Director James Cameron discusses cinematography, visual style and Super 35 (among other things) and the making of Titanic.
There are few filmmakers whose work and reputation speak as strongly as James Cameron's. In just over a dozen years, he has helped lead a revolution in special effects and postproduction, while helming several spectacularly complex productions that not only served as stages for developing new technology, but told compelling stories within fantastic settings.
During our conversation on Titanic, Cameron ably fielded AC's queries on a variety of subjects.
American Cinematographer: Describe the theme of "faith in technology running mankind into the ground" that runs through each of your films.
James Cameron: [Laughs.] I suppose that is a thematic connection between Titanic and my other films, though it is much more magnified in this picture. The sinking of the Titanic was one of the great cautionary events of the early 20th Century, and since we're in the midst a definitive technological era, it's still an event that's worthy of notice even as we approach the 21st Century which promises to be an even more technology-based time. The problem is that technology is largely invisible to us because we adapt to it so rapidly. We live in a world that has been transformed in the last decade by the personal computer, yet we don't really sense that there has been a profound change. But the Titanic incident isn't just a cautionary tale, it's a true event, which I think is another thing that gives the film such great power. In terms of visualizing the picture, we wanted to give it a great sense of reality and not over-stylize it.
How can you visually convey to an audience that the Titanic itself was state-of-the-art in its day, and that boarding that vessel in 1912 was akin to people today climbing aboard a spaceship?
Cameron: It's hard to do that, because there are certain things about the technology that just seem antiquated and quaint to us now. For example, the telephones on the Titanic's bridge are goofy old-style telephones with earcups. But you can convey the fact that people thought this ship was the cat's pajamas through the actions of the characters. They have to react to the technology, as well to the design accomplishment of the Titanic. The ship was grand and majestic and had a look that was unlike any ship of its time, with its four funnels and long, straight lines. So part of what we do in the film is to get you to know and love the ship as a character, and get the audience to put themselves in the mindset of the people coming aboard with their optimism. I had to work against 85 years of history in which we've associated the name Titanic with gloom and doom. Photographically, everything in the early stages of the story was designed to be bright, open and cheerful sunlit as the passengers come on board. The light is actually very rosy and warm throughout this early part of the film; everything is great, and these people just don't know what's coming.
What was your process in adapting modern filmmaking techniques to this period story, and how have you told it in your own visual language?
Cameron: You always have to think about what's grammatically correct for any film in a visual sense. Is it correct to use a lot of the new technology, with sweeping camera moves and so on, in a story that is essentially a period story? I think the answer is resoundingly yes, because what I was trying to do is break through these barriers that have been put up around period films. Some people think a period film has to be shot like Barry Lyndon, with a very proscenium-style frame. I wanted to shoot Titanic like a Terminator movie. I wanted it to have the subjective immediacy of my other films, like The Abyss or Aliens, where you're inside this thing. I wanted to put the audience inside the Titanic, so we used sweeping Steadicam shots moving through corridors. It's as if the Titanic really existed today and we could take it out to sea and fly around it with a helicopter, shooting with a Wescam or something like that to get these beautiful shots. We couldn't really do that, of course, but if you can imagine doing that, then you can imagine what your visual effects will look like [see separate story on film's effects].
I remember having an early conversation with someone who said, 'Well, [shooting from an aerial perspective] would look odd because they didn't have aircraft back then.' That was the total opposite of what I believed. I wanted to tell a story that's set in 1912 utilizing every modern tool that I could think of. However, I didn't want overly modern stylization, or anything that one would associate with a current trend in cinematography. I wanted to use my tools to the fullest dynamic spectrum available, but always use them correctly in a dramatic sense.
David Lean made period films like Lawrence of Arabia and used the state-of-the-art filmmaking methods that were available at that time. I remember seeing Doctor Zhivago for the first time, and there was this huge sweeping crane move that was absolutely breathtaking. They certainly couldn't have done that in 1917 during the Russian Revolution, so I think this argument is moot. Most people would accept the fact that you use the modern tools, but then the question is, what is the visual style for the film that does not seem anachronistic to the audience?
I found while making Titanic that I was spending more time in a wider frame. On True Lies, I was in a looser frame than I had used in T2 or Aliens because the intensity level was different. It was comedy, and actors use their bodies to a greater extent in comedies. So I was cutting the bottom of the frame at the waist, or even mid-thigh, on a lot of master shots. But on Titanic I was across the room. And although I wasn't trying to emulate a particular style, we used a sort of deep-focus effect, where we were using a wider focal length and had the actors in the foreground with all of this pageantry behind them in depth. This is opposed to a long-lens effect that would just collapse the space and make it all abstract.
