'Titanic' co-producer recalls making of film
BY GENE TRIPLETT
Jon Landau still gets excited when he talks about “Titanic,” 15 years after the romantic blockbuster’s maiden voyage across cinema screens.
“In a day and age when people think, ‘Oh, it’s about big explosions and technology,’ and all these things, movies are (still) about drama, movies are about characters,
and I think that’s what ‘Titanic’ and the rerelease and this Blu-ray release will illustrate,” the producer said in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles.
Landau was talking about the debut this week of writer-director-producer James Cameron’s $2 billion box office phenomenon on 2-D and 3-D Blu-ray sets. Landau partnered with Cameron in the production of 1997′s “Titanic,” as well as the eerie sci-fi drama “Solaris” (2002) and the otherworldly fantasy “Avatar,” which smashed box office records in 2009.
The film made global stars out of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as two star-crossed lovers who happen to meet on the ill-fated maiden voyage of the “ship of dreams.”
Landau still has vivid memories of the daunting obstacles the production company faced in recreating the 1912 seagoing disaster that left the British luxury liner at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
“Well, the first thing that was the most difficult was trying to figure out where to make the film,” he said. “Because no facility in the world existed
where we could build an 800-foot-long set — and sink it. So we literally scoured the globe, looking everywhere from the tanks in Malta (the famous water tanks at the Mediterranean Film Studios), to the shipyards in Gdansk, Poland, to Moffett Field up in northern California where there’s a blimp hangar, trying to figure out where we could possibly make this movie, before settling on really building a studio in Rosarita, Mexico.
Follow
