CAMERON: So this is the real Titanic, as she lies at the bottom of the ocean...
shot on 35-mm film by us, in 1995...
when we went out there, in the early days of making the movie.
You know, I've joked many times over the years...
that I only made this movie because I wanted to go dive to the Titanic wreck.
I've been a wreck diver for many years, at scuba depths.
I love shipwrecks. I love the romance and the mystery of shipwrecks.
I love the fact that every shipwreck is a human story.
Imean, ships are not on the bottom of the ocean by design.
They're on the bottom of the ocean 'cause something really bad happened.
And there were people on those ships. They're not unmanned vehicles.
So the story of those people, whether it's a story of...
you know, a wartime encounter with a U-boat...
or you know, an encounter between a luxury liner and an iceberg...
they are fascinating stories. So I've always loved wrecks.
And Titanic's the ultimate wreck.
So what I did was, I went to 20th Century Fox...
Ihad a good relationship with them, I had made a couple of films for them...
and I said:
”Let's do a real expedition to Titanic, to shoot scenes for the movie."
They thought I was crazy. But then I told them my rationale.
And the rationale was...
that we're going to have to do these scenes as miniatures.
The miniatures are going to be probably more expensive...
than going in and shooting it ourselves.
We can use the Russians. We'll use the Russian subs.
The marketing value of us having gone and photographed the real ship...
at the bottom of the ocean will be tremendous.
It will be worth mi//ions in publicity to the movie.
So these are some very ambitious shots. /mean, we went out there with a mission.
And the mission was to make a movie.
Two-and-a-ha/f miles down in the Atlantic.
So, first step was we needed a movie camera.
So I talked to my brother Mike, about the technical prob/ems...
of shooting at that depth.
No one had ever shot with a movie camera at that depth...
other than sort of, just poking it up to the viewport of a submersible.
We wanted to have a camera that was outside the sub...
that we could pan and tilt and do beautiful cinematic kind of moves with.
And so that involved building...
a pan-and-ti/t mechanism, a remote device that was outside the sub.
We had to design a camera housing.
We had to design a 35-mm camera that could fit in that housing.
We went down there on this expedition. We dove Titanic, I think, 10 or 11 times...
out of 12 deep dives on this expedition.
And we had about 12 minutes of footage on each dive.
So we were down there for 10 to 14 hours.
So this is Al Giddings on the right. He was my underwater D.P. on The Abyss...
and he had introduced me to Robert Ballard...
and kind of put me down the path of meeting...
all the Titanic people involved, including the Russians.
This is Snoop Dog, which is a remotely operated vehicle that we built ourselves.
Actual/y, Scott Mallard at Western Space and Marine built it for us.
And this is a robot that really worked.
It really worked at 12,000 feet down...
with this tremendous water pressure, 5,000 pounds per square inch.
This thing worked. And we weren't supposed to...
l had set myself a limitation that l wasn't going to actually take...
the Snoop Dog inside the wreck of the ship.
Here we are at the D-deck gangway door, on the port side.
And I promised myself l wasn't going to really go inside.
But, of course, I couldn't contain my enthusiasm...
once we saw how well this vehicle was working.
And now, compared to the vehicles we're using now...
it's a clunky, heavy, big, dumb dope on a rope.
But, you know, this is 10 years ago.
And it was pretty state-of-the-art for its time.
Here we are, you know, crossing the forward well deck.
And, you know, Titanic, it's tough to see this who/e ship...
you know, it's just so darned big...
and even the 1,200 watt H. M.l. lights don't really light it up.
Just small sections of it, you know.
That's the B-deck railing on the starboard side forward.
And it's right where we had Rose standing...
on one of the shots that were taken out of the film.
This is one of the first times...
that our ROV was really used to poke around inside the shipwreck.
And we were just enthralled by what we were seeing.
So here, Snoop Dog is being piloted aft along...
the B-deck promenade, on the B-deck level.
And it gets to a door that it can't pass.
You know, it's sort of looking in a window.
You know, it's just mysterious, what's inside that window.
You know, there's no way to know.
And, of course, in the 2001 expedition, we actually...
got behind that window and had a look. And we know what's in there now.
So, this is Jeff Ledda. He was the ROV pilot.
And here is another... This is, I think, our last dive.
And we're sending the ROVdown into the grand staircase.
The grand staircase is just this big, open pit...
that goes down through the ship, five decks down, inside the ship.
