Cameron had a decisive answer to the question in 2017.
“Look, it’s very, very simple: you read page 147 of the script and it says, ‘Jack leaves the board and gives her his place so she can survive,'” he said in a interview with the Daily Beast.
But now Cameron is ready to close the door on the debate.
The director recently revealed he commissioned a study that shows only one of the duo’s “Titanic” darlings could have survived, he said in an interview with the Toronto Sun. The study, which used stunt performers and hypothermia experts to recreate the tragic and often disputed scene from the film, will be revealed in a February 2023 National Geographic special around the time a remastered version of the hit film is released. scheduled for release.
“We actually did a scientific study to put all of this to rest and drive a stake through his heart once and for all,” Cameron said in the interview while promoting his new movie, “Avatar: The Way of Water”.
After the ship sinks in “Titanic,” Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) gets Rose (Kate Winslet) to safety by leading her to a door he finds floating in freezing ocean water.
They both try to climb to the top of the gate but then fall back into the water before Rose climbs it alone, and Jack makes her promise that she will survive. He is still clinging to the makeshift raft, his body submerged, when a rescue boat arrives. But as Rose, lying in the doorway and wearing a life jacket, tries to wake him up, she realizes he is dead.
And ever since Jack disappeared into the dark waters, fans have claimed he might have survived if he had walked through the door next to Rose.
Over the past 25 years, many have weighed in on Jack’s death, including the TV show MythBusters, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Winslet and DiCaprio.
In 2012, Cameron himself made an appearance on MythBusters when the show’s hosts, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, told him the couple would have survived if Jack had walked in the door. The animators did an experiment showing that if one of the characters had strapped Rose’s life jacket under the door to make it more buoyant, and then supported their body more upright on the board, they would have lived.
The script says Jack dies. He has to die,” Cameron replies in the episode. “So maybe we screwed up, and the board should have been a little smaller, but the dude is falling.”
So, with the new study, how could Cameron prove – beyond citing the “Titanic” storyline – that Jack couldn’t have survived?
Sarah Purkey, a professor of oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, said it was a problem of buoyancy versus gravity. For Jack and Rose to survive, she says, the buoyancy of the wood would have to equal or exceed the force of gravity of the characters’ weight.
“That’s how boats float, and that’s how a piece of driftwood floats,” Purkey said. And it will sink if gravity is greater than its buoyancy.
Making these calculations comes down to the weight of the figures and the size and material of the wood. But that raises a question raised in the MythBusters episode – could Rose’s life jacket have been used to save Jack while they were under duress in the freezing ocean?
The stress of this situation makes it “absolutely realistic” that Jack and Rose would not have made all the right decisions, said Gordon Giesbrecht, a professor specializing in cold stress physiology at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
“It’s just basic stuff like panicking, panicking, or just not thinking straight in a stressful situation,” said Giesbrecht, who has studied human responses in extreme environments. I mean, why can’t you read a question right when you’re writing a review? Because you are stressed.
While the scene is hotly debated, Giesbrecht added that fan complaints to Cameron are frivolous, given that they concern a fictional movie couple.
“It’s so silly,” he said. “I can’t believe he’s had it for 25 years.”
While there are many known theories about the scene, it’s unclear what the study attempting to disprove them will look like. All Cameron has so far is that he’s revealed body doubles used for Winslet and DiCaprio, fitted them with sensors, and tested their survival “by various methods.”
And the answer was final every time – only one of them could make it out alive, according to Cameron.
“He picked the props and told the story,” said University of California professor Purkey. “So in my mind, he can make this door any size and any density he wants, and that’s what makes the movie.”
She added that if the study gets people thinking about the physics of the ocean, “then that’s great.”
And scientifically sound or not, the ship sailed to a happy ending for Jack and Rose. After all, as Cameron has said many times, the couple’s devastating fate was sealed years ago on page 147 of the “Titanic” screenplay.
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