James Cameron has admitted that the reconstruction of the sinking of the Titanic in his famous film is only partially correct, depending on how the real ship sank.
James Cameron is obsessed with technology and science, which he used to test the goodness of his own reconstruction of the sinking of the Titanic in the film of the same name. On the occasion of the National Geographic special, Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron, the director has hired a team of scientists and engineers to help him determine whether the sinking scene in his film is correct or not.
After multiple hydrodynamic tests, Cameron concluded that his reconstruction of the 1912 disaster, which killed more than 1,500 people, was “half correct”as he reveals to EW.
“Titanic depicts what we believed was an accurate portrayal of the ship’s final hours. We showed her sinking bow first, lifting her stern high into the air, before her enormous weight snapped the ship in two. Over the last 20 years, I’ve been trying to determine if we’ve got it right.”
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While based on a true story, Titanic told the fictional story of Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet), who fall in love on the ill-fated passenger liner. However, James Cameron noted that his portrayal of how the ship sank in the film may differ from how it actually sank.
“I have no way of determining that’s actually what happened, but I wish I could consider it a possibility because then I don’t have to redo the whole damn movie!” he joked, adding that “the dramatic image of the stern of the slowly sinking ship was as accurate as possible at the time”.
To test his theory, Cameron and his team built a model version of the Titanic that was able to split in the same spot as the original vessel and used pyrotechnic equipment to sink it in a controlled tank of water.
Among those who helped the director on his journey of knowledge was the United States Navy, which built two computer simulation models of the Titanic which revealed that the ship needed to list only 23 degrees out of the water before it broke. From there, Cameron and his team conducted a series of tests that uncovered a key difference between the model and the film.
“We found that you can make the stern sink vertically and you can make the stern drop with a big thud, but you can’t have both. So the movie is wrong in one aspect or the other. I tend to think it’s wrong about the fallout of the stern because of what we see at the bow of the wreck. I think we can rule out the possibility of the stern sinking vertically, and I think we can rule out the possibility of it falling back and then going vertical. We were more or less right in the film.”.
