Original subtitles

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

JAMES CAMERON: The first moments of a character

should somehow resonate with the entire rest of the film.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

So we talked about character introductions

and a few different ones.

I love stylistically interesting cinematic introductions

of main characters or main adversaries.

So here's one that I'll use as an example.

This is in "Titanic."

And let's say we'll start with this shot.

It was a big crowd getting ready to board the ship

and say goodbye to the people that

are already boarding the ship.

And so a thousand extras, and the camera's coming down,

and we're coming on to a small group of people.

And then we see this little girl.

And meanwhile, we hear a horn honking.

And she turns and looks.

And here comes this beautiful, glittering, otherworldly car.

And then the doors open, and we see a figure.

A hand comes out, and then a foot comes out,

and then a hat comes out.

And then the hat wipe reveals Kate Winslet's face as Rose.

And then we hear her first line of dialogue.

KATE WINSLET (AS ROSE): I don't see what all the fuss is about.

It doesn't look any bigger than the Mauretania.

Which is very sort of blase and diva-like.

(STUFFY ACCENT) "It doesn't look that big."

You know?

Kind of dismissive.

And she sort of immediately sort of

declares herself as a bit sort of posh and above it all.

But we also get to see her entire ensemble, which is

beautifully pulled together--

Edwardian day coat and her gorgeous hat.

So she's kind of defined very, very, very quickly.

But the cinematically interesting thing

is the first thing we see of Rose is her car.

And we see it from the perspective

of a little girl who's a steerage class passenger.

And to her, it's like a fantasy.

What she sees is the fantasy.

She sees the princess.

I've gone from the wide shot with literally, I don't know,

it might have been 1,200, it might be 1,500 extras

that were on call that day.

And we built this huge set.

And we come down with the crane, across the entire crowd.

Everybody's waving.

And then we introduce little Cora.

Daddy, it's a ship.

And just a relatively inconsequential line from her.

It's not important.

But she creates a subjective point of view.

And then here comes the car.

The car honks.

It's clearing a path.

And now we see it from Cora's perspective,

the beautiful, golden glittering chariot.

And not just one car, but a fleet of cars that show up.

And this is a very long lens shot.

This is probably a 150 millimeter lens shot.

And it's designed to stack the frame.

Now a lot of this sequence was shot with long lenses.

And it's hard to imagine "Titanic"

as being a low-budget movie.

But if you looked 10 degrees over that way,

or 10 degrees over that way, it was Baja, California.

We were down in Rosarito Beach.

So we had a piece of backing that

was supposed to look like the city of Southampton

at the Southampton docks.

And if I moved off that backing, I

was looking at scrub brush and hills.

So not exactly a low-budget film,

but every film has its limitations.

Now we're creating an anticipation.

Somebody's coming.

Who is it?

Somebody-- the door is being open.

We see a hand come out.

So Rose's introduction is her hand, her calfskin glove hand.

And her foot delicately comes out, and her little parasol,

and her hat.

Right now, she's a hat, you know, in the same way

that [INAUDIBLE] you know, the [INAUDIBLE] principle

that the character is reduced to an object that

represents that character.

It's a highly fashionable hat.

It's a rich girl hat.

It was a very expensive hat.

It was probably a unique hat from a couture designer

in London.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

And then we meet her.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

And she's absolutely gorgeous.

And I think for the average audience member,

this is a moment that says, okay, she's the character.

She's the one I'm going to follow.

We also have a foreknowledge.

We've seen this character.

We've seen her at the age of 103 in sort

of the prologue of the film.

And we've been taken back in time through her narrative.

She's the storyteller.

So what did she look like when she was 19?

You know.

We've seen her as the old lady.

Now we're going to go back and see her at this age.

And so there's actually a few layers playing

at this exact moment, even before the hat

reveal takes place.

And there's just something quite elegant about that hat reveal.

And, of course, it was a fair number of takes

to get the crane move just right and landing at the right time,

and Kate's timing, and what she looked

at with kind of interest, and how she kind of hit that pose.

And so, to me, maybe it's a little too classic.

Or maybe it's just classic enough

to set a tone for this film, which

plays by very classic rules of cinematography.

It's not an iconoclastic film in that way.

It's not trying to play by some very stylized rule set.

It's trying to use classic cinematic technique

to tell the story.

We cut away to something else.

We cut away to two of the shots.

We introduced Cal, that's important.

He is, in a way, the adversary, or one

of the adversaries of the film.

And then we come back.

We come back to Rose, and she speaks.

It doesn't look any bigger than the Mauretania.

JAMES CAMERON: And she's a spoiled little brat.

In a way, almost off-putting.

She's not very nice.

(STUFFY ACCENT) "It's not that much, is it?"

You know, she's above it all.

Yeah, okay.

She's a spoiled little rich girl.

I get it.

I know who the character is.

She's not the character I've already met.

She's not that 103-year-old lady.

All those years that have intervened have changed her.

And she speaks with kind of a spirituality

and a deep wisdom in the scenes that we've already met.

That's not the girl that we're meeting right here.

So, to me, in just a few shots, we've

learned a tremendous amount about the character.

But we also haven't learned the most important thing about her.

She's that desperately unhappy, depressed woman

that looks at herself in the mirror and says to herself--

you can see it in her eyes.

Kate doesn't say it out loud--

what the hell?

I'm in hell.

And then the next time we see her,

she's running down the deck, getting ready to climb over

the railing.

She's impetuous.

She's impulsive.

These are things that are revealed.

So obviously a lot of time in the writing,

a lot of time in the casting, and the rehearsal, then

the production design, the design of the hat.

A lot of things go into the creating of a character.

But I do think there's something sacred and important

about the way you introduce a character.

You could be blase about some things, Rose,

but not about Titanic.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]