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(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
There are few movies in the rich history of cinema that possess a cultural impact quite like James Cameron‘s 1997 romantic disaster movie Titanic. A true monolith of American film, Titanic details the ill-fated journey the RMS Titanic made in 1912 and focuses on a love story between two of its passengers. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the artist Jack Dawson and Kate Winslet as a young socialite Rose DeWitt Bukater, Cameron delivered a genuinely epic film with some of the most impressive special effects of the 1990s, throwing his audience into the terror of a sinking ship.
However, even within a commercial and critical success like Titanic, there can be room for improvement, and Cameron once admitted that he perhaps mistreated one of the characters of the film, which was based on a real-life person. The director decided to have the character in question kill himself despite there being no record of this actually having happened.
“I took the liberty of showing him shoot somebody and then shoot himself,” Cameron once explained. “He’s a named character; he wasn’t a generic officer. We don’t know that he did that, but, you know, the storyteller in me says, ‘Oh.’ I start connecting the dots. He was on duty. He’s carrying all this burden with him. [It] made him an interesting character.”
However, Cameron did not consider the fact that the person in question, First Officer Murdoch, might have had family would become upset by the director’s creative license and the character’s fictitious decision to kill himself. “I think I wasn’t as sensitive about the fact that his family, his survivors might feel offended by that, and they were,” Cameron admitted.
Interestingly, though, Cameron admitted that he would likely not change “a frame” of Titanic today if he were given the chance. After all, the film went on to become one of the most commercially successful works of cinema of all time and won 11 Academy Awards, to boot, so why would Cameron consider changing his masterpiece?
“I think I’ve learned over the years, artistically, don’t second guess yourself,” he said. “That’s a snapshot of who you were and what you thought and believed at that time. And what I find out looking back across all my films, and there aren’t that many. I haven’t changed that much. I’d probably make the same damn movie now that I made back then.”
So there seems to be an element of conflict within Cameron in the fact that he would likely preserve his film to retain its commercial and critical credibility. At the same time, he harbours some remorse over the way he treated some of his characters, particularly those who were representative of real people.
Cameron had quite a task on his hands in bringing the true and tragic story of the HMS Titanic onto the big screen, and it’s fair to say that he mostly accomplished what he set out to achieve. Not only did he detail the disastrous maiden voyage of the ship, but he did it in a way that tugged at the romantic heartstrings of his audience.
However, by using real-life people as inspiration for his character, Cameron ultimately risked upsetting the families of such people. Though he is reticent in admitting that he would want to change even a frame of Titanic, the director would likely have altered the fate of First Officer Murdoch if he had known the backlash that would arrive from his family.
Check out the scene in question below.
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