Watch ‘Titanic’ on Netflix: A Viewing Guide

Mar 23, 2024

By Katey Rich

As the media frenzy surrounding the Titan sub proved, our national obsession with Titanic has barely abated since it sank over 100 years ago. But there are different ways to pursue that obsession, and for those of us uninterested in traveling to the bottom of the ocean to see the wreck, there’s an alternative: the 1997 Oscar-winning epic Titanic, streaming once again on Netflix starting July 1. (It’s also still available to stream on Prime Video). Given the frequency with which the movie trends on TikTok or sparks Twitter debates, there may be a whole lot of Americans spending their long Independence Day weekend sinking back into the depths of the North Atlantic.

So what better way to do that than with our viewing guide? With time stamps to tell you when to pause and commence googling, we’ve collected some fascinating behind-the-scenes details, actor memories, and historical facts to accompany your Titanic viewing. You may never see some of the movie’s most famous scenes—Jack and Rose in the car included—the same way again.

This opening sequence was conceived at virtually the last minute, according to James Cameron’s director’s commentary. “One bottle of tequila and 20 hours later” he had figured it out: Use footage he’d already shot, make it look old-timey, pair it with the saddest part of James Horner’s score, and boom.

That’s a chillingly apt description of what is presumed to have happened to the Titan submersible passengers. One expert compared it to having the weight of the Eiffel Tower land on them.

Even in 1997, this was a throwback reference. In 1986 Geraldo Rivera hosted the two-hour primetime special The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults, in which he opened a walled-off room once owned by the crime lord, live on TV. The vault, as you might imagine, yielded nothing except debris. Despite what Lewis Bodine claims, Rivera was doing pretty much fine at the time, hosting the daytime Geraldo and the evening Rivera Live on CNBC. It’s what’s happened since in his Fox News career that he might really never recover from.

Cameron drew all of Jack Dawson’s art himself, with a flourish of JD initials in the corner similar to the director’s own signature. He says Winslet posed for this sketch before production began wearing a bikini, since “We didn’t know each other well enough for her to pose nude for me.”

This tight close-up flashback is the first time you see Leonardo DiCaprio in the film. I was in the movie theater in early 1998; I remember the shrieks. DiCaprio famously had to be talked into taking the role, and Cameron didn’t really want him at first either, though he later fought for the actor. “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,” the director told Vanity Fair in 1998.

Who would have guessed that 25 years later this might be the most frequently circulated image from the film?

An enormous analog production just before digital effects made much of this effort moot, Titanic built just one side of the enormous ship—but not the side that was actually docked in Southampton, where its journey began. A stickler for detail, Cameron decided to flip the image in post-production to make everything face the historically correct direction, which means any writing seen in the scene—logos on delivery trucks, uniforms, etc.—had to be done in reverse. The behind-the-scenes footage reveals just how elaborate the effort was. “This flopping thing I haven’t been able to get my head around at all,” Winslet says in the video.

If you’ve spent the past decade with children, the names of these randos that Jack wins the tickets from may have acquired new meaning.

Pushing past Jack and Fabrizio in the crowded third-class hallway, here’s your first glimpse of Nice Irish Mother, played by Cameron fave Jenette Goldstein. Once you realize she also played Vasquez in Aliens and then learn she now runs a franchise of bra stores called Jenette Bras, you’ll be on a research rabbit hole you may never recover from. Feel free to pause the movie here.

Is it overkill to have teenage Rose DeWitt Bukater travel to Paris and just happen to purchase multiple future masterpieces? Maybe. But the real drama happened when the Picasso estate denied Cameron’s request to use Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in the film, and he put it in anyway. He paid a fee at the time—presumably a tiny fraction of the film’s gross—but when it was rereleased in 3D, the estate demanded he pay up a second time. (“I don’t expect we’ll have any difficulty” getting paid, a representative for the company guarding Picasso’s rights told The New York Times in 2012.)

