Just like Jack, James Cameron can’t let it go.
After decades of debate about whether Jack really could have shared the door to survive in the “Titanic” blockbuster, the director has finally settled the score.
For the staunch believers who are convinced Rose could have spared some room for her maritime fling, their hearts might sink when they learn the truth.
In the preview for his upcoming celebration of the film with National Geographic dubbed “Titanic: 25 years Later with James Cameron,” the “Avatar” filmmaker heads a science experiment to determine if there was really enough room for the lovebirds aboard the floating piece of debris.
“We’ll find out once and for all whether Jack could’ve survived the sinking of Titanic,” Cameron says in the teaser for the special, which will debut next week.
With the help of a hypothermia expert, Cameron’s team conducted a “thorough forensic analysis,” complete with a reproduction of the makeshift raft created in the wake of the wreckage. The team tested a variety of scenarios, including multiple different situations.
In one, the pair become submerged in below-freezing water, in another, Jack saves Rose from being pulled under by a fellow passenger. While Cameron admits Jack might have been able to make it “pretty long” or “until the lifeboat got there,” it wasn’t part of his master plan.
“We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate [Winslet] and Leo [DiCaprio] and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived,” he concluded, per the Toronto Sun.
“Only one could survive.”
But even if there was enough surface area on the piece of floating wood, Cameron firmly believes Jack “needed to die.”
“It’s like Romeo and Juliet,” he explained. “It’s a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality. The love is measured by the sacrifice.”
The “Titanic” filmmaker’s raft investigation follows years of angered fans who believe Jack’s death was unnecessary.
Winslet, 47, weighed in on the high-profile debate just last year, anchoring her answer in her extensive experience with water-borne activities. At the time, she said she doesn’t think the pair could have survived if they had both weighed down the door – although she admitted they could have fit.
Meanwhile, DiCaprio has kept tight-lipped, once saying he had “no comment” when asked by MTV years ago, as others have tried their luck to prove the director wrong.
In 2013, the television program “Mythbusters” put the iconic scene to the test, hypothesizing that Jack could have tied Rose’s life vest to the underside of the wood to enhance buoyancy.
Although just a few years later, Cameron scoffed at the theory.
“OK, so let’s really play that out: you’re Jack, you’re in water that’s 28 degrees; your brain is starting to get hypothermia,” Cameron told the Daily Beast at the time.
“’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,” he stated. “So that wouldn’t work.”
The “Titanic” revelation comes just after Cameron’s blockbuster “Avatar: The Way of the Water” became the fourth highest-grossing film of all time.
