“It’s terrible to admit these things,” says Kate Winslet, as she reveals that a pivotal scene with Leonardo DiCaprio was shot in a water tank.
NB: The following contains a major spoiler for 1997’s Titanic.
Exploding over a quarter of a century of Hollywood filmmaking mystique, Kate Winslet has revealed that James Cameron didn’t film Titanic's pivotal water scenes in the freezing Atlantic Ocean, but rather in a “waist-high tank”.
Anyone who’s seen Cameron’s multi-Oscar winning disaster romance will likely know the scene Winslet’s talking about – the one where her character, Rose, is seen floating around on a door left over from the titular sinking ship. It’s a door too small for Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack to clamber onto, and so he dies.
“To burst a bubble, it was waist-height, that tank,” Winslet revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Deadline). “So first of all, I was regularly like, ‘Ugh, can I just go for a pee,’ and then I’d get up, get off the door, walk to the edge of the tank that was sort of 20 feet away, and I’d literally have to fling my leg over and climb out the tank and go for a pee and then come back and crawl on the door again.”
Although the tank’s diminutive size was useful when it came to Winslet’s loo breaks, it meant that DiCaprio had to employ more of his acting skills in order to make it look as though he was struggling to remain afloat.
“Leo is, I’m afraid, kneeling down on the bottom of the tank,” Winslet said, adding: “I shouldn’t be saying any of these things. James Cameron’s gonna be ringing me like, ‘Why are you telling them all that?’”
Read more: James Cameron only cast short extras on Titanic to make the set look bigger
All snark aside, the scene sounds like a comparatively pleasant one to film on what was otherwise a famously expensive and difficult production. Cameron, shouldering a movie widely predicted to be a box office disaster, spent much of the shoot in varying states of anger and frustration, the cast and crew were frequently cold and wet, while the spiked clam chowder story is now the stuff of legend.
Ultimately, of course, Cameron got the last laugh; Titanic made over $2bn worldwide and earned multiple awards, leading the director to humbly pronounce himself “King of the world” at the following year’s Oscars ceremony.
Decades later, that door Winslet floated about on in her shallow infinity tank has itself become something of a celebrity. In March 2024, the balsawood prop sold for over $700,000 at auction.
