It’s been 20 years since James Cameron’s Titanic sailed into theaters and box office history, but one thing is clear: We never let go of Jack and Rose’s tragic love story.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet’s iconic characters and their heartbreaking, infinitely quotable romance may be entirely fictional. But the chemistry between the actors was very real—and it was obvious to Titanic filmmakers from the start.
“There was a point very, very early where we all realized it had to be Kate and Leo,” Rae Sanchini, the film’s executive producer, tells E! News exclusively.
Winslet “had been very clear from the start she wanted to do it,” says Sanchini. But getting DiCaprio on board took some serious convincing from Sanchini and writer-director Cameron.
“I think the hardest thing with Leo was convincing him that there was complexity in Jack Dawson,” Sanchini says. “Because when you think about it, Jack is the purest of heart. We meet him, and he’s not conflicted. He knows exactly who he is. He knows his place in the world. He’s fearless…he falls in love, but he doesn’t change as a person…He makes his choice to die for the woman he loves, and he’s at peace with that.”
DiCaprio, who was 23 when Titanic opened on Dec. 19, 1997, had “always played very complicated characters who have very deep flaws,” notes Sanchini. And after starring in films like Romeo + Juliet, The Basketball Diaries and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, for which he earned his first Oscar nomination, playing Jack “almost seemed, I think when he first looked at it, too easy.”
“Jim would be the first to tell you,” Sanchini says. “It’s like, ‘I interviewed Leo for 15 minutes, and he interviewed me for three months!'”
With Winslet, who was 22 when the movie came out, it was the other way around. “She’d read the script, she came out to meet us, she sent Jim roses and signed the card, ‘Rose Winslet,'” Sanchini recalls with a laugh.
“Kate is like that,” she says. “When Kate loves something, when Kate’s passionate about it, she is not one to play hard to get. She tells you how it is, and I love that about her.”
And just as Winslet knew she wanted to play Rose, she knew that DiCaprio had to be Jack. Sanchini recalls the actors “doing an informal reading together” and watching as “they got to be fast friends.”
“We all knew there was something special there,” she says. “But afterwards, Kate said to us, ‘Whether you cast me or not, you’ve gotta cast him.’ He was just the guy.”
Eventually, DiCaprio realize that “playing a character like Jack, who doesn’t have any obvious stuff to hide behind…was a challenge in and of itself,” Sanchini says.
But casting the film’s star-crossed lovers was just one piece of the Titanic-size puzzle.
For Cameron, whose real-life fascination with shipwrecks inspired him to write the film, it was imperative that the movie be as historically accurate as possible. To help with this, Titanic researcher and author Don Lynch was brought on as the historian for the film.
“In the very beginning, I went through the whole treatment with Jim,” Lynch tells E! News exclusively. “Because his questions were, ‘Well, if I have Jack and Rose here, and I want them here, can they get there easily without having to climb three flights of stairs and going the length of the ship?'”
Lynch was also on hand to consult with Cameron on logistical matters in the plot line, such as how to get third-class Jack into a first-class tuxedo when Rose’s fiancé reluctantly invites him to dinner.
“One of [Cameron’s] questions was if there was some kind of men’s shop on board like there are today on some ships,” says Lynch. “And I said, ‘Well, no, there were no stores,’ but it was my suggestion to have the unsinkable Molly Brown [played by Kathy Bates] sort of take Jack under her wing…and she had a son that age, so I said to Jim, ‘Just say that Molly Brown is bringing a tuxedo home for her son [and she loans it to Jack].’ So you know, that’s what he did—he wrote that into the script.”