Cameron, who infamously reused the line for his Oscar speech, says he made up this line on set that day. “I was in a crane basket, and we were losing the light,” Cameron told the BBC in 2019, remembering his on-set efforts to suggest something for Jack to shout in that moment . “And I said, ‘Alright, I’ve got one for you. Just say, ‘I’m the king of the world.’” DiCaprio, maybe rightly, was a little baffled, to which Cameron responded, “Just fucking sell it.”

The elaborate tracking shot that closes out this scene is almost entirely CGI, including the folks walking on the deck. Again, for 1997, the effects are pretty incredible, but if you look too closely at the fake Captain Smith, the uncanny valley does start to take hold.

Everyone found their local angle on Titanic back in 1997, and the Chicago Tribune had the scoop that Jack Dawson was full of shit: Lake Wissota didn’t actually exist until five years after the Titanic sank. It remains a popular spot for fishing though.

Want to see a super-embryonic version of this scene? Kate Winslet’s screen test, opposite Jeremy Sisto auditioning for Jack, is online, essentially a dispatch from an alternate universe version of the movie.

By Savannah Walsh

By Rebecca Ford

By Chris Murphy

The Unsinkable Molly Brown was, of course, a very famous real Titanic passenger, and as she recounts later in the film, she really hid money in the stove. For the full Molly Brown deep dive it’s hard to do better than the 1964 musical starring Debbie Reynolds, which includes its own brief recreation of the Titanic sinking.

The scene of Jack and Rose hocking loogies off the first-class deck may be a pretty accurate encapsulation of the real, sibling-like dynamic between 21-year-old Winslet and 22-year-old DiCaprio on set. They shared cigarettes between takes and pranked each other repeatedly. “We’d do the most ridiculous things to each other,” Winslet told Rolling Stone around the time the film was released. “He’d be tickling me, groping me, sort of winding me up. And I’d be doing the same thing back, sort of grabbing his bum.” As Billy Zane told the magazine, “Grossing Kate out was purely Leo’s job.” The two have brought such an affectionate dynamic to awards shows since that a whole new generation is now wishing they were a real-life couple.

This is also one of a few moments where you can glimpse Brett Baker, DiCaprio’s photo double, who shared his strange Titanic journey with Vanity Fair back in 2016.

Still excellent advice from Molly Brown. Raise your hand if you’ve thought of her every time you’ve sat down at a fancy dinner.

In the late ’90s people loved harping on the anachronistic use of this phrase, which was either invented by Tom Wolfe or the He-Man cartoon, depending on whom you ask.

The first Titanic soundtrack was, like the movie, a massive, chart-topping hit. But there was also a second soundtrack, titled Back to Titanic, that featured much of the Irish music from the third-class party, as well as some other tracks that didn’t make the cut. It managed to sell at least 1 million copies in the US. Not bad for a selection of B-sides.

You can watch a mesmerizing gif of Cameron and a handheld camera capturing Jack and Rose’s famous spin, and in behind-the-scenes footage you can see DiCaprio take a spill at the end of one particularly tricky move. According to Winslet in that same video, it was as fun to participate in as it was to watch: “Watching Leo dance…I would happily pay good money to do again. It was…very funny.”

Somehow a rumor went around recently that Billy Zane had improvised his breakfast table flip, but as he told Vulture in 2022, “There’s improv and then there’s chaos.” The table flip may have been decided on that day, but Zane, much more of a gentleman than Caledon Hockley, made sure Winslet was well aware of the moment and safe. “I would never have done that just randomly. It would have been dangerous and inappropriate.”

As this scene was originally written, Rose was lacing up her mother’s corset—but Cameron says that the night before filming he realized the power dynamic would be much clearer if it was the other way around, possibly at the encouragement of one of the actresses. “It really shows you how organic the process of making a film can be and should be,” he says. “You have to keep yourself open to these ideas as they come up.”

