Near, far, wherever they are, what are the most extreme lengths a “Titanic” fan has gone to in their love for James Cameron’s epic 1997 disaster romance?

Some have set out to clock thousands of lifetime viewings of the 11-time Oscar-winning movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, says the filmmaker. “I think there’s one fellow that has set a goal to see it 10,000 times,” Cameron says in a recent interview. “It’s a long film, so I don’t know. He might not live long enough to pull that off.”

Then there’s Grammy- and Oscar-winning superstar Adele, who made a special request of Cameron and producer Jon Landau for her “Titanic”-themed 30th birthday celebration in 2018. “We loaned the Heart of the Ocean to Adele for her birthday,” says Landau of the blue diamond prop necklace Rose (Gloria Stuart) drops into the ocean at the end of the film. Of Adele’s party, he says, “They built a grand staircase, all these things. That’s right up there for me.”

More than 25 years later, “Titanic” love goes on and on so strongly that Cameron took about a week out of his packed “Avatar” franchise schedule in 2023 to oversee a 4K remastering of his groundbreaking modern classic, a fictionalized retelling of the famous 1912 sinking that cost $200 million to produce. A two-disc 25th anniversary 4K Blu-ray and limited edition box set recently hit shelves.

The long-awaited remaster is presented in Dolby Vision HDR and Atmos audio and is the first of six Cameron films heading to shelves in 4K, including “The Abyss,” “True Lies,” “Aliens,” “Avatar” and “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

In the recent interview, Cameron flashed back to the making of “Titanic,” for which an 800-foot-long full-scale replica ship was partially constructed in Rosarito, Mexico — a set the auteur says he would create very differently with today’s technology, using smaller set pieces extended via CGI.

But at the time “Titanic” was the most expensive film ever made, owing to the unprecedented physical scale of sets and sequences that required complex engineering and massive resources to mount. “We never panicked,” Cameron says with a laugh. “The studio panicked. It’s our job not to panic.”

The director admits there were miscalculations in logistics even before cameras rolled. “It was hundreds of miles of cabling, all the Musco lights in Hollywood at the time,” remembers Cameron. “The scale of everything was beyond anything we could imagine in terms of our prior experience. At the time we thought, wow, there’s no way this movie could ever make its money back. It’s just impossible. Well, guess what?”

One cut they made to help stanch the ballooning budget was to scrap an entire set planned to be canted at a three-degree angle, instead sticking to two other sets: a level one for pre-iceberg scenes and a second one tilted at six degrees to replicate the sinking of the ship. “We compromised the three degrees, and we saved $750,000,” says Landau.

Another cheat: “We only cast short extras so it made our set look bigger,” says Cameron. “Anybody above 5’8”, we didn’t cast them. It’s like we got an extra million dollars of value out of casting.”

Opening in theaters Dec. 19, 1997, the film became the highest grossing film of all time — until Cameron beat his own record with “Avatar” in 2009.

“If the studio had had their way, they would have cut the entire ship sinking,” says Cameron. “The smartest thing we did was do the sinking last. It wasn’t because of strategy — it was simply because you sink the set last because otherwise it doesn’t look so good the next morning when you bring it back up.”