Titanic, the film, was “wrong on one point or the other,” according to James Cameron, who has been on a quest for decades to uncover how correctly his 1997 film Titanic depicts the sinking of the real RMS Titanic.
He has concluded that the film was “inaccurate” in some way. In the new program Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron, which aired on Sunday on National Geographic, Cameron, 68, came to the conclusion that the film Titanic’s recreation of the real-life Titanic’s catastrophic sinking in 1912 was only “kind of half correct.”
Director of Avatar arrived at this conclusion after the United States Navy ran a series of experiments on model versions using computer simulations. “In the movie “Titanic,” the events of the ship’s last hours are portrayed in what we considered to be a realistic manner.
We demonstrated how it sank stern-first, sending the bow into the air, just before the ship’s enormous weight tore it in two, ” Cameron said this in the program.
“Over the last 20 years, I’ve been trying to figure out whether we got it right.”
The sinking of the Titanic in the early hours of April 15, 1912, when the ship collided with an iceberg on her first journey from Southampton, England, to New York City, resulted in the loss of about 1,500 passengers and crew members.
The imaginary romance that takes place on board the ship between passengers Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose DeWitt Bukater is the backdrop for the catastrophe in the 1997 film directed by James Cameron (Kate Winslet).
Cameron was quoted in the program as saying, “We found out that you can have the stern sink vertically or you can have the stern fall back with a large splash, but you can’t have both at the same time.”
Because of what we see in the bow of the crash, I have a strong suspicion that the movie gets the “fall back of the stern” part wrong. “So the movie is wrong on one point or the other.”
Cameron’s commitment to researching the sinking of the Titanic over the course of many years does not obscure the reality that “what occurred there was a terrible catastrophe,” as he said in the documentary special.
The filmmaker made the observation that it was something that really occurred to real people and that it continues to echo across time in a very potent manner.