Titanic left Southampton dock midday on Wednesday, April 10, 1912, stopping at Cherbourg, France, and finally, made her last stop at Queenstown on the south coast of Ireland. From Queenstown, with some 2,223 people aboard, she steamed at top speed for New York City. Yet, despite repeated warnings of ice along its route, the ship fatally struck an iceberg at 11:40pm on April 14, less than five days into its maiden voyage. By 2:30am on April 15th, she lay torn in half at the bottom of the North Atlantic. The ensemble cast of “Titanic 3d” includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bate, Gloria Stuart and Bill Paxton.
Cameron’s inspiration for the film was borne out of his fascination with shipwrecks; he wanted to convey the emotional message of the tragedy, and felt that a love story interspersed with the human loss would be essential to achieving this. The following q&a with James Cameron and producer Jon Landau further takes us into revisiting the voyage that took the world out of its comfort zone.
James: "Titanic was the first big wake-up call of the twentieth century. Technology had been delivering a steady diet of miracles for the better part of two decades -- the automobile, sound recording, radio communication, the airplane, motion pictures. Everything was just exploding with possibilities; it was all going to be great and wonderful in the never-ending upward spiral of progress. And then, boom -- 15 hundred people die in what had been advertised as the best, safest, most luxurious ship ever built. Our so-called mastery over nature was completely refuted and forever destroyed."
