Claudia Bitrán
I don’t quite believe it, but I want to believe it

At KIOSK, you can currently see Titanic - a deep emotion (2024), a shot-by-shot adaptation of James Cameron’s blockbuster Titanic, created by Claudia Bitrán. The film, which took ten years to make, is a monumental project within Bitrán’s practice. Known primarily as a painter, Bitrán (1986) has previously explored other media phenomena such as Britney Spears, music videos, road trips, and clips of drunk teenagers. To remake Titanic, Bitrán not only had to learn how to direct, edit, produce, and act in a feature film, but also collaborated with over a thousand participants across the U.S., Chile, and Mexico. For this interview, Bitrán spoke with Pia Louwerens, an artist-researcher and writer interested in fandom as an artistic method.

Pia Louwerens: Can you tell me about your fan-history with James Cameron’s Titanic?

Claudia Bitrán: I loved it since I first saw it. It’s part of my family history. My brother and I are extremely obsessive, to say the least, and as kids we used to get fixated on specific themes. While growing up, we memorized Titanic and all the Disney movies, and we used film quotes as a way to communicate with each other and laugh when no one else was. Titanic lines were our language. I also fixated on Kate Winslet’s body, I felt like her body and mine were the same.

Using Titanic as a model in my artistic practice seemed impossible. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I knew it by heart, and I didn’t know what to do with this thing that affected me so much. I needed to make something really big, something that could convince myself and others that remaking Titanic was important, worth it. Not just a parody.

PL: It almost seems like you had to match the scale of the original.

CB: Yes! I wanted it to echo the famously grand ambition of the Titanic ship itself, the attempt to build the largest and fastest transatlantic ship in the world. That ambition was, in turn, mirrored by the massive Hollywood ambition of the 1997 film Titanic. The only way to communicate the depth of my fascination was by going massive and ‘not letting go,’ to quote the filmscript.

PL: I had to brush up on my Titanic knowledge. I remember it being a blockbuster, but I hadn’t realised the extent to which it was made to feel canonical. For example how the use of historical facts, like filming the real wreck, lends it the patriarchal authority of ‘American history.’ But then its central storyline falls into the genre of the ‘women's movie,’ about a young woman’s independence and romance—before sinking into disaster, of course.

CB: It does interweave very stereotypically feminine with masculine storylines. The film starts with these explorers and submarines and all the technicalities of finding the wreck, and then transitions to the female perspective which is ‘old Rose’ remembering. So all of the memories are feminine and then the narrative brackets around that are coded as masculine.

In my opinion the character of Rose aged really well, it’s not a film that you cringe at in 2025. She’s a feminist. I really identified with Rose in a way. When I portray her it doesn’t just feel like acting, I’m really embodying the character.

PL: Alongside playing Rose, you also take on the ‘roles’ of actress and director, both on and off screen. I found myself thinking of the director as ‘Rose’, as if Rose, within the narrative, became the director of her own story. How did that feel to you?

CB: There's a moment when Rose's mother ties her corset while forbidding her from seeing Jack. Rose turns and says, ‘It's so unfair.’ And her mother responds, ‘Of course it's unfair. We're women. Our choices are never easy.’ In that scene, I played both mother and daughter. It was a funny moment, because as the filmmaker I'm in control of all these decisions, while being hyper-aware that I’m learning filmmaking by imitating this male-controlled blockbuster.

The male gaze is something I think about a lot. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey writes that film is always longing for the presence of a woman in the frame, because she is the center of visual pleasure. I’m very aware of this in the context of Titanic. I mean, remember the nude drawing scene? I want to explore what it means to be at the center of that pleasure, but sometimes I want to be a center of chaos or an entity of direction, controlling every part of its construction and delivery, fueled by self-consciousness and experimentation.

PL: I think you see this in the film through the way you keep interrupting the spectacle. Some dramatic beats you clearly don’t miss; you give the viewer those spectacular moments that make Titanic Titanic. The iconic lines are recited literally, and in English. But in less interesting moments, you might shift the focus towards the materiality of the work or to elements of the production itself. It’s like you’ve remade our memories of the movie rather than the movie itself—the way some moments stay with you while others fade into the background.

Between those ‘iconic beats’ the language also shifts to Spanish. It seems to be the vernacular of the movie. It brings dubbing to mind, which is interesting when thinking about adaptation. Did you first see it in Spanish?

CB: I first saw it in English, but I was in Chile, where there’s a different, ironic sensibility when it comes to consuming Hollywood productions. In Chile we are huge on fandom, but we’re also highly skeptical consumers, and constantly say things like, ‘Oh my god, so cheesy.’ I’m Chilean-American, and my sensibility when consuming these spectacles is kind of dual, both ‘I don't quite believe it’ and ‘I want to believe it.’

When starting out, my theory was that I could give the viewer as many emotions as they felt while watching the Hollywood film. I had decided to work without a budget, so the question became: how to evoke deep emotions using extremely modest resources and materials? A lot of it involved finding emotive qualities through exaggeration or by adding new gestures, but also by tactile and material choices that both comment on the original and engage the viewer’s memory as another tool.

PL: I recognise these strategies from written fanfiction, where the plot is often completely secondary—a flimsy vehicle for the affective qualities, the feelings, which are the real focus of the work. It’s very direct: we’re here for the feelings, so let’s cut out all the artifice and just make them happen.

