The debate over the ending of Titanic is one that has raged on for years, and will almost certainly continue to do so for decades to come.
Director James Cameron is now regularly asked why Kate Winslet’s Rose didn’t make room for Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack on the door that she was using to float on. During a recent interview with Vanity Fair Cameron was once again quizzed about the conclusion to “Titanic,” but rather than going into specifics he instead explained why nothing could have saved Jack.
“The answer is very simple because it says on page 147 [of the script] that Jack dies. Very simple. 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.”
However, while Cameron might sound a little glib with the above comment, he did admit the fact the ending is still debated so often proves just how popular both “Titanic” and its characters still are.
“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.”
Cameron also recalled just how involved he was in the shooting of Jack’s death, as he wanted to make sure that the physics of the scene were correct.
“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.”
Basically, that translates as James Cameron really doesn’t care about your “Titanic” theories.
