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Continuing his apparent never-ending quest to prove to everyone that he’s always the smartest guy in the room — which, in fairness, he probably usually is — James Cameron has revealed one of the bizarre tactics he used to save money when making his hit 1997 film Titanic.
According to Cameron, in order to make their sets appear larger, he only cast people who were shorter than 5’8″. The 69-year-old Cameron, who has directed three of the top four highest-grossing movies of all time, claims that it saved them “a million dollars.”
“The scale of everything was beyond anything we could imagine in terms of our prior experience. At the time we thought, wow, there’s no way this movie could ever make its money back. It’s just impossible. Well, guess what?” Cameron said during a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times to promote the release of the film on 4K.
“We only cast short extras so it made our set look bigger. Anybody above five foot eight, we didn’t cast them. It’s like we got an extra million dollars of value out of casting.”
In addition to Titanic, Cameron’s films Aliens, The Abyss, True Lies, Avatar, and Avatar: The Way of Water are also being released in the coming months.
Cameron is also currently working on the third Avatar film, which is currently scheduled to be released in movie theaters on December 19, 2025. While previous rumors had suggested the film would be titled Avatar: The Seed Bearer, producer Jon Landau recently claimed it will be called something else.