CB: Totally. Fans are different from regular consumers, they don’t just consume. Fandom is productive. To me, fanfiction is fascinating because fans are artists. I want to foreground that because I found it a challenge to produce this work in the contemporary artistic landscape. The models that I’m drawn to, like Titanic or Britney Spears, are often immediately categorized as shallow. I wanted to stand firm in the position of being the lover of something, even when it seems shallow in a ‘high culture’ context.

PL: As critic Catherine Grant described it, ‘Rather than an appropriation strategy that privileges irony and distance, the action of a fan focuses on attachment and desire.’ It’s often seen as unserious when you get close to the things you love. With mimicry you get as close as you can. For your adaptation, you’ve embodied your object of fannish desire for years!

CB: “Even though remaking Titanic sounds silly, useless or basic, the endurance of doing it for ten years has kind of redeemed its initial superficiality.

When we start recreating a scene, even though everyone is self-conscious, ten minutes go by and suddenly everybody's invested in it like it was their life, you know? In adaptation there is an earnestness that becomes cathartic and it can be contagious when the parameters are clear. I love this quote that you share because indeed, the act of translation and embodying goes beyond mere appropriation. Every scene of this remake has become a cathartic mirror, I'm actively searching for meaning within the parallels that one can draw.

I’ve filmed the scene where people are drowning multiple times, in different places. I’ll place dozens of people on the floor or in the water and I tell them, ‘Act like you're drowning, just go for it.’ I set a timer and leave the camera running. At first everyone is a bit embarrassed, but that dissipates quickly. Everybody screams at the top of their lungs and starts drowning. I don't intervene, and eventually people start getting tired. The exhaustion, the endurance that captures is a great analogy for death, the exercise of fake dying together is actually really moving and deep.”

PL: As you mentioned, fans step out of their passive role as consumers and essentially appropriate authorship, which is quite subversive. It’s worth noting that studios have increasingly learned to capitalize on fan culture, and Titanic is actually an early example of a film the actively encouraged fandom activity.

Still, something exciting happens when a fan loves a work and transforms it. To find space for oneself in the work, a fan has to discover the cracks or possibilities that the work affords. Like gender-swapping characters, reading characters as other than white, or finding other queer potential. They use the structure of a work, the affective beats of it, but then find openings to do something else.

I think that Titanic: A Deep Emotion opened the Hollywood story of Titanic up to material realities—the problems and labor of filmmaking. It finds Spanish in the cracks, and I loved the gender-swapping of Jack, which created all these new queer possibilities. Are there other cracks or openings that I'm missing?”

CB: Yes! I think the word queering is perfect to describe those cracks and mutations. I decided never to repeat a way of working: every scene is made differently. In this scene, Jack might be ten years old. In another, old Rose is played by different women. This scene might feel like a telenovela. So I think the cracks aren't just in gender, race, and age, but also in genre.

The genre can shift from something really American and Hollywood-ish to telenovela, to music video, to time-lapse art studio, to commercial, to fine art animation, to clumsy, shitty, fan, desperate animation. Choppy animation. All of this while exploring the fluidity of filmmaking itself, which seems infinite.

PL: You’ve also cast your family members as the family members of Rose, creating additional intertextual relationships between reality and the film. I imagine this as adding layers of meaning and memory, creating a really dense and layered text. Your film isn’t just a portrayal of the memory of watching Titanic, it also captures the memory of your process of filming.

CB: When we watch these scenes with my family, it's like looking into a photo album. It contains sad memories too. My grandmother passed away not long after filming her scenes in the movie, and my grandfather passed away as well. They’re gone, but they live on in the movie. It’s moving to see them every time I edit.

The subtitle ‘A Deep Emotion’ came from a blooper of an old Rose. I was asking her to repeat the line, ‘A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets.’ And she kept saying, ‘A woman's heart is a deep emotion of secrets.’ And I kept correcting her, saying, ‘No, it's a deep ocean.’ And she's like, ‘Ok, a woman's heart is a deep, um, emotion of secrets.’ I felt like that accident just really carried the vibe of the whole film. Like hell yeah, that’s what it’s all about: a deep emotion.

PL: Titanic ends as a sort of horror movie, with Rose as the sole survivor. Viewers probably left the cinema in tears over Jack’s death. But then, at the end of Titanic: A Deep Emotion, you suddenly break away from the constraints of the shot-by-shot adaptation and shift into a bonkers Spanish-language music video slash musical. All the characters are singing, even the dead ones are revived. What made you decide to create this happy ending?

CB: I think I wanted to make this scene as a release, something to escape the rigid structure of the remake, which at times really felt like a prison to me. In the final scene, Rose either dies or falls asleep, and then dreams of reuniting with Jack at the Grand Staircase. I thought: it can’t be Rose’s dream just to kiss this guy, just like it’s not my dream, as a filmmaker, for it all to end as a remake.

I’m a dancer and a painter, I have a lot of friends, I love singing and making choreographies, and I started out this whole filmmaking practice with making music videos. So it made sense to have a kind of opera-musical scene using all those resources. It felt liberating and joyful, extremely cathartic, and just right to create a happy ending.

It’s so culturally unserious to be happy and to just celebrate. I don’t like to overuse the word radical, but I do think the happiness in that scene was a loud statement. Like, if we’re going to be happy, let’s live it fully and let’s go all the fucking way.