That’s what the studio executives said, anyway!
What does the 1998 blockbuster “Titanic” have to do with manufacturing?
Very little, of course. Have you seen this movie? It’s about the infamous 1912 disaster during which an ocean liner deemed unsinkable hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage and promptly sunk. Roughly 1,500 people drowned, an enormous human tragedy. But even though director James Cameron’s movie took a reasonable amount of artistic license in recreating this drama, no factories went down with the ship.
It was quite an ordeal making it, though. It took 160 days to shoot and cost more than double its initial $100 million budget. Cameron was reportedly a real nightmare on set. Somebody spiked a crew dinner with PCP. Leonardo DiCaprio reportedly pulled the “I’m famous” card to get out of paying his bar tabs.
And! Most interesting of all, the majority of the movie was shot on a seaside set – on a replica of the ship 90 percent to scale, in a 17-million-gallon tank – at a studio in Baja Mexico built specifically by Twentieth Century Fox for the film’s production.
This of course was not the first time Mexico had hosted a runaway Hollywood film production, but it’s one of the most cited examples, likely because it was for nakedly economic reasons. Fox’s studio on the Baja coast was built shortly after NAFTA went into effect, which made it markedly cheaper to send movie productions across the border. The deal specifically made it easy to send equipment and film stock south tariff free. “This is NAFTA at work!” Fox’s Tom Sherak said at the time.
The move also reportedly helped Fox avoid contentious dealings with the Teamsters union.
And so, several major Hollywood projects were shot in Mexico in subsequent years, including Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic” (2000) and Mel Gibson’s Mayan epic, “Apocalypto” (2006). The Baja studio specifically was used to shoot movies with lots of scenes in the water, like “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” (2003) and “Deep Blue Sea” (1999), which I gotta say is an all-timer for this scene alone (huge spoiler, but watch it anyway):
Cameron, when accepting awards for what turned out to be a record-setting movie, credited the locals who staffed Titanic’s production and served as its hundreds of on-screen extras. “Titanic is as much as Mexican movie as a product of Hollywood,” he remarked as he was made a member of the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle by President Ernesto Zedillo. “And since it has obtained the most Oscars – a total of eleven – in the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, we might say that we have made history together.”
But NAFTA wasn’t great for legitimately Mexican film production. By the late ’90s, film production in Mexico was barely a thing, with only 17 films being made per year between 1995-2000. That said, the industry there by no means died; in the 2000s the Mexican government approved production incentives, like the one known as EFICINE, which significantly boosted private investment in moviemaking. “This stimulus, as well as other measures, sparked production,” reads an article in Mexican outlet Aceprensa, “and in 2019, 216 films were produced and 111 in 2020, an especially difficult year for the industry due to the pandemic.”
Titanic was really an international production. Financed in Hollywood, shot largely in Mexico, and worked on in post-production in Europe, it was praised by Fox’s president, Rupert Murdoch, at the time of its release. “This cross-border cultural co-operation is not the result of regulation, but market forces,” he said. “It’s the freedom to move capital, technology and talent around the world that adds value, invigorates ailing markets, creates new ones.”
For a time, Fox offered a tour of its Baja studio, where visitors could check out the huge tank and look at Titanic-themed exhibits. The studio has since changed hands, and the tour is no longer available. Today, the Mexican film industry is thriving and has produced a number of top-flight directors, and it’s also a hub of American film and television production.
It’s close and has a well-trained workforce with plenty of knowhow – and very little union density, especially compared to the very unionized film and television industry in the United States. The trade deals between the U.S., Canada and Mexico set the stage so that film production decamping for Mexico would happen whether “Titanic” was shot there or not. Nevertheless, the story behind the movie’s production is interesting!