James Cameron recently appeared on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, diving into a wide-ranging conversation about his iconic career.
Yet, one topic inevitably stole the spotlight: the age-old debate over whether Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Jack, could have survived the icy waters at the end of Titanic or simply joined Kate Winslet’s Rose on the raft.
Fans have argued this point for decades, and Cameron approached it with an unexpected mix of passion and exasperation.
“Don’t ask me about the f—ing raft, people!” Cameron, 71, said when the topic came up.
Nevertheless, the director – whose resume spans genre-defining hits like The Terminator, Aliens, Avatar and The Abyss – didn’t leave fans hanging on the question.
“Look, we even went to the lengths of doing an experiment to see if Jack could have in any way survived, or if they could have both survived, and people didn’t even hear the answer when I told them the answer,” Cameron, who won three Oscars for the film, explained.
“The answer is, if Jack somehow was an expert in hypothermia and somehow knew what science now knows back in 1912, it is theoretically possible, with a lot of luck, that he might have survived.”
Yet Cameron quickly set the record straight for Titanic fans. “Therefore, the answer is no, he could not have. There’s no way. The conditions were not met. He couldn’t have known those things.”
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The conversation highlighted not just Cameron’s attention to detail and commitment to accuracy but also why his films continue to captivate audiences worldwide, repeatedly breaking box-office records.