Scene Anatomy 101: Titanic
Posted by George H. Sirois on 04.11.2007
The movie was over three hours long; an extra three minutes wouldn’t have killed it…
Everyone has their favorite times and places to explore in their films. George Lucas loves to go into his past and bring the old science-fiction and adventure serials into the present. Quentin Tarantino puts lots (and lots) of homages to his television and movie watching past into his dialogue. James Cameron? He loves the water. More than that, he's fascinated with shipwrecks. He loves the mystery and wonder that they bring, and in 1995 he began a journey to bring the ultimate shipwreck – the Titanic – to the big screen in a way it had never been there before.
There had been a few attempts to bring the story of the Titanic to the movies, with the most successful being the 1958 adaptation of the novel, "A Night to Remember." But Cameron wanted to present the most faithful re-telling of that tragedy, and so he went on half a dozen deep-sea dives to explore as much of the actual ship as possible. He and his crew painstakingly recreated the Titanic, and with the exception of adding some extra glitz to the walls and widening the hallways, they succeeded in their mission. In the meantime, Cameron created a storyline that involved a young engaged woman in first class and a young man in third class who won his ticket onboard the ship in a poker game. The two of them fall in love very quickly, which turns both of their worlds upside down, and their love affair comes to a tragic halt when the ship strikes the infamous iceberg.
The end result was a film that had an epic look, an epic length (over three hours), and a storyline that grabbed audiences worldwide and had many members of that audience coming back for seconds, thirds and seventeenths. In less than six months, this became the highest grossing film of all time and the recipient of eleven Academy Awards. I'm speaking, of course, of the 1997 James Cameron colossal hit…
Just so you know, this Sunday will mark the 95th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
Everyone knows the story of Titanic – well, almost everyone, I'm sure there are a few here and there who have never seen this – but most people only recall the love story between Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and the ship sinking. It's easy to forget about the framework of the film, which takes place in present time.
A treasure hunter named Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton, Cameron's go-to guy) searches through the wreckage of Titanic, looking for a lost diamond necklace called "The Heart of the Ocean." It's a diamond that would be worth more than The Hope Diamond and Brock and his partner Lewis Bodine (Lewis Abernathy) have sunk all of their money into this expedition. What they find, instead of the necklace, is a drawing of a young woman posing on a couch wearing the necklace. Wearing only the necklace.
The woman in the picture is still alive, and her name is Rose Dawson Calvert (Gloria Stuart). She and her granddaughter Lizzy (Suzy Amis, now Mrs. James Cameron) go to see Brock, and Rose tells her story of coming aboard Titanic and meeting Jack. Only a few times does the film shift back to the present time, allowing us to take a breather and to revisit Brock, Lewis, Lizzy and everyone else listening to the story Rose is telling all of us.
But there was a little something missing in the finished film. When we first meet Brock, we see a single-minded, determined man who WILL find that necklace and not let anyone stand in his way. As the film goes on, Brock takes a back seat to Rose and her story about Jack, and by the end of the film, he just gives up his mission. I'm aware that what happens on the Titanic is the primary story, but it's just as important to follow through on the subplot that got the film started in the first place.
Well, it just so happens that on the 3-Disc Special Edition DVD to Titanic, you can find an assortment of deleted scenes that mainly add to the atmosphere around Jack and Rose. But one major scene allows us to see Brock as Rose first brings up that diamond necklace, and it provides us with Brock's transition that was missing from the finished film. It begins in April of 1912, where Rose is first given the necklace by her fiancée Cal Hockley (Billy Zane, a cool dude). Rose is looking in the mirror at herself, with the necklace around her neck.
ROSE: It's overwhelming.
CAL: It's for royalty. We are royalty, Rose.
As Cal speaks to her, he is looking at her mirror image, not directly at her. It's as if he's not speaking from the heart, and just telling her what he expects her to want to hear.
CAL: You know, there's nothing I couldn't give you. There's nothing I'd deny you… if you would not deny me.
Only now does Cal crouch down and look at Rose instead of her mirror image. He gives her a charming smile.
CAL: Open your heart to me, Rose.
We zoom in on the necklace, and the image dissolves to Old Rose's neckline. The necklace is obviously not there, and once we've fully returned to the present, we pull back to the cabin where Rose is telling her story to Brock and his crew. (I actually like this transition much more than the one where we zoomed in on Rose's eyes while she was posing nude for Jack with the necklace around her neck. I always felt like Old Rose was going to be in the same pose that the young one was in, and that always took me out of the moment. But I digress…)
OLD ROSE: It was a cold stone, a heart of ice. After all these years, I can still feel it closing around my throat, like a dog collar. If you could have felt it, not just seen it.
Brock smiles at Rose. After hearing all about Rose boarding the ship, mingling with the VIPs in First Class and meeting Jack, she finally got to the reason why they were all there. This is the first major lead he's had in getting that necklace.
BROCK: Well, that is the general idea here, Rose.
Everyone has been hearing about Rose feeling trapped while on the ship and how she was considering killing herself. So Lewis decides he can't just sit back and listen anymore.
LEWIS: Wait a second, I just want to get something straight. You were going to kill yourself by jumping off the Titanic? That's great!
BROCK: Lewis…
Brock tries to calm Lewis down in this moment of ill judgment, but Lewis just goes right on laughing about this revelation.
LEWIS: All you had to do was wait two days.
Brock quickly changes the subject once Lewis takes a breath in between his laughs.
BROCK: Tell us more about the diamond. What did Hockley do with it after that?
Rose slowly walks over to her wheelchair, where Lizzy is waiting for her.
OLD ROSE: I'm afraid I'm feeling a little tired, Mr. Lovett.
BROCK: Would you like some more coffee?
LIZZY: She's tired.
