James Cameron Joins Experiment to Settle Titanic Raft Debate

In National Geographic’s special ‘Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron’, the filmmaker recreates the floating door scene to see if Jack could’ve have survived the freezing water with Rose.

AceShowbiz -More than 25 years after “Titanic” became a huge box office hit, James Cameron finally settles the long-running debate about whether Jack could have fit on the floating door at the end of the movie. In National Geographic’s upcoming special “Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron”, he joins an experiment to see if Leonardo DiCaprio‘s character could’ve survived with Kate Winslet‘s Rose in “dangerous levels of freezing water.”

For the special, Cameron and a team of scientists recreate the floating door scene and test four different scenarios in which Jack actually climbed aboard the wreckage too. He enlists the help of two stunt doubles to reenact the scene.

In the first round, both Jack and Rose are halfway on the piece of the debris, but their lower halves are completely submerged in the freezing water. “Jack and Rose are able to get on the raft, but now they’re both submerged in dangerous levels of freezing water,” Cameron observes in a first-look clip debuted on “Good Morning America” on Tuesday, January 31.

In another position, they are both seated on the debris, but Jack is shaking violently from the cold. “Out of the water, [his body’s] violent shaking was helping him. Projecting it out, he could’ve made it pretty long, like hours,” Cameron says of the second scenario.

For the final test, the actors perform all of the physically strenuous actions Jack and Rose went through prior to finding the floating door, including when Rose is shoved underwater by another survivor before Jack swims over and punches her attacker. Once they both are seated on the floating debris, Rose offers Jack her life jacket, and he “stabilized.”

“She got him to a place where, if we projected that out, he just might have made it until the lifeboat got there,” Cameron explains. “He got into a place where if we projected that out, he just might’ve made it until the lifeboat got there.” He then concludes, “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.”

Cameron has previously weighed in on the debate, telling Vanity Fair in 2017, “It does show that the film was effective in making Jack so endearing to the audience that it hurts them to see him die.” He added, “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.”

“Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron” premieres Sunday, February 5 at 9 P.M. ET on National Geographic, and streams the next day on Hulu.

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