"When love conquers the heart
No sacrifice is unbearable
TITANIC is a 1997 American epic romance-disaster film
directed, written, co-produced, and co-edited by James Cameron. A fictionalized
account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate
Winslet as members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ship
during its ill-fated maiden voyage.
Cameron's inspiration for the film came from his fascination
with shipwrecks; he felt a love story interspersed with the human loss would be
essential to convey the emotional impact of the disaster. Production began in
1995, when Cameron shot footage of the actual Titanic wreck. The modern scenes
on the research vessel were shot on board the Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, which
Cameron had used as a base when filming the wreck. Scale models,
computer-generated imagery, and a reconstruction of the Titanic built at Playas
de Rosarito in Baja California were used to re-create the sinking. The film was
partially funded by Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox. It was the most
expensive film made at that time, with an estimated budget of $200 million.
Upon its release on December 19, 1997, Titanic achieved
critical and commercial success. Nominated for fourteen Academy Awards, it tied
All About Eve (1950) for the most Oscar nominations, and won eleven, including
the awards for Best Picture and Best Director, tying Ben Hur (1959) for the
most Oscars won by a single film. With an initial worldwide gross of over $1.84
billion, Titanic was the first film to reach the billion-dollar mark. It
remained the highest-grossing film of all time until Cameron's 2009 film Avatar
surpassed it in 2010. A 3D version of Titanic, released on April 4, 2012 to
commemorate the centennial of the sinking, earned it an additional $343.6
million worldwide, pushing the film's worldwide total to $2.18 billion. It
became the second film to gross more than $2 billion worldwide (after Avatar).
In 2015 Titanic Live, a live orchestra version of the film, premiered in London.
