It may be difficult for some to imagine anyone other than Leonardo DiCaprio starring in James Cameron’s Titanic.
But Cameron himself couldn’t even picture the star in the movie at first. In the end, it took little convincing for the filmmaker to change his mind.
Why James Cameron didn’t want Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Titanic’
There were many young actors vying for the part of Jack Dawson in the 1997 feature Titanic. Matthew McConaughey, Chris O’ Donnel, and allegedly Christian Bale all lobbied for the main role in the record-breaking blockbuster. By the time DiCaprio was suggested for the role, Cameron admitted he wasn’t too sold on the idea.
“The curious thing is, I actually didn’t want Leo at first,” Cameron once told Vanity Fair. “Leo was recommended by the studios, as were other young, hot actors. . . . He didn’t strike me as necessarily having the qualities that I wanted for my Jack.”
But it didn’t take long for the Oscar-winner to convince Cameron otherwise.
“But I met him and basically just loved him. He can quickly charm a group of people without doing anything obvious. . . . The second I met him I was convinced,” the filmmaker added.
But DiCaprio also had his doubts about doing the role. Before Titanic, he gravitated towards characters that were a bit more conflicted and three dimensional in films like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Jack Dawson might not have had the level of depth DiCaprio normally looked for in his movies. But Cameron convinced DiCaprio that was exactly what would’ve made playing Jack so challenging.
“Look, in a way, that’s the easy stuff,” Cameron continued. “Because you’ve got s*** to hide behind. When you’re playing someone who is very clear . . . you have to make the scenes work from a place of purity.”
Leonardo DiCaprio had a negative attitude in ‘Titanic’
It took a while for Cameron to warm up to DiCaprio. Immediately, the director and the movie star butted heads because DiCaprio was against some of Cameron’s requests.
“So Leo came in, of course, charmed everybody, myself included, and I said ‘All right, let’s see what your chemistry’s like with Kate.’ So he comes in a couple of days later, he didn’t know he was gonna test,’ Cameron recalled in an interview with GQ. ‘He came in, he thought it was another meeting to meet Kate. And I said ‘Okay, so we’ll just go in the next room and we’ll just, we’ll run some lines and I’ll video it.’ And he said, ‘You mean I’m reading?’, and I said ‘Yeah!’ And he said, ‘Oh, I don’t read,’ and I said well, I shook his hand, and said ‘Well, thanks for coming by.’”
DiCaprio’s slight attitude towards reading almost cost him the part, as Cameron wasn’t willing to give him the role without him meeting that requirement. DiCaprio would finally, but begrudgingly, read for the filmmaker.
“So he comes in and he’s like… every ounce of his entire being is just so negative. Right up until I said ‘Action’, and then he turned into Jack. And Kate just lit up, and they went into this whole thing and played the scene… Dark clouds had opened up and a ray of sun came down and lit up Jack. I’m like ‘All right, he’s the guy,’” Cameron said.
Leonardo DiCaprio considered ‘Titanic’ an experiment
Even DiCaprio might not have expected the amount of success Titanic would experience or how his life would change because of it. But looking back, DiCaprio was very much aware of how different the film was from other movies he’d done.
“Titanic was very much an experiment for Kate Winslet and I. We’d done all of these independent movies. I loved her as an actress and she said, ‘Let’s do this together, we can do this.’ We did it, and it became something that we could’ve never foreseen,” DiCaprio once said in an interview with Deadline.
DiCaprio did obtain a level of fame that could sometimes be overwhelming thanks to Titanic’s achievements. But it afforded the star more freedom in his career than ever.
“I had forged by then exactly what type of films I wanted to do. I used it as a blessing, to make R-rated, different kinds of movies, to throw the dice a little bit on things I wanted to act in. People would want to finance those movies now. I’d never had that, before Titanic,” DiCaprio added.
