People PEOPLE Titanic 25 Years Later

“NO ONE MAKES ME LAUGH LIKE LEO. NO ONE. AND THE SAME BACK. WE WERE SERIOUS, BUT WE COULD ALSO BE FOUND ABSOLUTELY CACKLING IN THE CORNER SHARING SOME RIDICULOUS PRIVATE JOKE”—KATE WINSLET ARE YOU READY TO GO BACK TO TITANIC? THE MOVIE THAT CHANGED HOLLYWOOD • FROM THE SINKING TO THE BLUE DIAMOND: HOW THEY MADE IT • KATE & LEO: BFFs PLUS REAL SURVIVOR STORIES…

ROMEO AND JULIET—on a boat.” That was James Cameron’s pitch to studio executives for a high-budget feature film about the RMS Titanic. Much about the true story had consumed the director: “The juxtaposition of rich and poor, the gender roles playing out unto death—women first, the stoicism and nobility of a bygone age, the magnificence of the great ship matched in scale only by the folly of the men who drove her hell-bent through the darkness,” Cameron wrote in the introduction to Titanic, his book about the making of the film. “Above all the lesson that life is uncertain … the unthinkable possible.” The sinking of the Titanic had claimed more than 1,500 lives. But in that moment Cameron asked the room to think about just two, of his own creation:…

LEONARDO DICAPRIO was not looking to make an effects-filled blockbuster. “I don’t like these gigantic, huge films,” the then-22-year-old actor told Access Hollywood in 1997. Kate Winslet, meanwhile, had lobbied not only to land her own part in James Cameron’s big project, she also leaned on DiCaprio to take the one he’d been offered. Only after shooting was well underway did it become clear that neither had known what they were in for. Along with much of the sprawling cast and crew, the film’s two stars would risk hypothermia in frigid water, witness the director’s infamous temper and endure workdays that occasionally stretched to 20 hours. “Nothing could have prepared me for it,” said Winslet in a Los Angeles Times interview. To be fair, no one could have prepared for it,…

It’s no spoiler now: Near the end of Titanic Jack Dawson clings off a floating wood door that holds his love just out of the icy water. He attempts to hike himself up next to her, but the door sinks under their combined weight. He leaves it for Rose and soon dies. “I would’ve tried more than once,” astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson told the Huffington Post. He is one of many to ponder cinema’s most tragic riddle: Could the door have saved them both? A better question, said Tyson, is why Jack gave up so easily. “You try once. ‘Oh, this is not gonna work. I will just freeze to death in the water.’ No, excuse me. No! The survival instinct is way stronger than that in everybody, especially in…

IT REQUIRES REAL TALENT to design costumes from a bygone era that will look great in close-up on film. But it takes a special kind of genius to ensure those clothes look equally good soaking wet. Given that enormous task, costume designer Deborah Lynn Scott dressed the main characters plus 150 regular extras with many, many looks (rich folk changed outfits frequently each day at sea). The scene in which passengers embark in Southampton—some headed for first-class cabins, others for steerage, a distinction evident in their appearance—called for 8,000 separate pieces: coats, vests, hats, gloves, dresses, shoes and more, all appropriate to the Edwardian-era setting. When possible, Scott restored vintage garments and added old trimmings like lace and beads to new designs. To withstand the water, she and her team made…

In appearance and setting, it closely resembles the Hope Diamond: a massive blue stone ringed by white diamonds and dangling from a diamond-studded chain. And, like the Hope, it boasts a long history of owners including King Louis XIV of France. But the 56-carat Coeur de la Mer (Heart of the Ocean)—the pendant that Cal Hockley places around the neck of his fiancée, Rose DeWitt Bukater, as if it were a pricey millstone—is fictional. (It does, however, enjoy the distinction of having inspired a lyric in Britney Spears’ “Oops I Did it Again.” I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean in the end/Well baby, I went down and got it for you.) The Heart figures into many Titanic plot points: Rose wears it (and it alone) when Jack…