The water was very cold, even after it was heated. We went through many different ideas of how we would shoot the last scene of Jack and Rose in the water. It was important to convey the sense of frigid water, ice-cold air. First we thought we’d refrigerate the stage. It’s done a lot to get the breath in the air, but not when people are in the water. They could have stayed in maybe 20 seconds at those temperatures. We changed our thinking to heat the water up to 88 degrees and add the breath digitally. If you are in water that long, you still get very cold; it’s still 10 degrees below your body temperature. Those were long, difficult days. How do you get the actors to concentrate on what they need to do and not on how dismal they feel?
Another moment when an actor can be uncomfortable is in scenes that don’t drive the action, scenes that seem beside the point. One of those scenes is the one when Jack teaches Rose how to spit standing on the deck of the ship. It was always a scene that a lot of people, including the cast, were really hesitant to keep in. When we had our budget problems, it was the scene that came up most often as one to cut. Jim said, “No. This scene is going to work.” It would have been an easy decision to cut it. It was a very complicated scene to shoot. It took four or five different days because we wanted to shoot it at “magic hour”–dusk. Plotwise, it’s not so important. But thematically, that scene is very important to Rose and Jack’s relationship. Movies that work are theme movies. Theme evokes emotion.
Weeks later, when we were shooting the lifeboat scene when the ship is sinking and Rose is pulling away from Billy Zane’s character to go back to Leo, it’s scripted that she pulls out a hairpin and jabs him in the arm. Kate came up with the idea of going back to the spitting scene and actually spitting in his face. That was all Kate.
