Interview: “Ship of Dreams”

“Titanic” turned 25 years old this past December, and it’s still one of the biggest & most beloved films of all time. Like “Back to the Future” or “The Godfather,” it has left a profound effect on all who have seen it, as well as all who worked on it. If you’re eager to dive deeper into the legacy of “Titanic,” the perfect documentary for you just premiered at the Valley Film Festival this year: “Ship of Dreams: Titanic Movie Diaries,” directed by Alexandra Boyd, who herself had a small part in the iconic film. The documentary reunites several of her cast mates who wrote diaries about their experience, as well as reaching out to super fans who still love the film. I was thrilled to talk with Boyd about her journey from actress to filmmaker, the lasting impact of “Titanic,” and the importance of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike.

What is your background as an actress?

I was an actress for going on 40 years now, although I don’t really act anymore. I’ve sort of lost that drive. I grew up and trained in England, married an American pilot in the American Air Force. Brought us to Florida where I had to live for three years of my life I’ll never get back. He and I split, and I came to Seattle. I drove across America with my cat and everything I could fit into a car, cause somebody said, there’s all this acting, there’s all this theater in Seattle, you should go.

So I spent two years in Seattle, and then I did a movie called Mr. Holland’s Opus in Portland, and they were like, oh, Richard Dreyfus is gonna get nominated, It’s gonna be a big movie. And I was like, oh, they say it’s gonna be big movie. I should probably get my ass to LA and get caught up in the glamor of the thing. I did that and I was waiting tables for a year, and the film came out and Richard was nominated for an Oscar, but that had nothing to do with the fact that I had to get more work. So I became a quite successful commercial actress, with voiceovers and so forth, for 10 years. I did Titanic in that time, I got the tiny part, which was not the, you know, we all made quite a bit of money, a bit of cash at the time because we were all there for so long. And then when it did make a billion dollars, we didn’t get a very big chunk of that, but I was making enough income from residuals. They did some creative financing to make sure we didn’t get too much money, but anyway, we got some money. And then the relationship I was in burnt out, and being an actor in LA I was just like, I’m done. I want to go back to London. I want to be in England. So I left him and I went back to London and for two years I was like, what the have I done? I don’t have a plan. And then I got on a huge TV show called Coronation Street.

There’s East Enders and there’s Coronation Street, and three times a week you are in people’s living rooms, and it’s instant fame. It’s ridiculous. It was really hard work, but it’s some of the best work I’ve done. Soap operas should be every actor’s training, because it is so fast. You are not even thinking. We are trying to train actors at drama school to be spontaneous. You cannot teach spontaneity. You cannot teach gut responses to dramatic situations. You have to either instinctually do it, have an experience of it, or do it in soaps where you don’t have any time to think. And it’s the best training. And as I said, the best work I have done.

And how did you move into directing?

Somebody asked me to direct a short film that he was pitching to the BBC for the Olympics; the Olympics were coming to London in 2012, this is 2011. I said, well, I’ll have a go, and I was brilliant at it! I loved it. I loved figuring out where the camera’s gonna go and chatting with the actors; can you be a bit more like this? Think of it like that. I was like, I know this shit! I know what actors need to know. And I’ve watched so many movies and I love art and I’ve studied interior design and architecture and all pertains all of it. Every shot is a visual storytelling tool. And every time you design an interior, we’re art directing our lives. It all crosses over. So that was what started it. And I ended up firing my (acting) agent and I was on this path to make a big epic World War I boxing film called The Wilderness.

I’m at Cannes, and I’m like, I’ve got this big movie and it’s gonna be like $50 million, but we’ll get Liam Neeson to play the coach! And this producer said to me, whoa, whoa, whoa, Alexandra, nobody’s gonna give you $50 million for your first film! This was Ian Smith. I had one lunch with him and that was all the mentoring I needed. He goes, now this what I see with a starting director: I think you’re onto something, but you’ve got to take your eye off that, save it and make a genre film, a horror film, five characters, one location. Have you got something like that to do instead? I said, no, I haven’t. I’ve just started this stuff. If I do that, Ian, that’s a two year conversation between now and having something I could show, and he said, yes, it is. So I went home and I opened up my computer and I started writing a ghost story called Widows Walk. Which four years later, or is it six years? I, I forget now. Took me two years to write it. Two years to raise the money for it, two years to shoot it and post, because we were doing piecemeal as we had bits of money and so forth. And it sold straight to Amazon for what we made it for. And all my investors, my mum, my housemate, friends from my choir, giving me 10,000 or 5,000 pounds, never expecting to get it back. And they all got their money back and a tax break from the UK film people. And that was in 2019.

