Some cinematic questions remain eternal. What’s in the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction“? What did Bob whisper in Charlotte’s ear at the end of “Lost In Translation“? And was there enough room on that floating door for Rose and Jack to survive in “Titanic“? As the film approaches its February 10 theatrical rerelease, James Cameron looks to put that mystery to bed in a new National Geographic special, “Titantic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron.”
EW has a breakdown of four different scenarios Cameron uses to recreate his film’s tragic scene and speculate if Jack indeed had a chance to avoid his chilly fate. In Test #1, “Jack and Rose are able to get on the raft, but now they’re both submerged in dangerous levels of freezing water,” Cameron noted. And in the next scenario, actors on the raft lift their upper bodies (and vital organ) in a position out of the water to increase their chances of survival. “Out of the water, [Jack’s body’s] violent shaking was helping him,” Cameron noted. “Projecting it out, he could’ve made it pretty long. Like, hours.”
And in the special’s final tests, Cameron puts his stand-ins through the same physical hurdles Jack and Rose dealt with before finding the floating door, like another passenger attempting to use Rose as a flotation device, with Jack socking them in the face. But Cameron has another addition, too: a life jacket for Jack for even more protection. “He’s stabilized,” Cameron said about Jack in the life jacket. “He got into a place where if we projected that out, he just might’ve made it until the lifeboat got there. Jack might’ve lived, but there’s a lot of variables. I think his thought process was, ‘I’m not going to do one thing that jeopardized her,’ and that’s 100 percent in character.”
But do Cameron’s experiments quell the chatter about Jack’s demise twenty-five years on? Whether or not Jack could fit on the door with Rose has been a long-debated topic for “Titanic” fans. So much so that even star Kate Winslet had to weigh in on the matter in her promotional tour for “Avatar: The Way Of Water.” “I have to be honest: I actually don’t believe that we would have survived if we had both gotten on that door,” Winslet said last December on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “I think he would have fit, but it would have tipped and it would not have been a sustainable idea. So, you heard it here for the first time. Yes, he could have fit on that door, but it would not have stayed afloat. It wouldn’t.”
But what do the fans thinks? Watch a clip from the upcoming National Geographic special below and decide whether or not Cameron’s recreations of the iconic “Titanic” scene truly put the matter to rest.