There is one event, more than any other, that sealed the public image of James Cameron, and that is the last five seconds of his 1997 Best Director Oscar acceptance speech for Titanic. In the second of three speeches he would deliver that night, Cameron quoted Leonardo DiCaprio’s line from his film, “I’m the king of the world! Wahooooooo!” and lifted his trophy triumphantly. “The funniest moment of the whole thing, in retrospect, was the quizzical expression on Warren Beatty’s face after he gave me the Oscar,” Cameron recalled, when I asked him about the speech for my book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron. “His expression was like ‘what the fuck were you thinking?’” What Cameron had intended as a heartfelt display of his exuberance had come across instead as self-congratulatory, especially to a room that had already seen Titanic collect most of the awards and box office receipts they hoped would go to their own films.

The delicate art of delivering an acceptance speech comes easily to some—Meryl Streep’s flustered gratitude and Robert Downey Jr.’s laconic wit could be how-to tutorials for the 30-second medium. But Cameron, for all his industry stature, has never seemed entirely at home behind a Hollywood awards podium.

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This is how “meet cute” happens in James Cameron’s Avatar: At night in a jungle on the alien moon Pandora, Jake Sully, a cocky Marine played by Sam Worthington, stumbles into a pack of snapping, six-legged predators called viperwolves. This jarhead is about to become a viperpuppy chew toy when a lithe huntress named Neytiri (Star Trek’s Zoe Salanda) intervenes. Luckily for Jake, Neytiri is handy with a bow and arrow. She’s also smart, bilingual, spiritual, great with animals, and—for a 10-foot-tall cyan-colored woman with a tail—a babe.

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Media buzz on the movie began to swirl around Cameron’s apparent ravenousness with money. Variety launched a regular “Titanic Watch” column to detail the set’s excesses, and Time ran a piece head-lined “Glub, Glub, Glub . . . Can James Cameron’s Extravagant Titanic Avoid Disaster?” It didn’t help that Waterworld, Kevin Costner’s $170 million high-seas adventure released in July 1995, was widely regarded as a costly misfire. Early efforts to market Titanic were challenging, too, including finding enough material to present at ShoWest, the Las Vegas convention of theater exhibitors, in March 1997. Almost none of the special-effects shots were done. It was decided to use a long, linear trailer instead of a bunch of quick-cut scenes. On a Sunday night, before she was to view the material, Sanchini got a call from a studio executive at Paramount. “I just saw the trailer, and I’m throwing up on my shoes,” he told her. Paramount was expecting something Cameron-esque—chases, explosions—not a little old lady narrating a story about a necklace. Meanwhile, the production was dragging way behind schedule. Meant to take 135 days to shoot, Titanic would actually require 165 days of production. Titanic the movie appeared to be mirroring Titanic the ship—a creation that was far too large, a product of man’s hubris barreling toward an iceberg.

Cameron tuned out the media hum, but the budget pressures weighed on him. “I felt very strongly that I had let these guys down,” Cameron says of Fox. “I had told them I would do it for a certain amount of money, and I’d failed to deliver on that.” In a series of exchanges during the making of the movie, Cameron kept offering to give Fox back money, first his front-end fee, then his entire share of the back end. Twentieth Century Fox president Bill Mechanic, the unfortunate Fox executive charged with reining the production in, told Cameron the back-end offer was a noble but ultimately hollow gesture, because the film would never see a dime of profit. He countered by suggesting that Cameron should not only surrender all his points on Titanic but give back half his points on the next film he did for Fox. This conversation happened in Cameron’s living room. Mechanic’s counteroffer didn’t go over well. “Get the fuck out of my house,” Cameron replied. The director rescinded his offer of the back-end points. “Nobody ever gives back money in Hollywood,” says Chernin, Mechanic’s boss at the time. “On the one hand, Jim was killing us. On the other hand, here was a man of great conscience.” In the end, the filmmaker and his studio agreed on one thing. “We kept saying, ‘Our only hope is to make a great movie,’” Chernin says.

But then, the director said the same thing while making Titanic. “There was gonna be no song, dammit, in my movie,” Titanic composer James Horner recalled to me in July, when I was interviewing him about Avatar. “That was a closed issue.” But as he grew close to finishing the Titanic score in 1996, Horner was stumped about how to end the movie musically. He ended up sneaking into a studio with Celine Dion and secretly recording My Heart Will Go On, the ballad he had written with lyricist Will Jennings. Horner waited weeks to play the song for Cameron, holding out for a rare good mood day. The result is, of course, soundtrack history. When I asked Horner in July if he had a similar plan up his sleeve for Avatar, he didn’t answer, just got a twinkle in his eye and offered to show me some footage.

“The first test screening for Titanic was at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. [Director-writer James] Cameron flew there ahead, ostensibly to test the audio systems, while producers Jon Landau and Rae Sanchini and 8 or 9 20th Century Fox executives rode in on the corporate plans.

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