Where did the idea to first write the diaries come from?

This was like early internet days, right? People were starting to write blogs. Do you remember blogs? So there was one actor on the movie who was writing his daily blog: we got woken up, hair and makeup — but then we didn’t go to set, and it was Happy hour at four o’clock, so we went to the bar, and we started drinking Margaritas. And I said, that’s a good idea. Because we had so much downtime, and none of this comes out really in my documentary, but there are so many stories, like happy Hour in the bar at the, at the Real Del Mar. Brian Walsh would bring his pipes. Ioan Griffith would sing, Ewan Stewart, he gets somebody’s guitar and starts singing Scottish folk tunes.

It was literally like we were the third class passengers having our own dance party every night. Because we were the third class passengers waiting for the first class people. And Captain Smith, aka James Cameron, to bring us to do some work. So, you know, there were all sorts of shenanigans that always goes on a movie set. But then there was this set and there was the costumes and there was that poop deck, and there were people in the water for eight hours a day. And I don’t think it was me, cause now the mists of time have sort of muddied it a little bit, but somebody said, we should all be writing our diaries. We should all be, but we weren’t doing it at the time. It was after it won the Oscars. So I, because I realized I’m like the head mistress, and clearly I was a baby producer and director at the time. I was like, well, let’s just all write everything down, and everybody will have a unique point of view, which they do, as you can see, if it’s all connected by the experience. But everybody’s point of view is very singular. And we’ll get it published, we’ll get a book published. We’re like the munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. Like imagine if you could read 10 accounts of those little people who watched Judy Garland sing live on a Sound stage for the first time. Nobody else had that experience. And we don’t know what their experience was, cause they didn’t write it down. So we were the munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, or the, you know, the Centurions in Ben-Hur or something, because this is now a classic movie that made it a billion dollars at the box office.

But there was no self-publishing in those days. You had to give it to a publisher who would edit it and decide, and they had already moved on. It was 1998. And who cares, right? So I was the one that gathered them, I was the one that kept them. Some people hand wrote them, so I transcribed them into PDFs. And they’ve been in every computer I’ve had for the last 25 years. I’ve kept them on a hard drive somewhere. And then Nick Lauren, who’s a producer, he was John Travolta’s stunt double for like 25 movies. And he and I met on a movie called From Paris with Love in 2008. But he’s now a producer. I said, look, Nick, I’ve got these bloody diaries and it’s the 25 year anniversary. What I want to do is just get the actors that want to — they’ve forgotten about them — I want to sit them down and film them reading these diaries for the first time and evoking their memories, and then telling more stories and so forth. And as you can see, it’s incredibly moving and powerful. When Rebecca goes, oh my God, I’ve forgotten that, and then she’s burst into tears. She immediately is taken back to that moment and all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes that nobody knows about. But the “Titaniacs” are voracious for it.

That’s a good name.

They’re self dubbed! So what also had happened was, I had connected with Dale McCarthy on Instagram and he had made me a dress to go to the premiere of Widow’s Walk in New York. He was in South Africa, I sent him my measurements and he just made me a dress and mailed it to me. And also is now working for my best friend in Essex. ‘cause he wanted to leave Durban. He said, do you think Laura would give me a job in her wedding dress shop? I was like, let me call her. She was like, let me do all the immigration stuff. He’s been working there for like a year and a half now. Changed his life because of Instagram, but ultimately because of our connection through Titanic.

And he knows Ilka-Sophie Reinecke de Castro, and then Zach is just a hilarious character, so all these people came to me via Instagram. So we’re gonna balance the sort of real time stories with the effects this film has had on people who saw it when they were very young. Or if you think about it, they’re all now in their late thirties, early forties, and they all saw this movie and it made such an impact. And it changed their lives.

