James Cameron Weighs In On ‘Titanic’ Controversy: Jack Would Have Died

Director James Cameron has finally weighed in on one of the most controversial plot points of his hit film Titanic: was the raft big enough for both Rose and Jack?

JAMES CAMERON SAYS JACK WOULD NEVER HAVE SURVIVED

At the end of the Oscar-winning film, Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) are in the freezing water when Rose finds some floating wood. She sits atop the makeshift raft as her love Jack stays in the water, freezes and drowns. Even 20 years later, fans and critics wonder why Jack couldn’t have sat next to Rose on the raft and survived.

“Ok, so let’s really play that out,” Cameron weighed in, in response to a MythBusters episode that explored the topic. “You’re Jack, you’re in water that’s 28 degrees, your brain is starting to get hypothermia. MythBusters asks you to now go take off your life vest, take hers off, swim underneath this thing, attach it in some way that it won’t just wash out two minutes later — which means you’re underwater tying this thing on in 28-degree water, and that’s going to take you 5-to-10 minutes, so by the time you come back up you’re already dead. So that wouldn’t work. His best choice was to keep his upper body out of the water and hope to get pulled out by a boat or something before he died.”

To make sure he wasn’t misconstrued, the director acknowledged the show’s hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage. “They’re fun guys and I loved doing that show with them, but they’re full of s–t,” he said. “I think you guys are missing the point here. The script says Jack dies, he has to die. Maybe we screwed up. The board should have been a tiny bit smaller. But the dude’s going down.”

That didn’t stop Winslet from telling Jimmy Kimmel that she thought Jack could have survived. “I think he could have actually fitted on that bit of door,” she said last year.