Titanic fans have been arguing for about two decades about whether or not there was enough room for both Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) on the door in the infamous scene where Jack died.
Helmsman James Cameron had an interview with Vanity Fair and revealed that nothing would’ve saved poor Jack.
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.
Fans have used science to prove that there was surely enough room on that raft for the two of them. However, Cameron insisted that Jack had to be gone with the wind.
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.
Well there you have it folks. A two decade old mystery has been solved. Now we can catch Titanic in theaters as it was re-released for its 20th anniversary, and convince ourselves in our heads that Jack’s life could’ve been spared.