How can the movies change our lives? We know how powerful they are. Of course we do. It’s why we watch them again. We are watching sexier, more violent, more romantic, more everything, versions of our own lives. And Titanic has it a thousand fold because it’s based on this true life tragedy where 1500 people lost their lives because of the hubris of the rich people and who paid for it? All of the poor people, and the gallant men who didn’t get into the life boats. And I tried, and we have a podcast, Nelson and I, we’ve got 24 episodes of a podcast called Titanic Talk. And we interview some of the actors, we interview historians, we’ve interviewed a descendant of Quartermaster Hitchens who was at the wheel when the iceberg struck. He had a terrible life afterwards, drinking and PTSD and being blamed for being the guy at the helm. Why didn’t you swing it away from the iceberg? All these ripple effects down the decades. I have given up trying to really process why this film in particular is so powerful to people, because it just is, and it’s every single element of it.

Like you said, it’s become one of those films, like Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz, that probably every person on the planet has seen at this point now and everyone loves.

Except my boyfriend.

Really? He hasn’t seen it?

At this point it’s just to be cantankerous. He’s seen my film and I’m like, you can’t watch my film and not watch Titanic. Everybody who’s seen Titanic, they watch Ship of Dreams, and they’re like, I have to watch Titanic again now, because now I’ll never see it the same way again.

Exactly, you have the actor who gets punched in the face by Kate, and I remember that scene!

Of course you do! People even remember my eyebrow. They remember that I’m the lady with eyebrow. They think I’m winking, but I can’t wink. So I go, oh, alright, “a little bit of rough trade” <laugh>. All that stuff is all layered in, and because Kate Winslet and Frances Fisher, they’ve all had their say, this is another layer that nobody could imagine we could come up with.

You just had your premiere at the Valley Film Festival. How did that go?

It was lovely. It’s a very small film festival, and we felt very loved and looked after, and we had a couple of super fans show up, and that was great. And it was lovely to see it on a big screen because, you know, you make an independent film and you never really quite know if you’re ever gonna see it as a cinema experience. And one thing I will talk about is, the digital recreations of the interior and what I call the seagulls view of the outside of the ship, they’re all from Titanic: Honor and Glory. Titanic fans will know about that, because they’re creating an entire virtual experience of Titanic. You will be able to put on a headset and walk up and down the grand staircase and the engine room and the third class suites. Everything they’re doing, it’s absolutely exquisite.

So I said, I would like a fly through from seagull’s eye view through the door and spiral all the way down the grand staircase and, and fly into the, into the dining room. And they are very sharp, very detailed digital renderings of the ship. But what my brilliant editor and grader did was put a cinematic grade on them. So what you don’t see when you watch it on your computer or your TV, I don’t believe, but when we watched it in the cinema, I felt like I was back on the set, like I was flying through the set because it just felt very three dimensional and very real and very cinematic. So for me, that was the standout of seeing it in a cinema.

What is your hope with the film now going forward?

We’re going to probably do a year of film festivals. We entered a lot of film festivals. We just have to hear whether they’re going to invite us or not, but those festivals are more about meeting people and getting the word out. We’ve just signed with MPX, which is a sales agent, and they are literally, as we speak, putting together their presentation package to take to market. So what will happen, hopefully, is that we’ll sell in several territories and the perfect place for it to be is on any television channel that has Titanic playing. I can’t tell you how many people go, I just saw you on TV, Titanic was on again! We basically made a 93 minute commercial for Titanic. People immediately are like, I’ve gotta watch it again now because I have to watch out for all those people whose backstories you now know. And then in five years time, we’ll have the 30 year anniversary, and then another 10 years it’ll be the 40. You know, I feel like this is a film that is just a slice of film history that say, somebody new to Titanic, cause this is another thing, teenagers love this film. They all love Jack Dawson, aka Leonardo DiCaprio. Young people are just drawn in. One young woman we interviewed on the podcast is now a filmmaker. She wants to be an art director, and she wants to make films based on the fact she saw Titanic and looked at how beautifully that was put together. And it inspired her to pursue a film career.

