GLUB, GLUB, GLUB...

By KIM MASTERS/LOS ANGELES

Director James Cameron gazes intently at a small monitor displaying footage of a recently shot scene from his film in progress, Titanic. The sound hasn't been added yet, but the faces of the doomed passengers indicate that they know the outlook is grim aboard the supposedly unsinkable ship. A priest is leading a prayer, and as his lips move, Cameron murmurs the lines, "Hail Mary, full of grace..."

One can almost imagine that Cameron is asking a higher power to help navigate his Titanic to a safe harbor at the box office next summer. The picture, which has been in production since September on locations ranging from Nova Scotia to Baja California, is already causing a stir in Hollywood with its burgeoning budget, which studio sources peg as low as $120 million and others put as high as $180 million. If the bigger estimates are correct, Titanic is in contention to be the most expensive picture ever made, surpassing Waterworld's mere $170 million budget. Throw in tales of the usual Cameron-generated on-set turmoil--plus an extraordinary incident in which virtually the entire cast and crew were dosed with PCP--and you have one of the most talked-about productions in years.

Cameron, according to a source on the set, is running behind schedule and over budget. It's hardly the first time he's been here--his last film, True Lies with Arnold Schwarzenegger, started out costing $60 million and wound up with a final price tag of well over $100 million. "We're doing spectacle," Cameron says unrepentantly during a brief break from filming. "Spectacle costs money."

This level of expenditure makes some sort of twisted sense to studio executives for a big-action picture starring Schwarzenegger. But Titanic is a historic piece without major stars; it features up-and-comers Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. An executive at another studio says he can't imagine attempting "a period movie for that kind of dough on the water with Jim." What Cameron promises to deliver, of course, is the Titanic as no one has seen it. The director of Aliens, both Terminators and The Abyss, Cameron has "vast cinematic appetites," as an agent puts it, consistently delivering event films with dazzling effects. Nevertheless, Hollywood insiders can't fathom how Fox and Paramount--which are splitting the cost--will make money. Indeed, soon after shooting began, Paramount became spooked by the budget and demanded that Fox limit its exposure. Facing a possible court fight, Fox agreed.

But Cameron won't yield when it comes to getting his vision on the screen. At the moment he is several hundred miles south of Hollywood, filming at the Mexican beach town of Rosarito on a 40-acre site dominated by a massive 750-ft.-long re-creation of the ship--a hulking shell built almost to scale. It rests in a 17 million-gal. tank, and will be lowered into the water by degrees. Tonight's shoot takes place on the poop deck, which can be tilted as much as 90[degrees] by hydraulic lifts. This is one of the film's more harrowing sequences, at least from a production point of view: a couple of hundred extras playing steerage passengers must endure take after take in which they career down the deck to its end, slamming into each other at high speeds. It's about as rough as football, and without helmets and padding. "These people are getting banged up horribly," Cameron acknowledges. One night's work produces two broken ribs and a sprained ankle.

Amid the mayhem, the director remains a perfectionist. He fusses with each shot, unbuttoning the jacket on an Irish musician who is about to be wrenched from his wife's arms by a flailing fellow passenger. An extra with a bandage on his head--presumably from damage inflicted during an earlier shot--is admonished to keep his face turned away from the camera.

When the poop-deck angle gets to 30[degrees] or more, the actors don harnesses so they can't fall off. "I wish I could do it in every scene--tether the extras so they can't go to the bathroom," Cameron says. He's only half joking: during the making of True Lies, the director decreed that anyone who asked for a potty break was fired. Cameron says he doesn't care if his crew gets mad. "I'm pretty demanding," he admits. "When we're spending $25,000 or $35,000 or $45,000 an hour and my hand is on the throttle, it's my job to be impatient."

No one bargained for the kind of trouble the production got last August, when Titanic was filming in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Late one evening dozens of cast and crew members became ill after eating seafood chowder that had been laced with PCP. Cameron rejects the idea that someone was avenging the director's high-handed behavior. "It would be easy to say the crew was disgruntled, but it was the last night of shooting [there]... It would be a dumb time to disrupt things," he reasons. Police have yet to crack the case.

Last year the 42-year-old director paid a dozen visits to the ocean-floor site of the Titanic wreck, some 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland and 2 1/2 dark and chilly miles below the surface, to shoot footage. That meant nearly three hours drifting to the bottom of the sea, packed with two crew members into a sphere about 7 ft. in diameter. Cameron, an inveterate thrill seeker, loved it.

Despite the logistical difficulty of the film, Cameron claims his Titanic is more a love story than an action picture--which may not soothe his backers' anxieties. Inspired by the romance and sweep of Doctor Zhivago, the director-screenwriter has devised a fictional liaison between first-class passenger Winslet and third-class cute guy DiCaprio. The director says he's fascinated by the notion that people who were supposed to be coddled and secure were facing imminent doom. "They thought they were safe in this big luxury hotel," he says. "In fact, they were in a steel object over 2 1/2 miles of water...It's a metaphor for the inevitability of death. We're all on the Titanic." Maybe so, but at the moment executives at Fox and Paramount are probably feeling it more than the rest of us.