The brief image of a boy spinning a top on the deck of the Titanic is a recreation of a real photograph of Douglas Spedden, a child who survived the sinking but died three years later after being hit by a car. The photograph was taken by a Jesuit priest who boarded the ship in Southampton but disembarked in Ireland, missing the sinking entirely.

According to Cameron, that’s a natural sunset you see here, with light so striking that when Winslet emerged from wardrobe she shouted, “Shoot! Shoot!” There wasn’t even time to rehearse or get more than one shot in focus. “This is exactly what God gave us that day,” Cameron says.

This nude scene was one of the first Winslet and DiCaprio filmed together, and as the story goes, she flashed him before filming began to get them both comfortable with the idea. “She had no shame with it,” DiCaprio says in the film’s official behind-the-scenes book. “She wanted to break the ice a little beforehand, so she flashed me. I wasn’t prepared for that, she had one up on me. I was pretty comfortable after that.”

Like so much else about the Titanic, it’s somehow still up for debate.

Winslet and DiCaprio had to get past their prankish brother-and-sister dynamic to film the sex scene, which Winslet told Rolling Stone in 1998 was actually nice despite the potential for awkwardness. “Doing the scene, it so wasn’t us,” she said. “Even though I didn’t feel that way about Leo, it was quite nice to sort of feel that way in the scene. It was quite lovely. And then, y’know, the camera stopped rolling and he gets up and walks off, and the scene’s done. And I remember lying there thinking, ‘What a shame that’s over.’ Because it was quite nice. It was.”

A line taken directly from the historical record. Did Jack and Rose’s kissing distract the lookouts from seeing the iceberg sooner? Up for debate.

Those guys kicking a chunk of ice around like a soccer ball weren’t the only ones getting frisky with the deadly iceberg. In a deleted scene, Rose shoves a bit of ice down the back of Jack’s collar, full middle school flirting style.

By Savannah Walsh

By Rebecca Ford

By Chris Murphy

As you might guess from all the other historical details in the movie, Arthur Larned Ryerson was a real person, a first-class passenger who died in the sinking.

If you watched Titanic on the two-part VHS that was released in September 1998, you may remember this as your cue to pop in the second tape. The movie wasn’t released with an intermission, but some theaters seem to have taken it into their own hands to insert one. (I am certain the one in my theater came after flares are first shot into the dark sky, but alas, I’ll never be able to prove it.)

Though the actors playing the crew have been visible throughout the film, it’s only when the sinking starts that you really pay attention to them. This one demanding “women and children only” is Second Officer Charles Lightoller, played by Jonny Phillips, who wound up being the most senior crew member to survive. He’s the source of Jack’s earlier line describing the cold water as “like a thousand knives,” and survived the sinking by clinging to an overturned lifeboat. He went on to serve as an officer in World War I, and during World War II, sailed his private boat to Dunkirk to assist in the rescue effort, bringing home 127 British soldiers on a ship made to hold 21.

According to Cameron’s commentary, Rose spitting in Cal’s face, calling back to the earlier spitting scene, was Winslet’s idea—the script had her stab him with a hairpin.

Here’s something you couldn’t see in theaters: When Rose swings the axe to break the chain on Jack’s handcuffs, the prop axe she’s using makes square contact with his hands—something you can really only see if you watch it frame by frame. The clanging sound effect sure sells it, though.

When anyone who worked on Titanic talks about the production, they complain about the water. “There were days when you’d just think, ‘Oh, God, I’ve got my period and I can’t get in that freezing-cold water today,’” Winslet told Rolling Stone in 1998. “I remember standing up and saying to everyone, ‘Listen, if it suddenly looks like Jaws, the movie, it’s my fault.”

In behind-the-scenes footage, DiCaprio admits, with seemingly a little bit of embarrassment, “I’m very temperature-sensitive…to act when you’re freezing, it’s hard to concentrate.” At the film’s wrap party, Winslet gave him a thick thermal blanket, “in which he buried himself,” per his VF profile. “After the whole experience,” he told VF, “I know it’s really not my cup of tea—all respect to Jim and the actors who do that type of thing.”

