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UNITED STATES · 1997
Titanic
Synopsis
101-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater tells the story of her life aboard the Titanic, 84 years later. A young Rose boards the ship with her mother and fiancé. Meanwhile, Jack Dawson and Fabrizio De Rossi win third-class tickets aboard the ship. Rose tells the whole story from Titanic's departure through to its death—on its first and last voyage—on April 15, 1912.
Cinema Atlas Connection
Cameron didn't invent the Titanic tragedy — Roy Ward Baker did, in the 1958 docudrama A Night to Remember. Cameron studied Baker's film obsessively, using it as the historical benchmark and visual template for every death scene, every angle of the ship, every moment of ordinary people recognizing their mortality. The 1912 disaster had already been sculpted into cinema. Cameron respected that sculpture enough to learn from it before rebuilding it. A Night to Remember is streaming on MUBI.
David Lean was the ultimate influence on me because of his sense of scale, his characterization within scale, and his dramatic structure in films like Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and Ryan's Daughter.
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