‘I Wish I Wasn’t Here’: Kate Winslet Was Ready to Ditch Titanic Because of This Scene
A near-death experience made the actress question whether she was ready to risk her life for a movie.
James Cameron 's Titanic won 11 Academy Awards and held the title of the highest-grossing movie in world cinema history for 12 years. This unprecedented success cost the film crew dearly in every sense of the word.
The crew had to work in unusually difficult conditions and the actors literally risked their lives.
One of the scenes became so dangerous and made Kate Winstlet so frightened that she wanted to refuse to continue filming – in addition to the near-death experience, she suffered numerous injuries and came down with pneumonia because she refused to wear a wetsuit.
The incident that almost caused Kate to leave the set occurred during a sequence in which Rose and Jack, trying to escape, run through a water-filled corridor only to find a wrought-iron grate blocking their way to the upper decks.
Winslet's baggy coat caught on it, pulling the actress down and nearly suffocating her. Fortunately, others intervened in time to pull Kate out of the water. The actress recalled the incident in one of the interviews:
“I had to sort of shimmy out of the coat to get free. I had no breath left. I thought I’d burst. […] I was thinking, ‘I wish I wasn’t here.’ Some days I’d wake up and think, ‘Please, God, let me die.”
Initially, there were 40 gallons of water to put inside the ship, but that amount had to be tripled, and at the same time some of the scenery had to be rebuilt to make it more reliable. The scene scared the team because it had to be shot in one take: recreating the ruined interior would take too much time and add to an already huge budget.
This was not the only dangerous incident on the set. August 8, 1996 was the last day of filming for Titanic. It was in Canada, and the crew was in a festive mood. To celebrate the happy ending, the workers and actors had a wonderful dinner with restaurant dishes... And soon everyone started behaving strangely.
It turned out that the soup contained PCP, also known as phencyclidine, a powerful dissociative drug that can cause depersonalization, dizzying euphoria, outbursts of aggression, and muscle spasms. All in all, not the kind of thing you want to end your 14-hour workday with.
60 hallucinating people were rushed to the hospital, and who was responsible for all the chaos is still a mystery.
Source: LA Times