The unexpected death of Bill Paxton at 61 due to complications from surgery left millions of fans of the beloved actor stunned and saddened. Currently starring in the CBS reboot of the 2001 hit film Training Day, Paxton had also completed his work in the upcoming feature film adaptation of Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle. In his prolific 40 year career in front of and behind the camera (he directed his first feature film, Frailty, in 2001), Paxton is perhaps best known for his work with his friend and longtime collaborator, director James Cameron.
As Cameron noted in a tribute he penned for Vanity Fair, he and Paxton shared “36 years of making films together, helping develop each others projects, going on scuba diving trips together, watching each others kids growing up, even diving the Titanic wreck together in Russian subs.” Appearing in many of Cameron’s most popular blockbusters, Paxton had memorable roles as an LA street punk dispatched by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s killer cyborg in The Terminator, as an excitable space marine in Aliens, as a used car salesman pretending to be a spy in True Lies, and as a treasure hunter in Titanic. Paxton’s role in Titanic is that epic film’s most underrated component.
The unprecedented success of Titanic has since become nearly as legendary as the tragic shipwreck the film was based upon. With an unmatched run as the number one movie at the box office for 15 consecutive weeks since its December 1997 premiere, Titanic went on to become the highest-grossing film of all-time worldwide with a total of $2,185,372,302 (after its 2012 theatrical reissue). It would hold the record for 12 years until Cameron’s own Avatar surpassed it in 2010. The ill-fated, Academy Award-winning love story of Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) set against the real-life tragedy of the sinking of the “unsinkable” ocean liner has resonated among moviegoers for a generation and has become an indelible part of cinematic history and of pop culture.
Alongside the star-making performances by DiCaprio and Winslet, the Oscar-winning direction by Cameron, Titanic’s astounding visual effects, and the Billboard chart-topping hit song “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion as the primary reasons for Titanic’s blockbuster success and global acclaim, the film has a (not-so-secret) weapon: Bill Paxton.
Are You Ready to Go Back To Titanic?
In Titanic, Paxton anchors the modern day framing sequences that wrap around the bulk of the film’s story, which is told in flashback. Paxton portrays Brock Lovett, a treasure hunter aboard the research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh. Lovett and his team are conducting a salvage operation in the North Atlantic, searching the wreck of the RMS Titanic, which struck an iceberg and was lost on April 14, 1912. Lovett recovers a safe containing a drawing of a woman wearing the coveted item Lovett is searching for around her neck: a diamond necklace known as the Heart of the Ocean. The woman in the drawing, Rose Dawson Calvert, is a survivor of the Titanic. Portrayed in the twilight of her years by Gloria Stuart, Rose is invited on board the Keldysh to meet with Lovett. From there, Rose narrates her story to Lovett and his crew, telling them of her forbidden romance with the penniless artist named Jack Dawson she met on the Titanic, and the circumstances that led to his heroic sacrifice so she could survive.
From a storytelling perspective, the modern day framing sequences of Titanic, while not as well-remembered as the romantic sweep of Jack and Rose’s story, were a vital component as to why the movie worked as well as it did. Acknowledging that the Titanic’s sinking was a historical event from nearly a century ago that audiences were only vaguely aware of, Cameron wisely used the Lovett scenes as a means to explain the technical details to everyone watching. Cameron even brilliantly included a scene where Lovett used a computer simulation to depict how the ship struck the iceberg, broke apart and sank. Armed with the cold hard facts of the event, the audience was then prepared with what to expect in terms of what was to happen to the ship itself, allowing them to now focus on the human side of Rose’s story about her and Jack. “Are you ready to go back to Titanic?” Lovett asks old Rose, launching us into the true heart of Titanic’s tale.
