5. Titanic
While the delays on Titanic weren't as long as either Apocalypse Now or Tree of Life, the scale of the project meant that they were far more publicly scrutinised. And there's no doubt that Titanic was a mammoth project. Cameron and co were diving down to see the original shipwreck way back in 1995. The director then spent six months researching the timeline of the sinking as well as individual stories from the ship's passengers and crew. Every prop was made from scratch - a 17 million gallon tank of water was built to contain the gargantuan model of the ill-fated ship built by the designers. This was, at the time at least, as big as film making could be. So it was perhaps inevitable that things would not go completely smoothly. Cameron it seems is not a man to be crossed on set. So put-out was one employee at the director's tyrannical rule that he spiked a batch of drinks with PCP, sending 50 crew members to hospital. Several others were taken ill as a result of spending hours in cold water, including Kate Winslet, who has expressed a fervent desire never to work with Cameron again. The shoot was no fun for the actors then, but one would have thought the tight directorial control would have delivered on time. Originally Titanic was to be a July-release summer blockbuster, and indeed shooting was finished in time for this date. It was the complexity of the special effects that pushed the eventual release day back to December 1997. This delay (as well as the expense of the film) sparked rumours of an inevitable box office car-crash, with critics preparing for another Waterworld. Hindsight, however, is a glorious thing, and now no-one remembers the delays or the expense of the film. It seems Cameron's tyrannical approach delivered results.