From the Trivia Section, IMDB:
Many cast and crew members came down with colds, flu, or kidney infections after spending hours in cold water, including Kate Winslet.
Some crew members started out wearing hip waders, but after several incidents where these accidentally filled with water, they quickly switched to wetsuits.
Several people left, three stuntmen broke bones, and both cast and crew got exhausted from all the peril and long days of shooting. Both Winslet and James Cameron admitted that they often woke up on shooting days thinking "Please, God, let me die."
Kate Winslet was one of the few actors who was not allowed to wear a wetsuit during the water scenes. As a result, she got hypothermia, and nearly quit the production. However, James Cameron persuaded her to stay.
(at around 2h 10 mins) Both Leonardo DiCaprio and Jason Barry injured themselves while filming the scene in which their characters pull up a bench in third class and use it to smash a gate open. DiCaprio threw out a shoulder, and Barry caught himself in the chin with the bench.
The climactic scene, which features the breakup of the ship directly before it sinks, as well as its final plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic, involved a tilting full-sized set, 150 extras and 100 stunt performers. James Cameron criticized previous Titanic films for depicting the final plunge of the liner as sliding gracefully underwater. He "wanted to depict it as the terrifyingly chaotic event that it really was". When carrying out the sequence, people needed to fall off the increasingly tilting deck, plunging hundreds of feet below and bouncing off of railings and propellers on the way down. Even though the sequence had been rehearsed for weeks, stunt performers were suspended by harnesses and wires and the set had been coated with foam rubber, the actual filming of the scene resulted in one stunt man breaking a leg, and one stunt women fracturing a rib. Cameron halted the more dangerous stunts, and inquired with special effects supervisor Robert Legato if computer-generated people could be used for the more dangerous falls. Legato acknowledged, even though he was still in the initial stages of employing this technique. It finally paid off, although the amount of digital stunt people was purposely limited due to the fact that they didn't always hold up to close scrutiny (clothing textures and faces still looked a bit fake). The shot of Titanic's final moments was featured prominently in the trailer, and Cameron later commented that "that shot alone got our opening weekend audiences."
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