Titanic has just turned 25, and that's prompted a look back at the 1997 hit. In a recent retrospective, the crew reminisced on an interesting event in the production history of the film: a night in which the clam chowder was spiked with PCP, causing chaos on the set.
Titanic was once the highest grossing box office film of all time, before being dethroned by another little-known James Cameron project, Avatar. The film centered on the sinking of the Titanic, a travesty that occurred in 1912. The ocean liner, the RMS Titanic, entered frigid waters on April 14 of that year, before striking an iceberg and sinking entirely in the early morning hours of April 15. 1,500 passengers died, out of a total of 2,240 passengers. The film used this tragedy to tell a love story involving Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet).
In a retrospective, Vulture explored one of the most infamous nights in the film's production. The crew and some members of the cast had been eating clam chowder when it was discovered that someone had laced the catering with drugs. Cameron suspected a "red tide", a naturally occurring toxin that makes shellfish dangerous to eat, before it was discovered that the food was actually contaminated with PCP.
Apparently, Cameron himself was affected. Crew member Jake Clarke recalled, “We had a room for the grips and electricians, and one of the guys started talking really hyper. He’s a big guy, like six-four, and he says, ‘Do you guys feel okay? Because I don’t. I feel like I’m on something, and believe me, I would know.’ He was just chattering on like that. And just as he was saying this, we saw James Cameron run by the door and this extra running behind him. He said, ‘There’s something in me! Get it out!’”
Though the culprit was never caught, evidently, the event left a big impact on the crew. Cameron's production took longer than anticipated - the incident occurred during the last day of filming in Halifax, but because so many cast and crew members were incapacitated, the studio granted Cameron an extra day to finish shooting. Production was slated to move to Rosarito, Mexico, which is where Winslet and DiCaprio would film their scenes, so the two were not involved in the incident.
Cameron is known to be detail-oriented, a perfectionist, so the extra filming day actually "thrilled" him, reportedly. The crew, meanwhile, appear to have found humor in the situation. Clarke recalled, “One of the art-department guys made T-shirts, and he recreated that chowder on the corner of the T-shirt. He gave that out to a bunch of the local crew. It said underneath it, ‘Good crew, bad crew.’”
Source: Vulture