{"id":213335,"date":"2025-12-31T15:39:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-31T15:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/213335\/"},"modified":"2025-12-31T15:39:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T15:39:08","slug":"james-cameron-explains-how-to-survive-titanic-sinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/213335\/","title":{"rendered":"James Cameron Explains How to Survive Titanic Sinking\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tTitanic<\/a> is the most popular disaster-survival film of all time. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut if you found yourself on the \u201cship of dreams\u201d on the night of April 15, 1912, what could you have done to survive its sinking? <\/p>\n

\n\tWe asked the film\u2019s Oscar-winning writer-director James Cameron<\/a> during our interview for last week\u2019s Hollywood Reporter cover story<\/a> and the ever-resourceful filmmaker gave a rather clever answer.<\/p>\n

\n\tFirst, our phrasing of the question was specifically chosen: \u201cIf you were traveling by yourself as a second-class passenger on Titanic when it hit an iceberg, what would you have done?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTraveling by yourself\u201d because a man traveling with his family is presumably going to prioritize their survival instead of his own. And \u201csecond class\u201d because we all know from watching Cameron\u2019s film that some third-class passengers found themselves trapped below decks and were pretty much doomed, while first-class passengers had the best shot at securing an easy seat on the lifeboats (even though Second Officer Charles Lightoller mistakenly took the captain\u2019s order of \u201cwomen and children first\u201d to mean \u201cwomen and children only,\u201d which resulted in some boats not being filled to capacity).<\/p>\n

\n\tTurns out, Cameron has played this game himself. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tKate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio and James Cameron on the set of \u2018Titanic.\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t20th Century Fox Film Corp.\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think there were interesting ways to what-if or second-guess the whole thing,\u201d Cameron says. \u201cOne I like to play with my Titanic experts is \u2014 with what we know now, and if you had the captain\u2019s ear \u2014 how could you save everybody? The other is: What if you\u2019re a time traveler, you go back and want to experience the sinking, and your little time-travel thing that gets you back fails, and you\u2019re like, \u2018Oh f\u2013k, I\u2019m really on the ship, I\u2019ve got to get off it.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAssuming you couldn\u2019t get a seat on a lifeboat the normal way, Cameron says that your best move would be to stand on the side of the Titanic and wait for a lifeboat to launch during the early part of the evacuation. Then you jump off the Titanic and swim to the newly launched boat. As long as the boat wasn\u2019t too far away, you\u2019d survive the brief plunge into the 28-degree water \u2014 and the lifeboat passengers would likely pull you aboard given that people would be watching from the rails of the ship.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMost people wouldn\u2019t have had the courage to jump into the water,\u201d Cameron says. \u201cThey couldn\u2019t quite believe that the ship was really going to sink. But if you knew for sure it was going to sink and you weren\u2019t on a lifeboat, you jump in the water next to the boat the second it casts off. Once they rowed away, you were screwed. Are they going to let you drown when Titanic is still there and everybody is watching? No, they\u2019d pull you in, and the officers would go, \u2018Well, f\u2013k, there\u2019s nothing I can do about that.\u2019 Boat four would be a good one for this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the 1997 film, of course, Cameron\u2019s hero, Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), reasons the best move is to stay on the ship as long as possible. Which made sense given the amount of information he had at the time \u2014 not knowing rescue from another ship wouldn\u2019t arrive until roughly two hours after Titanic sank. An even better move would have been for Rose (Kate Winslet) to stay on the lifeboat, giving Jack a better shot at survival on that floating door. But that\u2019s all part of the movie\u2019s appeal; there\u2019s a play-along factor where the audience can ask themselves what they would have done at various turning points.<\/p>\n

\n\tCameron\u2019s latest, Avatar: Fire and Ash, is now in theaters.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor more from James Cameron\u2019s wide-ranging and deep-dive interview with THR, read this week\u2019s cover story: James Cameron Is Ready to Move Beyond Avatar: \u201cI\u2019ve Got Other Stories to Tell.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Titanic is the most popular disaster-survival film of all time. But if you found yourself on the \u201cship…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,30586,397,43729],"class_list":{"0":"post-213335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-james-cameron","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-titanic"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}