started breaking all the box office records, from the 210 million dollars of the premiere to the more than 2.18 billion dollars he ended up collecting. It was name to 14 Oscars, of which it obtained 11, including better film and the one of better director for Cameron. People left the halls between tears, with Jack (Leo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) engraved in their hearts.
Cameron has recently remastered his classic and Titanic will return to the big screen (in the United States) as part of the anniversary, thanks to a laser projection in Dolby Vision that the filmmaker hopes will become a new standard - and the reason why still We will not see it here, it will take time to arrive. It is also accompanied by a National Geographic documentary: Titanic: 20 years later, with James Cameron. But it is the least. The important thing is that Cameron has also talked with us about some of Titanic's unsolved questions (especially, the one on the door, why did not he get in the door with Rose?), Which would imply for him the sale of the Fox's film business and how he has been involved in both Avatar and Terminator.
Vanity Fair: Do you think that any current study would give the green light today to a movie like Titanic?
James Cameron: They are releasing films twice as many faces.
V. F .: But different.
J. C .: Even the circumstances that allowed it to become Titanic were peculiar. It was an anomaly, one for which I feel fortunate and grateful. But I do not think the industry has changed so much in 20 years in terms of fear of risk. They already had it then, and still have it today. And all those tendencies that people get into, "oh, they're just franchises now, they're just comics," you know what? That they were like that then. It's not that we've become smarter.
V. F .: Kate Winslet has a role in one of the sequels of Avatar, which she said will also be partly underwater. Tell us more about this.
J. C .: Yes, he does, and he is very excited. He gave us a very intense visit during a couple of days of rehearsals and saw the world we had created and how we worked and he was very excited. His role is that of a character that is part of the People of the Sea, the people of the reef. The only thing we ask is that she shoot all her acting scenes. I said "Okay, fine, we have to teach you how to do free diving". The other actors are able to hold their breath for three or four minutes. We have already done underwater movement capture. We did a scene last week with six teenagers - well, with five teenagers and a boy from years old - able to act while holding their breath for four minutes. A scene of dialogue, also, because they speak a kind of sign language.
V. F .: A question that many people ask me about Titanic, and I suppose you have done it a thousand times: why does not Rose make room for Jack at the door?
J. C .: And the answer is very simple: because on page 147 of the script it says that Jack dies. That easy. Obviously it was an artistic decision, the door was big enough to keep her afloat, but not for him. I think it's pretty silly that we keep having this discussion 20 years later. But it helps us to see that the film was very successful that Jack was so endearing to the public that it hurt to see him die. If he had survived, the end of the movie would not have made sense. It is a film that talks about death and separation: he had to die. So it did not matter if it was that way or that a chimney fell on him, Jack would die the same way. It's called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for physical reasons.
V. F .: And yet, it is very rigorous with physics ...
J. C .: I am. I spent two days in the water with my equipment and that piece of wood to get enough flotation so that Rose was sheltered from the water at -2º and could survive the necessary three hours until the rescue ship arrived. Jack did not know that Rose was going to rescue her from a lifeboat a few hours later. And, total, he was already dead. And we sharpened very much what you see on the screen because I believed then, and I still believe it, that what you see is exactly what would have been necessary for Rose to survive.
V. F .: Between the violence and the nudes, how did you get Titanic to be rated for children under 13?
J. C .: Maybe my memory fails me, but I do not remember any controversy about it. When we sent the film to be rated, we said that nudity was artistic, not erotic. And I guess they believed us. And, around that time, I think that his standard for a bit of frontal nude above the ciuntura was a bit more lax than it is today. That sounds a little weird, but there it is.
V. F .: Between the violence and the nudes, how did you get Titanic to be rated for children under 13?
J. C .: Maybe my memory fails me, but I do not remember any controversy about it. When we sent the film to be rated, we said that nudity was artistic, not erotic. And I guess they believed us. And, around that time, I think that his standard for a bit of frontal nude above the ciuntura was a bit more lax than it is today. That sounds a little weird, but there it is.
V. F .: What do you remember of the night that Titanic won the Oscars?
J. C .: I remember that I almost got into a fight with Harvey Weinstein and that I almost hit him with my Oscar.
V. F .: Considering what has happened, there may be many people ...
J. C .: ... That I would have preferred it to be without the "almost". But it happened in the main pit of the theater and they had just put the music so that we could return to our seats. The people around us shouted "Here not! Not here!". As if it was appropriate that, I do not know, we should stick in the parking lot, but it was not right for us to do it there, with the music on and about to go live.
