James Cameron revisits Titanic, answers the much-asked question: could Jack have survived?

Titanic director James Cameron has addressed a controversial question about the hit film, as it returns to the big screen for its 25th anniversary.

It’s a “totally stupid” debate that has been raging for a quarter of a century, but James Cameron has finally decided to tackle it head on: could Jack have survived at the end of Titanic?

As part of the 25-year anniversary celebrations of his record-breaking, Oscar-hogging disaster epic, the visionary director recruited experts in hypothermia and rigged up two stunt people of similar size, age and body mass to his lead actors under lab conditions for the National Geographic documentary Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron. His goal was to determine whether there really was enough room for Leonardo DiCaprio’s romantic lead alongside Kate Winslet’s Rose on that floating piece of wood (it’s wall panelling, not a door) – and whether it would have made a difference anyway.

“We wired them up with sensors up down and sideways, and had them go through the experience,” Cameron says. “And the goal, interestingly, was not to disprove or prove anything. It was to try to save Jack’s life in that scenario. And we actually ran the test four times. I’m not going to tell you the outcome of that but the results were kind of interesting.”

Jack and Rose in the final scenes of Titanic.

Cameron says he has tried to dismiss the “selfish Rose” theory ever since the movie sailed in to the public consciousness in 1997, winning 11 Oscars including Best Picture and Best director, and becoming the highest grossing film at that time (it’s now third on the list, with $3.2bn). He understands it shows just how invested audiences were in the love story that plays out on the doomed ocean liner, but says that it “clearly misses the literary point”.

“The entire film culminates thematically around Jack’s death because it’s ultimately about love meets loss, separation and a potential reunification, whether in an afterlife or just the yearning for that in old Rose’s final moments,” he says.

“Romeo and Juliet is only remembered today as a play because the young lovers died – star-crossed lovers, right? If they just held hands and skipped off into the sunset together, it wouldn’t have had the impact. So the only remaining question is, how small did that raft need to be to satisfy all of the audience that there was no hope for Jack?”

Cameron is no stranger to re-releases of his own films. When he did Terminator 2: Judgement Day a few years ago, he used CGI to fix a continuity error with a broken windscreen that had bugged him for years, and for the 2012 re-release of Titanic, he tweaked the night sky over the sinking ship when acclaimed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson told him it was inaccurate.

“Neil is still dining out on that, by the way, a decade later,” he says with a laugh.

He was tempted to reinstate one scene he’d always liked between Jack and Rose after the wild party in steerage that sealed their bond, but ultimately realised he’d cut it for a reason and stuck with his initial editorial decision.

“I thought that editorial decision was a critical part of the overall artistic decision-making at that time 25 years ago,” he says. “And to violate that for something that might have been fun for some fans didn’t seem worth it to me. So we ultimately wound up not changing a frame.”

Upper-class American Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) enjoys a moment with free-spirited young steerage passenger Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Winslet recently reunited with Cameron for Avatar: The Way of Water, a turn of events that surprised some given how difficult she said it had been on Titanic at the time. The pair have since discussed their experiences on the huge and technically challenging time and concluded that the then 19-year-old actor was overwhelmed by the scale and pressure of what was by far the biggest movie she’d ever worked on.

Whereas DiCaprio breezed through the shoot, “playing video games and rapping with his buddies” right up until the cameras were ready to roll for a scene, and stepping out of character just as easily when Cameron called cut, Winslet was “the exact opposite”.

“She carried the burden of that production on her shoulders and in her mind,” Cameron says. “We’ve had long conversations about this since because we’re still great pals and she now realises that’s a pattern for her, and it’s very hard for her to shake off characters that have been through traumatic experiences because it eats into her soul and draws her into that black hole. And that’s why she’s so good.

“I would like to point out that I’m the only director to date that she’s worked with twice, so I don’t think the trauma is long term. I think it’s part of her cycle of finishing one character and starting the next character. Now this is just me – no extra charge for the psycho analytics here, Kate, you get them for free.”

Director James Cameron. Picture: Getty Images via AFP

With Titanic back on the big screen this week and The Way Of Water still ruling the box office, Cameron is now in a strange race with himself as to which of the two will become the third highest grossing film ever, behind the original Avatar and Avengers: Endgame. It’s a win-win clash that the director is relishing,

“The story of Titanic is all about a collision, right?,” he says with a laugh. “Multiple collisions actually … Titanic hits iceberg, Jack hits Rose or vice versa, whoever made the first move there. So, it’ll be a collision one way or the other.”

Like Titanic and Avatar before it, The Way of Water was again met with scepticism and portents of doom before its release with many pointing out it would have to clear the $US2bn mark just to make a profit. Given it was 13 years since the first film was released – and with grand plans for more well advanced – Cameron was also nervous and says his strongest feeling when audiences embraced it was one of relief.

“I was manifesting some kind of anxiety around whether coming back to that world 13 years later … blah, blah, blah … all the things that the naysayers were on about endlessly,” he says. “So obviously, there’s huge relief that our loyal fan base came back and we’ve created a whole new set of younger fans, and so we’re actually in good shape to continue with that franchise, which is good because we’ve already shot a whole other movie.”

Titanic is in cinemas Wednesday.

Originally published as James Cameron revisits Titanic, answers the much-asked question: could Jack have survived?