And here he is going down. This is just...
a bulkhead that's just covered with rustic/es.
And here's a beautiful view down the grand staircase, level after level.
A-deck, B-deck, C-deck...
D-deck, all the way down to where the dining room was at the bottom.
Now, so far, we haven't done anything radical.
Robert Ballard, back in 1986...
when he went down there for the first human dive...
This is what the grand staircase looked like back then.
When he went down there in1986...
he took his ROV, which was ca//ed Jason Junior.
He went down into the grand staircase.
But they literally went straight down the center.
I don 't think they looked down and saw this who/e footing arrangement.
This is when we knew that there really was still...
a lot of structure down inside Titanic.
And, you know, we're going down.
This is looking into the A-deck level...
you can see a little glimpse of a chandelier there.
From what we know in the... On our 2001 expedition...
those chandeliers are still there, just the way we saw them in '95.
Here you see the ROVgoing down one more deck level.
It's going down from A-deck to B-deck.
And it's going to scoot in here in a second, into the B-deck level.
This was all new. This was all new territory.
Nobody had ever really done this before. I think that shot's actually in the movie.
So here we are, going in on B-deck. We're heading aft here.
This was all just ridiculously exciting for me.
I mean, to be flying an ROVaround inside the Titanic.
I mean, it was just great.
And here's a view looking back. And you can see one of the chandeliers...
just kind of overgrown, with deep-sea animals...
that are sitting there, filter feeding in the current.
And now we're heading aft. You can see the boiler uptake.
So this is all just really exciting for us, and you know...
I wasn't supposed to take our movie prop vehicle inside Titanic...
and do real exp/oration, but we just couldn't resist.
Eventually, we go through this doorway that you see back here...
in the back, and we go into this suite.
This used to be one of the most luxurious suites on the ship.
It doesn't look like much now.
All the wooden walls are kind of decomposed...
and all the wiring that was in those walls is just kind of hanging down.
That's the doorway that leads outside to the private promenade deck.
And we couldn't get Snoop out there. lt wouldn't fit through that door.
But here you can see the MIR submersible maneuver around...
outside the wreck.
We thought that was pretty cool beans...
back in those days to have done a coordinated move like that.
Of course, we did tons of that stuff in 2001.
But we were just sort of finding our feet here.
And this was a big find.
This was the firebox of the fireplace in this first-class suite.
And with this Ga/athea crab...
crawling over the hearth, you know...
I just love the juxtaposition of that.
Here you see a perfectly preserved wall sconce...
with a kind of ribbon design, a bronze ribbon design.
And this is what that sconce and that firebox would have looked like.
That's an actual photograph of the room.
So we were pretty excited. We were, like, big-time deep-ocean explorers here.
We brought all this stuff back and showed it to Fox...
a good year before we actual/y started...
shooting the scenes with sets and actors on the movie.
But, as far as I'm concerned, I was committed.
I was committed to make the film at that point, you know.
Fox had spent a couple of mi//ion dollars to do this expedition...
and to get this footage.
I'd already written the treatment. lstill had to write the script.
But I told them, you know:
"This expedition commits me to you to make this movie."
So in a way, you know, I kind of sold it to them...
as like a cheap way to do a pay or play deal.
And they bought it on that basis, as well.
I also got hooked on the who/e bug of deep-ocean exp/oration.
So, of course, as soon as the movie was done...
I was immediate/y planning my next expedition.
Took us a couple of years to get it pulled together.
The film was done and then the who/e awards, you know...
season and all that was over by spring of '98.
And by summer of 2001, we had built...
our new generation of robotics and gone back out there again...
and explored deep inside the wreck.
So this is coming down to the D-deck level.
And again we're doing this with this big, clunky robot, Snoop Dog.
Boom!
So here we are coming down to the D-deck level.
This is the D-deck reception area. We explored this thorough/y in 2001.
But in '95 nobody had ever been in here.
Not since the ship sank in 1912.
It was really exciting to see that woodwork still survived.
Imean, here was a carved oak decorative post.
Imean, there's a steel post up the middle and this carved oak covering.
And we were just so excited. You can even see where...
the paint still exists down in the bottoms of some of the carving.
The white paint, because this who/e room was painted white.
We said, "Wow, you know, Titanic...
"Titanic is still down there. It's just away from the prying eyes...
"that have been here before. If we could just get deeper in...
