James Cameron shuts down fan theory on alternative 'Titanic' ending
He plainly says that door was "not big enough to hold" Jack.
— -- Fans are still arguing about that heartbreaking "Titanic" ending two decades after the movie's release.
Director James Cameron has tried to dispel the notion that Jack, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, could have survived by getting on that wood door with Rose after the ship started to sink, but fans have always said there was definitely room for both.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Cameron again delved into Jack's death.
"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," he said.
The "Avatar" director, 63, added that he thinks it's "silly" that this is still being debated.
"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. 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," he told the magazine.
Cameron has even gone on the popular show "Mythbusters" to back up his claim that the large wooden door that Rose rests on in the water to avoid freezing to death couldn't hold two people. In this new interview, Cameron talks about the calculations he did to make sure the physics were precise.
"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," he said.
He continued, "[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’s what it would have taken for one person to survive."
Aside from "Titanic," Cameron also spoke at length about returning to the "Terminator" franchise, saying the cast and crew are "cranking along."
"It’s the first of three. The story is mapped out over a three-film arc, but again, if we don’t make any money there isn’t gonna be a two and a three. Technically, we’re thinking of them as three, four and five. As if 'Terminator,' and 'Terminator 2' exist, and the other ones are kind of alternate time lines that are no longer relevant," he explained.
He said his "Terminator" movies take on even greater meaning in the world today.
"When it comes to strong [artificial intelligence] being coupled with weaponized robotics, and that’s all coming," he said. "It’s just a question of who gets there first, it’s gonna be the next big arms race, it’s gonna be like the next race to get the bomb . . . And when you couple that with the kind of wired world that we live in, where we’ve basically given away our privacy and every single person walking around, that’s got a smartphone is essentially a belled cat."