Titanic is a
1997 American romantic drama film directed, written, co-produced and co-edited by
James Cameron about the sinking of the
RMS Titanic. It stars
Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson and
Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater, two members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ill-fated maiden voyage of the ship. The main characters and the central love story are fictional, but some characters (such as members of the ship's passengers and crew) are based on historical figures.
Gloria Stuart plays the elderly Rose, who narrates the film in a modern day
framing device.
Production of the film began in 1995, when Cameron shot footage of the real wreck of the RMS
Titanic. He envisioned the love story as a means to engage the audience with the real-life tragedy. Shooting took place on board the
Akademik Mstislav Keldysh - which aided Cameron in filming the real wreck – for the modern scenes, and a reconstruction of the ship was built at
Playas de Rosarito, Baja California. Cameron also used
scale models and
computer-generated imagery to recreate the sinking.
Titanic became at the time the
most expensive film ever made, costing approximately
US$200 million with funding from
Paramount Pictures and
20th Century Fox.