1st February 1998

Leonardo Dicaprio is the hottest young actor around, so hot that he is carrying a $250 million film, Titanic - the most expensive production ever made on his slim shoulders. But why all the fuss around the baby-faced 24 year-old, six-foot lanky lad? "He's star material," explains director Lasse Hallstrom, who directed DiCaprio to an Oscar-nominated performance in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? "In addition to depth, feel and range in his acting, he has a lot of sex appeal."

Director James Cameron say, "Leo likes to play tortured souls and wasn't interested in doing my film in the beginning."

But Titanic was hard to resist claims Leonardo because "it was a good story, and it contained some emotionally charged characters. Jim said he wanted it to be a Doctor Zhivago type of thing, and I thought it would be interesting to be part of that. Also, I'm not really Mr Action Guy, so this kind of action movie made sense to me."

Titanic is more than an action/disaster film. It is "a love story on a ship in which I play a working-class artist who meets an upper class girl and falls in love. Society doesn't like that, and in the midst of everything, the ship starts going down."

It wasn't an easy film to make for Leonardo and co-star Kate Winslet who worked for six months on tilting sets.

"You were thrown around a lot,' recalls Leonardo, "and it was very hard on your body. I tried to keep everyone's moods up by joking around while the ship was sinking.

"There were definitely certain moments when I felt like I was there for real," he continues. "When you run on the ship with 200 people around screaming for their lives while the ship is tilting up, you feel like you are there."

Filming in water for weeks on end was cold and exhausting.

Says James Cameron, "Every time we were about to do water work, Leo gets sick!" "Not true! But you just don't want to be there after a while," admits Leonardo. "I got to dump a big thing of ice and water on Jim's head at the end of shooting in front of the crew. I got away scot free, which was cool. It was my revenge."

"I tried to keep everyone's moods up by joking around while the ship was sinking'

"It wasn't easy for Kate. The first day the poor girl had to be completely naked'

Having filmed Romeo & Juliet in Mexico, where the crew got attacked, robbed and shot at, Leonardo wasn't too keen on returning there to shoot Titanic.

"There's garbage everywhere and I missed home and my mother's cooking," he remembers. "I wouldn't have chosen to spend a whole year in Mexico if l could have helped it, but those two movies happened back-to-back." It wasn't all bad.

"No," he grins, "I did get to kiss Kate, which ain't bad at all." Times have changed. Of his first wet kiss, Leonardo once told me, "It was the most disgusting thing in my life. The girl injected about a pound of saliva into my mouth, and when I walked away, I had to spit it all out!"

But the Titanic love scenes were among his favourites.

"The soul of the movie is the romance, it's what the audience - connects to. It was crucial to make it as realistic as possible."

He grins. "But it wasn't easy for Kate. The first day at work, the poor girl had to be completcly naked in front of me and the whole crew."

Despite his wealth, Leonardo could relate to the poor, young man he portrays. The son of comic book artist George DiCaprio grew up on the streets in Los Angeles.

"Growing up in the city of Hollywood stunk," he recalls. "My playground was a cesspool of hookers and drug addicts and pimps. I can identify with a working class guy." Leonardo always knew he wanted to become an actor.

"I was outgoing as a child, and whenever people came over I'd automatically do impressions of them as soon as they left. It was my mom's favourite thing," he recalls. "At the age of six, I saw kids on TV and knew that was what I wanted to do. The first time I tried to get an agent was at age seven."

After 50 auditions, the actor who was named after a Leonardo Da Vinci painting at a gallery in Italy because that's where his mother first felt him kick inside her stomach, won a role in a car commercial.

He appeared in commercials and TV series (Roseanne, Growing Pains) learning "what I didn't want to do." His film debut as the star of Critters 3, and This Boy's Life - opposite Robert De Niro made people notice him.

Although DiCaprio has never had an acting lesson, he takes his profession seriously and intends to make films that "challenge myself and the audience."

British actress Kate Winslet, 22, who portrays Rose Dewitt Bukatern, agrees that the film is no action picture.

"To me, it's an amazing love story between two people on a ship. I'm unhappily engaged to be married and then, on the Titanic, I meet Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and fall madly in love."

