To Sell Titanic’s Most Iconic Line, DiCaprio Had to Be Yelled at by Cameron
A mere misunderstanding was to blame for the famous short scene’s prolonged shooting process.
Even with all the big-budget impressive flicks popping up every several months, James Cameron ’s Titanic remains one of the greatest movies ever made, with viewers being completely aware of all the physical effort put into the epic disaster movie every time they rewatch it over and over again.
All the struggles were nonetheless worth the shot, leading Titanic to becoming the first ever film to garner $1 billion in the box office and later on to win 11 Academy awards.
However, things obviously weren’t that nice and easy during the production process, and one of the movie’s most prominent scenes was significantly jeopardized by everyone’s exhaustion at the moment, though it eventually turned out in the best way possible.
According to Titanic’s director James Cameron, that iconic improvised scene with Leonardo DiCaprio climbing the giant ship’s rostrum and screaming ‘I’m the king of the world’ took some long and tormenting moments of clearing things up before eventually being caught on camera.
The line was never mentioned in the script before the day the crew was filming that particular scene, so DiCaprio had no clue about it whatsoever. As Cameron revealed in one of his past interviews, everyone had to be quick to wrap that scene up as “we were losing the light and we had tried this and we had tried that and tried this line and that line. And nothing was really working and I was literally just coming up snake eyes”.
Using a walkie-talkie, Cameron reached out to DiCaprio suggesting that the latter say the line, then spread his arms out wide and just enjoy the moment. The actor’s response caught everyone off guard as it was just limited to a one-word phrase ‘What?’.
The director eventually had to repeat the same instruction multiple times and, as DiCaprio kept repeating his one-word question, the stressful moment turned into one of the funniest memories from the movie’s set. Cameron then clarified that he had to get tough with the confused actor eventually yelling ‘Just f—king sell it!’ — and, well, he did.
With more time to pass, the legendary line didn’t end up staying just in the movie as some months later James Cameron had a very Jack Dawson-ish moment shouting the phrase while accepting his Academy award for Best Director back in 1998.
Source: BBC Radio 1