"imagine what we might see."
So we drove our robot, which was i//-designed for this type of thing...
deeper and deeper into the ship. And we got this glimpse...
of this door, which is in the port-side entry vestibule.
And this is a bronze decorative screen in the door.
And you can see the handle on the door and so on.
This is the real ship. Now, we put a few shots...
from this ROVmater/a/ in the movie.
Then we matched it with some stuff that we shot in a tank...
down at Escondido, down near San Diego.
This is what one of those doors would have looked like in the day.
And this is what we photographed with Snoop Dog...
way down, you know, five decks down, inside the ship.
And we just really felt like we'd done something really cool...
because the previous conclusion by prior expeditions was that...
none of the woodwork survived anywhere in the ship.
So we knew, this is... Looking into the darkness here...
and wondering what was beyond. What's down there?
You know, this is what /ed me...
to want to go back and exp/ore it thorough/y with new technology later.
And, of course, it also set a level...
of excellence for the rest of the movie.
The movie itself, the sets...
and the costumes and everything all had to live up...
to the level that we had set by going down to the wreck...
and by filming the real wreck.
And, you know, maybe that had an impact on the budget.
Maybe the fact that we... lt was not that I was telling everybody...
everyday, ”You have to live up to what we've already done."
It's just that they felt this kind of obligation...
to do their best professionally. And sometimes...
when people do their best, it costs more money.
And you know, who knows how much of that imbued the film...
with some of its quality. Did we need to do it?
It's really unknown.
I don't see how you can look at some, you know, alternate universe...
where we didn't go to Titanic, but we made the movie Titanic...
and say that the movie would have been just as good.
Frankly, I don't think it would have, because my passion for the film...
would not have been as strong as it was.
Ife/t like, in a weird way, lfe/t like I owed it to Titanic.
I know that sounds strange, but when you go to a place like this...
you go to a place of great tragedy where people have died...
and you explore it, and you see it...
it becomes a part of your life and you become connected to that story.
And you become connected to that tragedy.
So as a result, lfe/t a kind of a mandate, to do my best...
as a filmmaker to tell that story.
So a lot of the things that we shot that were of historical interest...
and weren't necessarily part of the Jack and Rose story, let's say...
l probably shot those things because l felt like l had to tell Titanic's story.
I had to tell the story of the other people, who were onboard.
So a lot of the scenes that are in the deleted scenes...
here in the special edition, probably...
were in existence because of our trip to the wreck.
Iguess it infected us with this sense...
that we were the bearers of the tale, and we had to do a good job.
So going to the shipwreck may have had...
a direct connection to, you know, how well the film did...
or how well the film was received.
I don't know, I can't parse it out.
To me, it was all part of the process of making that movie.
So here we're actually /ooking... This is the shot right here that rea//y...
We were at the limit of our tether.
We couldn't go any further, and yet we're looking down this corridor...
down into a black corridor.
And I wondered what was down that corridor.
I knew it /ed forward along D-deck...
I knew it went to a bunch of first-class cabins.
Ireally wanted to see what was down that corridor.
And it was that shot...
that made me want to come back and why we went back in 2001...
with robots. And we did go down that corridor...
and we saw some amazing things.
And that's what happens. /t's the things that are just...
at the limits of your lights that sort of beckon you.
See that dark corridor right in the middle there?
It doesn't look like a corridor, it just looks like a dark spot...
but I knew it was a corridor, because we were looking at the deck plans...
and so we kind of knew where we were.
The elegance occasionally emerges from behind these rustic/es.
When you first see it, it kind of looks like some kind of grotto...
some kind of underwater cave.
And here you are seeing a big rustic/e lying on top of the vehicle...
is what you're seeing there.
The vehicle is actual/y pinned to the floor by a big chunk of rust.
And here you see how not to drive an ROV...
where we've actual/y wrapped our umbilical around a post.
And that was pretty tricky for us to get out of that spot.
But we did get the... We got the Snoop Dog back.
We got it back on the sub, and we got it back to the ship.
And we actually used it for a bunch of underwater shooting later...
when we were actual/y making the movie.
And this shows how we actually recovered the Snoop Dog.
We had to actually pull its tether out from inside the wreck.
It was hooked on something, so we had to pull it out...
with the mechanical manipulator arm on the submersible.
These are not recommended procedures, but it all worked.
We managed to get all our gear back and leave Titanic.
English - US - SDH