Cameron: Jack couldn’t get on the door because it was an artistic choice

James Cameron, the writer, director and producer of the Oscar winning film “Titanic” (1997), has finally broken his silence about the highly disputed Jack’s death and its connecting door theory. 20 years after the film’s first release, the director has yet again expressed dismay to the myth-busting claim put forth by fans, saying Jack’s death was inevitable. The disputed scene from the film is followed by the climax, where the two protagonists are stranded in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Jack, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is submerged in the icy cold water despite having room to climb aboard the floating door holding Rose, played by Kate Winslet. He could have clearly avoided death by hypothermia at the end of the film. Not limited to fans, nerds, scientists or even the actors of the film themselves agree there was more room on the door for Jack to have survived. The 63-year-old director stated in a recent interview with Vanity Fair: “It says on page 147 [of the script] that Jack dies.” “Obviously it was an artistic choice, [that] the thing was just big enough to hold her, and not big enough to hold him.” Finding it is “silly, really, that we’re having this discussion 20 years later,” the filmmaker pointed out that “had he lived, the ending of the film would have been meaningless. . . . So whether it was that, or whether a smokestack fell on him, he was going down.” He added he believed the physics were correct too. “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.... 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.” During the SAG AFTRA Foundation’s 2nd Annual Patron of the Artists Awards on November 9, Winslet’s fellow “Titanic” star, Kathy Bates, suggested while introducing Winslet on stage: “He lets go of her hand and sinks into the depth of the Atlantic. And I personally think that there was plenty of room on there!” Winslet agreed, and told the audience light-heartedly: “He could have fit on it! He could have fit on that door!” She similarly said these on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” back in February 2016 that Jack “could have actually fitted on that bit of door.” As far back as 2012, Cameron told IGN.com, “It’s not a question of room, it’s a question of buoyancy. ... It’s clear that there’s really only enough buoyancy available for one person. ... She’s completely out of the water on the raft, and . . . if he got on with her, they’d both be half in and half out of the water ... and they would have both died” of hypothermia. Referring to a 2012 episode of Discovery’s “MythBusters,” in which he gamely guest-starred, Cameron told Daily Beast: “You’re Jack, you’re in water that’s 28 degrees, your brain is starting to get hypothermia. “‘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. So that wouldn’t work. His best choice was to keep his upper body out of the water and hope to get pulled out by a boat or something before he died.”