How James Cameron Convinced Leonardo DiCaprio to Make Titanic

The day before shooting a photo for Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood Issue, James Cameron sat down with a VF video crew for a definitive interview about his career. In the video, Cameron discusses his films—from The Terminator to his soon-to-be-released Avatar: Fire and Ash. Cameron is his typical candid self throughout the hour-long discussion, speaking about the troubled production of The Abyss and his pursuit to cast Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, even after the actor had passed on the role. What has remained consistent, Cameron says, is his commitment to “the sanctity of the theatrical experience.”

Before directing The Terminator, Cameron says, the filmmaker had been fired from a previous feature. “I was at less than zero,” he explains. “I was living in a little apartment in Tarzana. My mom was sending me coupons so that I could get two Big Macs for the price of one, because she didn’t think I was eating enough, which I wasn’t.” The film was challenging from the beginning: Cameron knew he’d have to stretch its $4 million budget to make it work. He rejiggered the script so that Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’d originally been considered for the Kyle Reese character, could play the Terminator instead.

“We didn’t get Arnold until day 10 of a 40-day shoot,” he remembers. “So we just shot Linda [Hamilton]. Linda broke her ankle two days before shooting—or seriously sprained it, almost like a break. She was wearing this really tight sports wrap. She could barely limp around the set, and it’s about a girl running for her life. We pulled out every trick and some that no one had ever even imagined to get that film made.” Later in the video, he jokes that the crew members held a wrap party for the film midway through the shoot because they didn’t think they would make it to the end. As we now know, they were wrong.

Following the success of The Terminator, Cameron came aboard to direct the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien—the beginning of Cameron’s long affair with strong-female-led action films. “I think Ripley was in my mind when I was writing Sarah Connor,” Cameron says. “It was a weird metamorphosis out of the ‘last girl’ trope [commonly referred to as the ‘final girl’]. I think it comes from having a very strong mom, having strong women in my family. There’s probably a whole Freudian interpretation around it.”

Cameron recognized that this type of female role was not common in this era’s action films—and he used that to his advantage, creating big-budget films that could appeal to both men and women.

He followed Aliens with the notoriously troubled production of The Abyss. The film was riddled with technical issues, thanks largely to its underwater scenes—which the cast wasn’t thrilled to shoot. “Some of them loved it, and some of them were terrified. We did take some heat for putting people into a high-pressure situation,” Cameron says. “I wouldn’t do that again.”

Cameron went to great lengths to get Hamilton back for his sequel to The Terminator. Her one request was that he make Sarah Connor crazy; Cameron went back to the script and made changes, including one that placed her in a psychiatric hospital at the beginning of the movie. But at the film’s heart is the relationship between Sarah Connor and her young son, John. Cameron and casting director Mali Finn saw many child actors for the role: “Mali went out to all the agencies, and we saw all the kids that age [10], and they all had mostly done commercials. They were these little smiling robots,” Cameron says. Finn found Edward Furlong at a local youth club. “He bonded with Arnold,” Cameron says. “Arnold became his dad because Eddie had dad issues. His dad had split, and he was living with his uncle. He was able to use all that. And you sense a longing in him for a father.”

Terminator 2: Judgement Day was revolutionary for its use of CGI. The villain in the film, the T-1000, was envisioned by Cameron as a form of liquid metal and required cutting-edge effect shots. “We eventually wound up with 42 CGI shots, and it took a year and was very, very challenging to get the very last shots done,” Cameron says. “We’re just finishing up Avatar 3 with 3,500 CGI shots. So that’s a huge leap across three-plus decades.”

Cameron’s next film, True Lies, was an action comedy—a tonal departure from his previous work. So was Titanic, which, in Cameron’s telling, was born after he walked into Fox exec Peter Chernin’s office with a photo of the Titanic and said, “It’s Romeo and Juliet on that.” He just needed $120 million to make the film.

“I cast Kate [Winslet] very quickly,” Cameron says. Getting DiCaprio proved to be more difficult. He didn’t want to do the project, even though everyone around him said he should; he didn’t feel the role was challenging enough. “He didn’t want to just be handsome young Leo,” the director says. “He signed on to do the movie when I told him he wasn’t ready to do the film.”

Technology had to catch up with Cameron before he could realize his vision for Avatar, which he originally wrote in 1995. The first Avatar pioneered performance-capture techniques; the newest entries in the series perfected the technology. “We spent a lot of money on research and development,” Cameron says. “Every nuance, every glance, every tiny little bit of eye movement, everything the actors did would be preserved. So we spent three years and $40 million perfecting that before we ever worked with actors.”

What’s been consistent throughout Cameron’s career is his desire to keep learning. “I’m just fascinated by any kind of challenge,” he says. “I don’t want to do anything that I’ve done before.”

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Set design, Viki Rutsch. Produced on location by Preiss Creative. For details, go to VF.com/credits.