No, Jack and Rose would not have been able to survive on the Titanic raft. In a recent interview with the Toronto Sun, director James Cameron revealed that he led a “scientific study” made to disprove a myth about the iconic scene between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
“We have done a scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all,” Cameron told the Canadian outlet. “We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie and we’re going to do a little special on it that comes out in February.”
In the 1997 film, Jack allows Rose to take a raft after the Titanic ship sinks. Given the size of the raft, fans of the film speculated that both characters may have survived. Twenty-five years later, Cameron is putting the rumors to rest.
“We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived,” he said. “Only one could survive.”
And when asked if he had any regrets about killing off DiCaprio’s character for a happy ending, Cameron’s answer was simple: “No, he needed to die.”
“It’s like Romeo and Juliet. It’s a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality,” Cameron said. “The love is measured by the sacrifice.”
The death of Jack is something that Mythbusters tackled and claimed that his death was “needless,” though Cameron told Daily Beast in 2017 that the show’s theory “wouldn’t work.”
“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,” he said at the time. “[Jack’s] 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. They’re fun guys and I loved doing that show with them, but they’re full of s—.”
Given his disdain for the fan theory, perhaps the Avatar director is pulling everybody’s leg. We’ll have to wait until February to find out.