Brock has been listening so closely to everything that Rose has been talking about, and just when it comes to a breakthrough moment that he had been waiting for, Rose all of a sudden gets tired. That won't do for him.
BROCK: Wait, before you go to bed, can you give us something to go on here, like who else had access to the safe? What about this Lovejoy, the valet, did he have the combination?
Lizzy quickly rolls Rose out of the room.
LIZZY: That's enough.
Rose gives Brock and Co. a slight wave as she goes back to her bed.
The next scene, we see Brock and one of his benefactors, Bobby, walking around the docks. What we're seeing here is a very personal moment for James Cameron because, while his story has Brock running over budget on his quest to find the Heart of the Ocean, Cameron has been running the budget for his film higher and higher in his quest to create the perfect film about the Titanic. Just like Brock had to get more than one sponsor for his expedition, Cameron had to get two major studios – Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox – onboard to release this. Paramount took domestic distribution and Fox took the international, and as the price tag for the film passed $200 million, both studios started to panic.
So what we're going to see here in this scene is a representative of James Cameron trying to appease the moneymen and not allow them to pull the plug on the whole project. And, of course, who better to portray James Cameron than Bill Paxton.
BROCK: I need time. Just buy me more time.
BOBBY: There isn't any more time. Brock, we're six days over as it is at $30,000 a day. At this rate, I won't be able to raise 25 cents for a phone call. The partners are pissed. Brock, are you hearing this?
BOBBY: I'm telling you what they told me. The hand is on the plug, it's starting to pull.
BROCK: You tell the hand I need another two days. Bobby, we're close. I smell it.
BOBBY: Don't smell it, okay?
BROCK: I smell ice. She had the diamond on her that night. I just gotta work her a bit more, okay?
Brock couldn't have picked a worse choice of words at that moment, because we see Lizzy walk into frame just in time to hear the plot to "work" her grandmother for more information.
BOBBY: All right, we'll develop satellite trouble or something. You got two days, Brock. Two days.
BROCK: Go get ‘em.
Bobby walks away and Brock turns around to see Lizzy nearby.
BROCK: Hey, Lizzy. I was just coming to find you. Can I talk to you for a second?
LIZZY: Don't you mean "work me?"
Oops. Busted. Brock stumbles with his words for a moment, trying to come up with something that sounds good, but he just resigns himself to the truth.
BROCK: Okay, look. I'm running out of time here. I need your help.
LIZZY: I'm not gonna help you browbeat my 101-year old grandmother. I came down here to tell you to back off.
Okay, maybe Brock came on a bit too strong at the end of their conversation before, so Brock tries a different approach. He takes Lizzy around the rig that shows the amount of people working for the same goal.
BROCK: Please, you gotta understand something. I mean, look at all this. I got guys diving around the clock. It's a three-ring circus. My partner and I, we got all our dough sunk in this thing. This is three years of my life going down the drain here. I bet everything to find The Heart of the Ocean.
Brock holds out his hand with his fingers curled just a little bit. You can see the glint in his eyes as he knows just how close he is to accomplishing his dream.
BROCK: You see this right here?
LIZZY: What?
BROCK: That's the shape my hand's gonna be when I hold it. I'm not leaving here without it. I can't leave here without it. I need to unlock what's inside your grandma's memory.
Lizzy doesn't really care about Brock's quest; all she wants is for her grandmother to take care of what she needs to take care of, and it doesn't matter to her how long it's going to take for that to happen.
LIZZY: Look, she's gonna do this her way, on her own time. Don't forget she contacted you. She's out here for her own reasons, God knows what they are.
The fact that Brock was contacted by Rose is what makes Brock calm down. He's not the only one on a quest here, and he can appreciate that. He's waited this long to find the diamond; if he can find it and a Titanic survivor can have some sort of closure with that fateful night, then he can afford to wait a little longer.
BROCK: Maybe she wants to make peace with the past.
LIZZY: You really think she was there.
Brock smiles. He's now content with going at Rose's pace, and he's not going to rush it anymore. Not only can he allow Rose to make peace with her past, but he's also getting a first-hand look inside the Titanic itself. That's something that doesn't come around very often these days.
BROCK: Oh yeah. I'm a believer. She was here.
So what have we learned in this deleted scene? Well, we are given a look at how desperate a man Brock Lovett is to find the Heart of the Ocean. We get to see how much pressure he's getting from his sponsors. We get to see Rose's granddaughter Lizzy get involved, giving Brock the reason to back off and allow her grandmother to tell the story at her own pace. And we get to see the transition we needed to see in Brock's character. As the film continues, the focus is on Jack and Rose so much that the plot point that got Rose to the Titanic expedition, that Brock and his crew are literally shoved into the back. Here, we get to see the moment where Brock VOLUNTARILY took himself out of the story and allowed Rose to say what she needed to say in order to have closure with what went on all those years ago.
But there's one more element that we see here that ties into one of the most polarizing moments in the whole film – the revealing that Rose has had the necklace for all these years and her suddenly tossing the diamond into the ocean. There are audience members that look at that as such a romantic moment, and there are many others that want to know what the hell she was thinking. A diamond that expensive could have put her granddaughter up for life. At the beginning of the scene, we hear Rose talking about how cold and overwhelming the Heart of the Ocean was when Cal first put it around her neck. That diamond represented everything that she escaped from when she left Cal, and even though that is somewhat implied in the finished film, this scene puts the focus right on the necklace, which is necessary since it's what brought everyone together.
With all of what happens in this scene – including a look at James Cameron's roadblocks in getting this movie made in the first place – you would think that Cameron would have allowed just a few extra minutes into this three hour epic. But hey, the finished film as it is earned 1.8 billion dollars and won eleven Academy Awards, so it must not have hurt them that much.