Director James Cameron has ensured that the story is historically accurate: "If you went back in a time machine to the ship, this is exactly how it looked. We had the ship built from the original plans by the Titanic ship builder in Belfast. The lifeboats were made by the company that built the actual ones used on the Titanic. We placed the ship in a 17-million-gallon sea-water tank so it could be raised and lowered on hydraulic lifts. Then the water was heated to 80 degrees so the actors, who spent hours drenched, were kept as warm as possible." The production filmed over six months at a 40-acre site in Rosarita Beach, Mexico, where the 775-foot-long, 10-storey-high recreation of the Titanic facade (almost a life-size copy) had been built over a period of four months. In addition to the cast, Cameron had 150 extras permanently on call, with up to 1,000 required for the film's big scenes. They didn't have an easy time of it. Reportedly they slammed into each other without padding and many got hurt. "These people are getting banged up horrible," Cameron told Time magazine at the time. "One night produced two broken ribs and a sprained ankle. But my on-set safety record is among the best in the industry."

Accused of abusing his actors and crews, Cameron had an exasperated Kate Winslet demanding a break after l3 straight days of shooting.

"At one point I nearly drowned when Leonardo and I ran along the deck pursued by a giant rushing wave, and we found ourselves trapped by a closed gate," she recalls. "We finally got it open, but my long coat snagged the gate and submerged me beneath the rising water. I had to sort of shimmy out of the coat to get free. I had no breath left. I'd thought I'd burst." Winslet had been working out with a trainer to prepare for the swimming sequences because she knew how important strength would be on a film like this. But she had not expected the degree of exhaustion she would face over the long period of filming. "I should have done an Arnold Schwarzenegger workout," she insists. "But I only lifted light weights, about five pounds, because I had to keep the length in the muscle. Back then women didn't have any muscles because they never lifted anything. They even had someone to help them get dressed." At the end of filming, Winslet, who caught flu and suffered chills from being immersed in cold water, was quoted, "You'd have to pay me a lot of money to work with Jim again." Now, having got a distance on the turbulent filming, she enthuses, "Jim's a wonderful director, but it was an exhausting ordeal. Luckily I'm a masochist, I love working until I'm exhausted."

Because of its budget, Titanic has been compared to 1963's Cleopatra (whose budget in today's dollars would rival Titanic's) and 1980's Heaven's Gate (which nearly ruined United Artists). The production could make or break Hollywood careers and affect studio management teams. "I'm not afraid of taking a risk with an awful lot of money," states Cameron. "Let the studio speculate. The more successful Titanic is, the less it costs."

"It doesn't cost any more to see Titanic than it costs to see a little romantic comedy. The guy on the street will know he's getting his money's worth because there's not a penny spent that's not on the screen. We just have to wait for the public to decide whether using so much money was silly on our part or smart."

The Remains of the Deck

On April the 10th, 1912, the largest moving object ever created by the hand of man set sail from Southampton for New York. A mobile palace of unimaginable opulence, RMS Titanic was the greatest achievement in maritime history, aptly nicknamed the 'ship of dreams.' Declared 'unsinkable' because of its 16 watertight compartments, the ship weighed a staggering 46,000 tons and transported 2,220 passengers and crew on its maiden voyage. And then it hit an iceberg...

The subject of a recent Broadway musical and numerous books and films (including Lew Grade's monstrously expensive Raise the Titanic! in 1980), the ship is now the focus of the most ambitious movie ever to come out of Hollywood. Reportedly costing an unprecedented $200 million. Titanic is the latest dream project of writer-director James Cameron, who had a $40 m studio built in Mexico specifically to serve the venture. Utilizing a six-acre outdoor tank and genuine footage of the actual wreck, his film also features a massive 90 percent scale model, state-of-the- art effects and breakthrough digital techniques.

Cameron's Titanic out-classes other disaster movies for a number of reasons. One, for its sheer realism and enormous spectacle: two, for the strong, singular storyline featuring sympathetic characters: and three, because the event actually happened.

A major move away from the popcorn escapism of Cameron's previous epics, Titanic is still privy to the occasional caricature and over-heated cliche. The villains have absolutely no redeeming features, while the odd romantic flourish stretches the bounds of good sense.

But these are minor complaints in a picture that so dynamically captures the imagination and resoundingly stirs the heart. Part historical document and part unabashed love story, the film works on a number of levels. While replete with humour and pointed irony, it is as effective as an indictment of the class system (third-class passengers were locked below deck as the ship sunk) as it is a rousing, gobsmacking spectacle.

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