Titanic director says Jack had to die
Canadian filmmaker James Cameron has shut the, ahem, door on a pet theory of some Titanic fans as the film celebrates its 20th anniversary.
No, there wasn’t enough room for Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) to climb aboard the floating door holding Rose (Kate Winslet) and avoid death by hypothermia following the wreck of the famous ship in the North Atlantic.
“It says on page 147 (of the script) that Jack dies,” Cameron, 63, told Vanity Fair.
“Obviously it was an artistic choice, the thing was just big enough to hold her and not big enough to hold him.”
The Kapuskasing, Ont.-born Cameron, who won directing and film editing Oscars for the 1997 movie, which also won Best Picture and for which he wrote the script, says he finds it “silly, really, that we’re having this discussion 20 years later.”
“Had he lived, the ending of the film would have been meaningless,” Cameron noted. “So whether it was that, or whether a smokestack fell on him, he was going down.”
Cameron, also known for 2009’s Avatar, told Vanity Fair he believes the physics were correct as well.
“I was in the water with the piece of wood, putting people on it for about two days, getting it exactly buoyant enough so that it would support one person with full free-board, meaning that she wasn’t immersed at all in the 28-degree (Fahrenheit) water, so that she could survive the three hours it took until the rescue ship got there.”
However, Winslet and Titanic costar Kathy Bates suggested otherwise at the SAG AFTRA Foundation Annual Patron of the Artists Awards in November. Bates introduced Winslet by saying, “He lets go of her hand and sinks into the depth of the Atlantic. And I personally think that there was plenty of room on there!”
Winslet agreed, telling the audience lightheartedly, “He could have fit on it! He could have fit on that door!” She also said on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in February 2016 that Jack “could have actually fitted on that bit of door.”
As far back as 2012, Cameron told IGN.com, “It’s not a question of room, it’s a question of buoyancy . . . She’s completely out of the water on the raft and . . . if he got on with her, they’d both be half in and half out of the water . . . and they would have both died” of hypothermia.
As well, he told the Daily Beast in January, “You read page 147 of the script and it says, ‘Jack gets off the board and gives his place to her so that she can survive.’ It’s that simple.”
Referring to a 2012 episode of Discovery’s MythBusters in which he guest-starred, Cameron told the website, “You’re in water that’s 28 degrees, your brain is starting to get hypothermia. MythBusters asks you to now go take off your life vest, take hers off, swim underneath this thing, attach it in some way that it won’t just wash out two minutes later, which means you’re underwater tying this thing on in 28-degree water, and that’s going to take you five to 10 minutes, so by the time you come back up you’re already dead.”
On the episode itself, Cameron told hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, “The script says Jack died. He has to die. So maybe we screwed up and the board should have been a little tiny bit smaller, but the dude’s goin’ down.” With files from Debra Yeo