It’s a testament to the emotional power of “Titanic” that 20 years after its release, fans are still debating whether or not Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Jack, had to die at the end of the Oscar-winning blockbuster.
With a famed “Mythbusters” episode offering scientific proof that the wooden door floating in the icy North Atlantic should have been able to keep both Jack and Rose (Kate Winslet) afloat, James Cameron is once again defending the decision to have Jack die while Rose survived (for the record, Cameron jokingly declared that, when it comes to their “Titanic” conclusions, the “Mythbusters” guys were “full of s**t”).
“The answer is very simple because it says on page 147 [of the script] that Jack dies. Very simple,” states Cameron in a new interview with Vanity Fair.
“Obviously it was an artistic choice, the thing was just big enough to hold her, and not big enough to hold him . . . I think it’s all kind of silly, really, that we’re having this discussion 20 years later,” adds the director. “But it does show that the film was effective in making Jack so endearing to the audience that it hurts them to see him die. Had he lived, the ending of the film would have been meaningless. . . . The film is about death and separation; he had to die. So whether it was that, or whether a smoke stack fell on him, he was going down. It’s called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons.”
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When the interviewer points out that Cameron is “usually such a stickler for physics,” he responds: “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 water so that she could survive the three hours it took until the rescue ship got there. [Jack] didn’t know that she was gonna get picked up by a lifeboat an hour later; he was dead anyway. And we very, very finely tuned it to be exactly what you see in the movie because I believed at the time, and still do, that that’s what it would have taken for one person to survive.”
