Kate Winslet Said Kissing Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Titanic’ Wasn’t “All It’s Cracked Up To Be”

Kate Winslet is crushing the dreams of Titanic and Leonardo DiCaprio fans near, far, wherever they are. In a new video for Vanity Fair, Winslet watched the film’s iconic “I’m flying” scene that has been recreated by pretty much anyone who has ever been on a boat and she ruined a bit of the movie magic by saying that filming it was a “nightmare.”

“No wonder every young girl in the world wanted to be kissed by Leonardo DiCaprio,” she teased. “It was not all it’s cracked up to be.”

It wasn’t necessarily DiCaprio’s skill that made the smooch bad, however. Winslet explained that their makeup kept rubbing off onto each other.

“We kept doing this kiss, and I have a lot of pale makeup on and I would have to do our makeup checks—me, on both of us, between takes—and I would end up looking as though I had been sucking a caramel chocolate bar after each take, because his makeup would come off on me,” she said.

“And he just looked like there was a bit missing from his face, because there was this big pale bit from all my makeup getting onto him,” she remembered. “Oh God, it was such a mess.”

Not to mention, there ironically wasn’t room on the prop ship for the makeup artist, so Winslet had to take matters into her own hands…or dress, that is. The actress kept both his and her own makeup compacts and brushes tucked into the top of her dress.
“This was a section of the ship—it wasn’t part of the actual whole ship set that we had,” she explained. “We had to climb up a ladder to get to it, I remember. Hair and makeup couldn’t reach us.”

“Now, what you wouldn’t know, because Leo looks completely natural, but he had to lie on sunbeds; there’s a lot of fake tan makeup going on,” she continued. “So, I have got hidden in [one side of my dress] his makeup and brushes and sponge, and [mine] in the other side. And between takes, I was basically redoing our makeup.”

All in all, filming the scene proved to be quite difficult, and not just because of their not-so-transfer-proof foundation.

“This was a nightmare, shooting this,” Winslet recalled. “Because Leo couldn’t stop laughing, and we had to reshoot this about four times because [director James Cameron] wanted a very specific light for this, obviously, and the sunsets kept changing where we were.”
This scene in particular—along with “paint me like one of your French girls”—is one of the most quoted scenes from the flick. Winslet added that people even come up to her asking her to recreate it with them, which she said “does my head in. Every time, without fail.”

Of course, the critically acclaimed movie went on to become a Blockbuster hit (earning $2.2 billion globally), a 14-time Oscar nominated film, and a pop-culture phenomenon, and Winslet is still “very proud” of the movie to this day.

“It is that film that just keeps giving,” she told VF. “Whole other generations of people are discovering the film or seeing it for the first time, and there’s something extraordinary about that.”