Kate Winslet Reveals Iconic ‘Titanic’ Door Scene Was Filmed In A “Waist-Height” Tank: “It’s Terrible To Admit These Things”

Oscar winner Kate Winslet hates to “burst a bubble,” but the Lee star had to admit to audiences that the iconic door scene in Titanic was filmed in a “waist-height” tank.

“Well that was quite an awkward tank, that one,” she began on a recent episode of Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast. “To burst a bubble, it was waist-height, that tank. So first of all, I was regularly like, ‘Ugh, can I just go for a pee,’ and then I’d get up, get off the door, walk to the edge of the tank that was sort of 20 feet away, and I’d literally have to fling my leg over and climb out the tank and go for a pee and then come back and crawl on the door again.”

The veteran actress joked, “It’s terrible to admit these things … Leo is, I’m afraid, kneeling down on the bottom of the tank. I shouldn’t be saying any of these things. James Cameron’s gonna be ringing me like, ‘Why are you telling them all that?’

She added, “The thing that was amazing about the edges of the tank was that it was an infinity tank, so there was constant water rushing, and you could hear the constant sound of water.” In fact, the sound of moving water was so omnipresent that Winslet said the last 20 or so minutes of the film was shot entirely with ADR, including the actors’ shaky breathing and Rose’s yelling for Jack.

As noted in the podcast episode, in which the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind actress discussed her oeuvre from Heavenly Creatures to Sense and Sensibility, Titanic has been much-discussed (and memed and referenced and parodied) throughout the decades. Especially debated is the beloved 1997 epic romance drama’s falling action — the closing sequence in which Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) slowly succumbs to the freezing depths of the Atlantic Ocean — the fate of which has long been contested as avoidable (see: Keke Palmer’s viewpoint).

When Horowitz joked that he would not rehash that argument, he suggested DiCaprio “had PTSD” from continually being asked about his thoughts on the scene over the years, to which Winslet replied, “He probably got PTSD from the whole thing.”