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Martin - Executive Director, Print Services

Who would want to see a movie that was a remake, a love story over three hours long and set on a boat that sinks? Millions did and could not get enough of it, coming back for more and more and more…

Who would want to work on the technical delivery of a film that would mean for at least sixty days no proper sleep or rest and lastly but more importantly no Christmas or New Year fun? I did!!!

The journey really started in December when Titanic was selected as the Royal Film and shown at the Empire Leicester Square. To get ready in two screens would normally take a maximum time of ten hours for a film, it ended up taking twenty nine hours on this epic! I think my wife thought I was probably having fun downstairs in the Empire ballroom dancing the night away but in fact we were upstairs in the cinema watching the film again, again and again to get the presentation right. When I finally did get home, it was only to go straight back to the cinema again, because someone in their wisdom decided to have a press screening at the cinema without telling anybody until the last minute!

The actual delivery schedule of this film was a nightmare as the processing laboratories could not deliver the numbers we quoted them even if they worked all day and night and all over Christmas and the New Year (which had never been done before). They ended up doing it but it was a very, very close call and this film has set a benchmark for everything else to follow…

Someone even had the bright idea of trying to stop the three wise men leaving the east and a little baby being born but that was unsuccessful, as history will tell you. The journey then continued through France, Germany and ended up in Russia. One of the next surprises of this journey was to have two Premières in Russia, one in Moscow, but first wait for it, one in Kaliningrad! Where on earth was Kaliningrad? Everybody rushed for their history books to find out more and see what great battles or confrontations had taken place…but sadly nothing yet

We were asked to do the Première in a cinema that was an Old Prussian lecture hall and according to the information we had the cinema hadn’t been updated since 1946. We took a 48 hour visit to this cinema just to see how bad or good things were. After an early start we arrived in Kaliningrad via Copenhagen on a very cold winter’s day. The good news was that, there was no good news! So after a lot of debating it was decided to make a complete makeover of the venue, but first the budget - which was bound to be rejected. Oh yes it will - oh no it was not…

So everything was ordered, delivered to Tilbury and put on a very slow boat to Russia. We separately followed by plane, but this time we took the 35mm Show Prints with us as hand luggage – remember this was pre 9 / 11 and you could take anything as long as you smiled. The boat got there, we got there and we then spent the next three days getting the cinema ready for the Première. There were no hotels in Kaliningrad so we had to stay on the Keldysh (the salvage ship used in the film) with vodka-drinking Russian sailors, but that is another story…

We were in temperatures of around minus twenty four degrees and living on a basic Russian diet, which was not good for two of us in the party as we were not meat eaters. Also, I was sure the tea was not PG tips!!!

In the end everything was ready on time after three long days and very cold nights. Everything went well and James Cameron was given the freedom of the city and a magnificent present, the HMS Titanic cast in amber. No one in Kaliningrad had ever heard a film before in Dolby Digital and, as we tore everything down afterwards, it would probably be another ten years before anybody would hear it again…