I think long-lens photography is in response to our kind of contemporary landscape, in which a little piece of an out-of-focus neon sign will be read as 'city.' You don't need to actually see a city, because you understand that image. But I wanted the eye to be eating the Titanic up like a pizza. So we used depth of field and didn't make the backgrounds too soupy.
I think the film owes more stylistically to the Technicolor epics of the 1940s and especially the '50s, where they were moving the camera a lot more often and letting the actors play the frame, but still slamming in when there was a dramatic moment. They used close-ups more sparingly than one might in a completely modern style.
There was not an overt attempt to do an old-fashioned cinematic style on the film. Quite frankly, I'm not well-schooled enough to do that. I can only respond to what I see and what I'm trying to express. But I wanted the audience to have a great sense of the reality of the environment, because I thought it greatly informed the dramatics of every scene. Source lighting was very critical to this, for instance. We always wanted the lighting to feel highly organic to the scene.
What thoughts did you have in creating the photographic approaches to the three primary parts of the film: contemporary scenes, the Gilded Age, and post-iceberg?
Cameron: Some of these questions are only now getting sorted out during the color timing of the film. We didn't use any big process, and wanted these touches to be subtle throughout the film. The picture really has a 'styleless style,' in the sense that we tried to make it unobtrusive and dramatically correct for the given scene. But I didn't want to have a dramatic difference between the present day and the past; instead, I wanted to create the sense that you had traveled in a time machine and ended up right there in 1912.
Ironically, as a result of [Caleb Deschanel, ASC departing the production after photographing the contemporary portion of the shoot], we have an inherent stylistic difference between the film's present-day section and the scenes that take place in the past. I'm not saying things were contrived to happen that way they weren't but that's how it turned out, and I think it works to the benefit of the picture.
However, I also wanted things to look beautiful when they should. You have to do some interpretation there, to soften the image and the lighting. One key thing is that the light hardened up a bit when we went outside for the period night scenes, and a lot more once the passengers were in the water. The lighting is very soft in the interior scenes aboard the ship, especially in the first-class spaces, where there are never hard shadows on the faces. I especially wanted to achieve this on any shots of Kate [Winslet]; we almost wanted her to look as if she was lit from within. But that's just a goal, and you can't always achieve that.
For the present-day sequences, I thought about doing some really overt stuff, like leaving off the 85 filter and letting it go really blue, giving it a 'high-tech' feeling. That turned out to be too stylistically intrusive, partly because we have this character Rose [the elderly version of Kate Winslet's character, played by Gloria Stuart], and I didn't want her to be photographed as if she was 'high-tech.' The compromise was to use a cooler look in present day, but also to emphasize high-tech source lighting that they would not have had in 1912, such as fluorescents. In scenes featuring old Rose in this high-tech environment, we let everybody else in the scenes fall into this cyan-blue while keeping her in white light, which left her as the most human of the group.
We shot all of the period scenes so that there was quite a color separation in the night exterior photography. Russell [Carpenter] would go almost full blue on the ambient fill that lit the ship, but then a quarter or even half CTO on the white light, so they were pulled apart just a bit more. In the timing stage, we are deciding how warm or cool we want the white lighting to look. Dramatically, it's turning out like we anticipated at the point of shooting, with the white light always a bit warm to suggest the sanctuary of the ship. We always want to be historically accurate, since electric light in those days was not at the voltage we use now, and the light tended to be more like candlelight. But that dynamic works against the pervading sense of cold on the deck of the ship, as the disaster unfolds in this sort of a nightmarish slow motion. So we're going a bit colder in the blues in the later scenes than we thought we would during production. The beauty of this is that we have the flexibility because our colors are far enough apart.
One might suppose that in the 1912 sections we'd wash it all in this golden yellowish mask to give an antique feeling, but that's not the idea at all. Instead, after you go through this dreamlike transition to 1912, you're there and it's real. So the idea is to go almost neutral in the color response, where the blues are blue, the reds are red, and the yellows are yellow and everything is vibrant to the best extent that the Kodak negative can render it. We didn't want to stylize it and interpose a barrier between the film and the audience; we just tried to do really beautiful, elegant lighting on a shot-by-shot basis. Do you want backlight and shafts of sunlight coming through the windows? Great, we did that, but then we backed off just one step so we didn't end up with something that looked like an extended dream sequence. Everything was in proportion richly textured, and a beautiful interpretation of reality.
That style later evolves as we get deeper into the disaster and the scenes below deck: the camera moves become less elegant and more nervous. There's a lot more handheld work and Steadicam, and it's rough, which creates a sense of pervading panic in the camera movement. That's something that Russ, Jimmy [Muro] and I worked out. I warned Russ in advance that the camera was going to be jumping around.
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