Did Enya really refuse to write the ‘Titanic’ score?

Posted On December 22, 2025December 22, 2025

The chance of missing out on something great is exactly what can make a big decision so paralysing. Even if our gut is screaming no, the mere daydream of a shining gateway into a better future can make even the clearest of minds get hazy and doubt itself. However, when it came to an offer on the table for Enya to work on Titanic, she always knew the answer.

When Enya was asked to create the score for James Cameron’s Titanic, she said no. She said no quickly, and she said no repeatedly, which completely goes against the grain of every other story surrounding the movie.

It’s not that everyone else involved entirely believed in the film. When the director pitched it to 20th Century Fox as “Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic”, they were unconvinced, but they were open. Mostly, they were open to Cameron as a person. By this point, he was already a tried and tested box office smasher, so despite hoping he’d simply make another action movie, the studio said yes simply because they wanted to have the director around. 

Cameron seems to just have that effect. He can get people on board with whatever mad idea he has, like making Avatar at a time when the technology to make it didn’t really exist, or convincing the studio to fund the Titanic team to actually go and film at the Titanic wreck site. Really, since Cameron already had a strange obsession with shipwrecks, he was basically managing to get someone else to fund his own dream holiday.

But the yeses didn’t stop there. He managed to get the numbers people to approve a budget of $200million, making it the most expensive movie ever made at the time. He managed to get the actual builders of the Titanic to open up their never-before-seen archive and show him the blueprints. He also had Kate Winslet, one of the moment’s biggest rising stars, literally call him on his mobile, begging for the role.

Overwhelmingly, Cameron seemed to have some magic that made people say yes to him and offer him things. But that didn’t seem to stretch to Enya. Cameron wrote the script of the movie while listening to Enya’s music, so when it came to the soundtrack, he had always planned to call her up and get her to do it. However, she was one of the few people in this entire process to turn him down.

“James Cameron, he approached and sent the script, but what happened was when we were talking about the end song, it was to be a collaboration, and that’s something that I’ve actually never done,” the artist said.

Ever the control freak, Cameron seemed to have some degree of creative control over the music Enya would make. Chances are, that would come in the way that ‘My Heart Will Go On’ eventually did, where the film’s composer, James Horner, wrote the track and then Celine Dion was brought in to add vocals.

“I get to write the song, I sing,” Enya said of her typical and desired process. “I’ve always written the melodies, so I find it kind of strange,” she added, concluding, “and I was working on an album, so I just said it wasn’t going to happen if it was a collaboration.”

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