James Cameron explains why Jack couldn’t share the wooden door with Rose in Titanic

James Cameron explains the famous Titanic Scene.

Titanic is one of the highest-grossing films in the history, and also shares the top spot for most Oscar wins with Ben-Hur and The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Critics and audiences, both absolutely loved it. But there has been a scene, a crucial one, that has nagged almost everyone who watched the film. It still remains a mystery, even after 20 years of the film’s release. That scene comes towards the end when Rose (Kate Winslet) is lying on a wooden door. And the door is not enough to save two people. Its buoyancy will not last.

But now James Cameron has come out clean about the scene. In an interview with Vanity Fair, he has explained that Jack had to die because it was in the script. He says, had Jack lived, the ending of the film would have had no meaning. “And the answer is very simple because it says on page 147 [of the script] that Jack dies. Very simple. . . . Obviously it was an artistic choice, the thing was just big enough to hold her, and not big enough to hold him . . . I think it’s all kind of silly, really, that we’re having this discussion 20 years later. But it does show that the film was effective in making Jack so endearing to the audience that it hurts them to see him die,” Cameron says.

This scene from Titanic has nagged the viewers for two decades.

“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. It’s called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons,” he added.

When the interviewer asked why was this decision made when James Cameron is careful about the physical aspects of filmmaking, Cameron said, “I am. 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.”