Victor Garber’s Mr. Andrews, the film’s great conscience, is right—lifeboat number one was launched with just 12 people in it, and in inquiries after the sinking, one of the officers claimed it was the women on board who objected to going back and picking up more survivors. There were even extensive tabloid rumors that one wealthy couple had bribed the crew not to go back, earning it the nickname “the Money Boat.”

Bruce Ismay really did survive the sinking by hopping on board a lifeboat, and caught hell for it in at the time, though the official British inquiry determined more or less what you see in the film—he only got on the lifeboat when there were no women and children nearby to board. He resigned from the White Star Line in 1913, and lived most of the rest of his life in private before dying in 1937. A hundred years later his descendants were still begging for his name to be cleared.

For my money, it’s Billy Zane’s best line reading in the movie. If you’ve been drinking throughout this, now’s the time to raise a glass.

Back in 2021 a now-deleted TikTok seemed convinced that Winslet’s stunt double Sarah Franzl’s face is visible in this running sequence. In an archival interview Franzl seems to confirm it, saying that Winslet’s face is superimposed on to her body in some frames but not others. There’s no doubt that Franzl looked a whole lot like Winslet in their matching red wigs, so you might have to be Franzl herself to see the difference in the final film.

By Savannah Walsh

By Rebecca Ford

By Chris Murphy

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It’s likely somewhere in this scene where Kate Winslet says she nearly drowned. In a remarkably frank LA Times interview from May 1997, months before the movie was released, Winslet showed off her bruises and scratches from the recently wrapped Titanic production. In one take, the coat she’s wearing—Cal’s coat, diamond in pocket, of course—got snagged on the gate as she tried to swim past it. “I had to sort of shimmy out of the coat to get free,” she said. “I had no breath left. I thought I’d burst. And Jim just said, Okay, let’s go again.’ That was his attitude. I didn’t want to be a wimp so I didn’t complain.”

First Officer William Murdoch is probably the film’s most prominent crew member aside from the captain; the score’s best track, “Take Her to Sea, Mr. Murdoch,” is even named after him. But Murdoch’s descendants didn’t think the film did right by him, particularly for repeating the never-confirmed rumor that he committed suicide on board. In the spring of 1998 a Fox executive traveled to Murdoch’s hometown of Dalbeattie, Scotland, to personally apologize for the portrayal, particularly for showing Murdoch accepting Cal’s bribe money. Fox even donated money toward the local school’s William Murdoch Memorial Prize, but that year’s winner, teenager Lyndsay Moffat, was less than impressed: “I was quite surprised that Hollywood listened to a small town like Dalbeattie, but I still feel it’s too little too late.”

That is supposedly a variation of a quote from Benjamin Guggenheim, son of the dynasty-building Meyer Guggenheim and brother of Solomon Guggenheim, the namesake of the famous museum. Benjamin was famous in his own right at the time of the sinking, and was fondly remembered by survivors; one purportedly wrote in a letter, “The billionaire Benjamin Guggenheim after having helped the rescue of women and children got dressed, a rose at his buttonhole, to die."

If you’ve heard any Titanic myth debunked, it’s probably that the band may not have actually played this mournful hymn in their final moments. But did you really think the movie was going to squander this opportunity?

The couple are based on Isidor and Ida Straus, another pair of Titanic A-listers—he was a co-owner of Macy’s—who entered into legend when they each refused to get into a lifeboat, Ida supposedly telling Isidor, “Where you go, I go.” A deleted scene from the movie recreates the moving scene. But the family connection somehow doesn’t end there. Isidor and Ida’s great-great-granddaughter Wendy Rush was the wife of Stockton Rush, the OceanGate executive who was piloting the submersible that imploded on its way to the Titanic site.

The drowning sequences are some of the most wildly complex in the entire movie, and much of the reason the Titanic production earned a reputation for going over time and over budget. Plenty of shots could be accomplished with miniatures and models, but this one, with screaming people? All of it happened for real, and in 60-degree water. Watching the behind-the-scenes footage it remains shocking there weren’t even more injuries.

