![]() Ruling the RadioĬeline Dion attends the 41 Grammy Awards. Cameron ultimately went for the song, and when he screened the film-complete with “My Heart Will Go On”-for Dion and Angélil, Celine cried her eyes out. Session co-producer Simon Franglen made a rough mix to play for a skeptical Cameron, and Horner carried around a cassette for weeks, waiting to catch the director in a good mood. “Everybody started to cry, and I got caught by the emotion as well, by the story of the movie and the whole thing,” Dion said in a TV interview. Moved by the story and buzzing from black coffee, which sped up her vibrato, Celine nailed the song in a single take. “My girly days are starting to happen.” After Horner gave Dion a quick summary of the Titanic plot, the singer dimmed the lights and stepped into the vocal booth. “I have belly pains,” she told Billboard. The Canadian superstar was not pleased, and when she arrived in New York City to lay down vocals a few weeks later, she was feeling even worse. Perhaps sensing the song’s potential, Angélil stopped Horner’s performance and agreed to have Dion record a demo. While Horner played, she mouthed “I don’t want to do that song” to her husband and manager, René Angélil. Beyond that, Dion didn’t want to record another movie theme. Jennings says Dion was always their top choice to sing “My Heart Will Go On,” but when Horner first played her the song on piano in her Las Vegas hotel suite, she wasn’t impressed.Īccording to Dion, Horner (who died in a plane crash in 2015) wasn’t a great singer, so he didn’t do the best job of selling his song. By 1997, Dion had scored a couple of massive soundtrack hits-including “Beauty and the Beast,” the title track from the 1991 Disney movie, and “Because You Loved Me,” from Jon Avnet's Up Close & Personal-and blossomed into a pop heavyweight. Horner and Jennings had worked together on the 1991 animated feature An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, and they tapped Celine Dion to sing the demo version of “Dreams to Dream,” a song they ultimately gave to Linda Ronstadt, who was then a bigger star. With the music and lyrics in place, Horner and Jennings now just needed someone to sing the darn thing. ![]() Using Wood’s story as a stand-in for Rose’s, Jennings came up with “My Heart Will Go On,” a song about resilience and eternal love. “When she shook my hand, I had such a feeling of vitality and life force-it was like nothing in my life before or since,” Jennings told Songfacts. In order to gain a better understanding of Cameron's inspiration, Jennings met with Wood, who was then 103 years old and still working. ![]() She had studied in Paris before World War I and lived an incredible life. Though Wood was not a Titanic passenger, she, like Rose, had a deep passion for art. Horner told Jennings the movie centered on the character of Rose DeWitt Bukater, a Titanic survivor looking back on a love affair decades later.Ĭameron partly drew inspiration for Rose from Beatrice Wood, an artist nicknamed the "Mama of Dada," whose autobiography the director was reading during Titanic's development. He recruited Will Jennings, with whom he’d worked on other film projects, to write the lyrics. It incorporated elements of his score and promised to fit seamlessly into the movie. Unbeknownst to the film’s producers, Titanic composer James Horner had already begun writing a song for the end credits. The director simply didn’t think one would fit into his “very dramatic, historical drama.” Titanic executive producer Jon Landau refuted this claim, insisting that Cameron was always willing to consider a pop song. Speaking to Billboard for a “My Heart Will Go On” oral history in 2017, former Sony Music boss Tommy Mottola suggested Cameron was pressured by the film studio to provide an “additional powerful marketing tool,” as some feared the movie would be a flop. There are different theories as to why Cameron included a modern pop song at the end of his period drama, even though he was staunchly against the idea. It wound up being a massive undertaking, and when Titanic finally hit theaters in December 1997, it was $100 million over budget and six months late. But after watching a documentary on Robert Ballard’s 1985 discovery of the wreck of the RMS Titanic-which famously sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, killing approximately 1500 people-Cameron resolved to make a movie about the doomed ocean liner. Prior to Titanic, filmmaker James Cameron was known for sci-fi fare like Aliens, The Abyss, and the Terminator series. Celine Dion and René Angélil attend the 'Titanic' premiere.
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