What we’d like to do is put on a screening with an exhibition of Ilka’s dresses and Dale’s miniatures and the props and costumes and maybe do readings and stuff. That’s our next thing is to, either in Belfast or Cobh in Ireland, which was the last place Titanic docked before she went off and never made it to New York.

The SAG Strike is still going on. Do you think the issues about actor’s residuals and fair wages have gotten worse in the 25 years since Titanic?

Yes, of course. I mean, even when we started getting our residual checks from Titanic, we were like, is this it? <laugh> And we went to SAG and we said, we don’t think our checks are right. They’re just like normal residual checks.

You were in a billion dollar movie!

They looked and, oh, Fox couldn’t quite find the files, for 18 months. We kept calling SAG. Have you moved anything along? Oh, you know, we had to spend millions and millions on advertising, and there were 250 speaking roles, you know. But not everybody was a SAG member. And you didn’t pay Peter White because Peter was cut completely. And if you’re not seen or heard, you don’t get paid.

So they negotiated that last time, seen or heard. So all my lines were cut, but you see me, but I still had to go in and say hello, I’m in the film. Oh, hang on, let’s put her on the payroll. I had to look after myself for it. And the residuals have gotten smaller. I got a SAG deposit today. It was $10.10, because Titanic was on TV somewhere in Turkey, or because Mr. Holland’s Opus or something was on. Because you can’t track it. Like my film Widow’s Walk is on Amazon. The guy who’s in charge of it, who’s a big guy at Amazon, we had coffee with him. He’s like, oh, it’s performing very well, for a no-name director with no movie stars in it, we are getting a lot of hits on it. And I’m like, well, how much? How many times is it being watched? And they don’t tell you anymore. It used to be, you could see what a movie made on its opening weekend and over the life of the film. But if a movie goes straight to streaming, they have no obligation to, because it’s power, isn’t it? First time female director makes her first film, sells straight to Amazon, and it has a hundred thousand downloads at $4 a pop. They made their money back, didn’t they?

But they’re not gonna tell me that. ‘cause they don’t have to. There’s nowhere where it’s written. And therefore, my actors we paid them, you know, British equity, what we were allowed to pay them, as a small, tiny film. But they don’t get any residuals because we don’t, we got a little bit of money that we sent to them when we sold it. But they won’t get any more until we relicense it. Whereas before, you used to get a little chunk of money every time.

I was a commercial actress. I used to get $50 every time a cat food commercial was shown on TV. So I would go every Friday and get this fat wad of envelopes of checks. And that’s how I was able to buy a house because I had a regular income from TV. Now they just buy you out, take $10,000. Oooh, $10,000. That’s a lot of money. But I must have made $110,000 from that one commercial because I got paid over time. And all of that has gone away.

And then they boast about their profits, because they don’t pay anyone properly.

I mean, here’s another thing that Nelson and I talk about quite a bit, ‘cause we’re both screen actors. Nelson is my co-host on Titanic Talk, which I do encourage people to listen to because it’s like even further into the actor’s process or a historian’s process. We’ve got quite an amazing range of people interviewed…

Actors have done it for themselves. We’re so desperate to be chosen. We’re so desperate to work. Oh, I’ll sit around for two months in a corset; and you’re paying me something? I’m in a movie! You know, it’s like there’s, that’s how you start your career. You’ll do anything; you’ll sweep the stage. And you know, this year I turned down a big voiceover job because the money was shit. I have created a character that I’ve been doing for 20 years and all they could offer me was double scale.

I’m gonna leave you with this. One time, this was years and years ago, and my partner at the time said, remember that movie, The Agony and the Ecstasy, when the Pope wants the Sistine Chapel painted and he hires Michelangelo. So it’s Rex Harrison as the Pope. Michelangelo is Charlton Heston, and he doesn’t want to lie on his back and paint a ceiling. He’s got other things to do. But the Pope has money and he needs a ceiling painted. So Michaelangelo lies on his back for five years or however long it takes him, and paints the Sistine Chapel. And we have one of the most extraordinary works of art in history. The Agony and the Ecstasy.

“Ship of Dreams” is now playing on the festival circuit. You can learn more about the documentary on their website. You can learn more about Boyd’s previous film Widow’s Walk here.