Leonardo DiCaprio was fairly press shy even before Titanic made him the world’s biggest star, and didn’t talk much about his experience on set even in a big Vanity Fair profile pegged to the movie. This moment, as the bow of the ship tips precipitously into the air, is one of the few he did get into: “All of a sudden I’m being, like, towed up on the back of a poop deck with a harness around my waist. There’s, like, 200 extras cabled on with bungee cords, stuntmen ready to fall off and hit the cushioned girders. And then there’s three cranes around us with huge spotlights. Kate and I just looked at each other like, How did we get here?”

If you were watching morning TV in early 1998, you saw this particular clip a lot—DiCaprio’s mouth weirdly mushed up against Winslet’s head has been lingering in my brain ever since.

Look closely or indulge in some freeze-frames and you can see the wheels underneath the actors sliding down the deck, or the elements of the deck made out of foam so they could bounce off of them harmlessly. Sure, there’s plenty of CGI people, just like in the beginning of the film, but that’s a whole lot of real people flying through the air.

So, so many people swimming in that tank, which was not actually freezing but not all that pleasant either. According to Kate Winslet, other people—herself included—peed in the tank. There were some fake people in the mix too, something extra Ellen Mower learned the hard way. “Some jerk swam over me and dunked me,” she remembered for a 25th-anniversary local news piece. Turns out the jerk was DiCaprio. “I looked at him and he looked at me and he says, ‘Oh, I am sorry, I didn’t know you were real,’ and I said, ‘That’s okay, I have been told that I play dead well.’”

Do we really have to get back into this “dumbass” debate? We’re sticking with Cameron, Kate Winslet, and her paddleboard: There was just not enough buoyancy to keep Jack up there too. Moving on!

That handsome young officer marshaling a lifeboat to go back for survivors is played by Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd, who would have his big Hollywood moment a few years later as the star of 2005’s Fantastic Four. He’s holding another of the movie’s anachronisms that people still love to debate: There were almost definitely no flashlights on the lifeboats, though there was a “flashlight cane” belonging to a passenger named Ella White, which went up for auction in 2019.

This insert shot of the night sky is maybe the only time in history Cameron gave in to the critics. When Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out that the original field of stars was inaccurate for what would have been visible that time of year in the North Atlantic, Cameron changed it for the film’s 2012 rerelease.

At last, we arrive at the strange tale of the PCP-laced chowder, served to the crew during a night shoot in the Nova Scotia portion of the film—aka, the present-day stuff we’re seeing here. Bill Paxton was the only actor affected, and he wound up in the hospital alongside Cameron, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (who allegedly led a conga line through the hospital hallways), set painter Marilyn McAvoy, and many more. The whole incident happened before the production moved to Mexico and nearly drowned Kate Winslet, but quickly became part of the legend of Titanic’s challenged production. Even now, the PCP chowder culprit has never been found.

Be warned: Once you see this, you may never see Titanic the same way. Rather than silently drop the Heart of the Ocean back into the sea, Gloria Stuart’s Rose was originally supposed to have a whole confrontation scene with Paxton’s Brock Lovett, explaining to him in the most literal imaginable terms that “only life is priceless, and making each day count.” In the commentary Cameron says that the first time he and his team watched a cut of the film in the editing room, they knew the scene had to go. In the words of Lewis Bodine, “That really sucks, lady!”

By Savannah Walsh

By Rebecca Ford

By Chris Murphy

“Is she alive and dreaming or is she dead and on her way to Titanic heaven? I’ll never tell.” That’s how Cameron sums up the lingering ambiguity of Titanic’s final scene, in which Jack and Rose more or less have a wedding in front of only the Titanic victims we like—no Lovejoy or Ismay, a prominent spot for Trudy, the maid. Somehow this debate hasn’t gotten people nearly as worked up as the door thing. Maybe now is the time to start?

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