V. F .: What caused that altercation between both?
J. C .: It is a long story, but it is summarized in Guillermo del Toro and how badly he had been treated in Miramax with Mimic. Harvey came to me, as friendly as he was false, talking about how good they were for the creators and I explained point by point how good I thought they were for the creators based on what they had done to my friend, and there to the fight.
V. F .: Rodó Titanic for 20th Century Fox, which has long been your studio. And the sequels of Avatar that he is doing are also for that study, but right now there are rumors that the Murdoch are planning the whole film part of Fox. What would that mean for you and your movies?
J. C .: I guess not much. I've always had a good relationship with Fox. If it were sold to Disney it would not be bad because Disney, in fact, now has more money invested in Avatar, in terms of pure spending.
V. F .: Thanks to the Pandora-The Avatar World at Disney World?
J. C .: Yes, exact. So, I get along very well with Fox. And I'm sure I would get along very well with Disney.
V. F .: With all the work that the sequels of Avatar have, there have been some delays when it comes to putting them in motion ...
J. C .: I would not call them delays. I was very optimistic and thought that we could start immediately as soon as we had the scripts. If there are no scripts, there is nothing, right? And those scripts have taken four years. You can call it a delay if you want, but it is not because, from the moment we started the production until now, everything goes smoothly. We're doing great all the time because we've had all the time in the world to develop the system and the equipment. We have not been wasting our time, we have invested in developing technology and design. So when we approved the scripts, we already had everything ready. Each character, each creature, each scenario. It's something that, interestingly, has benefited the films because the design team has had more time to work ... Most of the actors, the key characters, had already read the scripts, so they know perfectly the arcs of development of their characters, they know where they are going, they can modulate their development from now on throughout two films. We all know where the narrative goes in the saga and that's great. Let's be honest, if Avatar 2 and 3 do not make enough money, there will be no fourth and fifth parts. They are self-contained stories that do not need other deliveries. That throughout the five films it becomes a great meta-narrative, but each one is a singular film, in its own right. It's not like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where you ended up saying, "Oh shit, okay, I guess I'll have to go back when the next one opens." Although that also worked for them and everyone went back to the next one.
V. F .: Will the sequels of Avatar deal with themes similar to those of the first film, especially the ecological ones?
J. C .: They will be a natural extension of all those themes, and of the characters, and of the underlying spirituality. In general, if you loved the first one, you will love these. And, if you hated it, you're probably going to hate these. If at first you said you loved the first one and then you said you did not like it, you're probably going to love it.
V. F .: And what about going back to Terminator, how is it going?
J. C .: We are putting the spanner ... It is the first of a trilogy, the story is intended for three films. But the usual: if we do not make money with it, there will be no more. Technically, we think of these as 3, 4 and 5. As if there were only Terminator and Terminator 2 and all the others belong to alternative universes and are not relevant.
V. F .: Why did you want to go back to Terminator?
J. C .: I think the world we live in today is going to depend a lot on our coevolution with our technology. While technology and innovation pose a huge promise for our survival, they are also a huge threat, especially when we speak of a strong [artificial intelligence] combined with robotic weapons. And all that is happening. It's all about knowing who arrives before, it's the next great arms race, the next to see who gets the [atomic] bomb first. And, if you combine that with the connected world in which we live, where we are basically giving up our privacy and every person who goes on the street and has a smartphone is like a cat with bells - a sensor platform in motion that can be monitored from afar -... It is as if we were on the verge of an Orwellian apocalypse of inconceivable proportions. So I thought, hey, I have to make a movie about that. So it's going to be a very happy and optimistic movie.
V. F .: Are you going to see the Titanic rerun?
J. C .: Yes, I want to see it whole. I want my family and my friends to come to see it in HDR ... See a movie that we all know, but in HDR and 3D with the lighting adjusted on a Dolby vision laser projector is almost like seeing a piece of the future. We have remastered everything in HDR and it is amazing. It goes beyond 70 millimeters, beyond any format you've seen before. What I wanted was for Paramount and Fox to support the deployment of Dolby Vision in theaters. And it occurred to me that, well, I have this eternal movie that people really like. Why not take it to theaters and let people see it, not as it should be, but in a way that no other movie can offer right now, except for a couple of current movies that have been made in HDR? It is obvious that the new Avatar movies will also be in Dolby Vision, and at some point we will remaster Avatar to HDR, to re-release it once in that format. I want this to work, because I think what they do at Dolby is fantastic.