James Cameron, who directed the iconic Titanic, in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Jack Dawson, dies while protecting his partner as the ship sank, now, decades later, shares tips on surviving such an incident.
“If you were traveling by yourself as a second-class passenger on the Titanic when it hit an iceberg, what would you have done?” he was asked in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
He first shares, “I think there were interesting ways to what-if or second-guess the whole thing.”
What strikes as surprising is James sharing that he had several discussions with his experts about the movie, focusing on hypothetical questions.
“One I like to play with my Titanic experts is — with what we know now, and if you had the captain’s ear — how could you save everybody?”
“The other is: What if you’re 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’re like, ‘Oh f***, I’m really on the ship, I’ve got to get off it,’” the Academy-winning director adds.
James then reveals his survival strategy in the situation of the Titanic sinking, saying, “Assuming you couldn’t 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’t too far away, you’d survive the brief plunge into the 28-degree water — and the lifeboat passengers would likely pull you aboard given that people would be watching from the rails of the ship.”
The Avatar director notes fear of jumping into the freezing cold water led many to miss their chance of being saved.
“Most people wouldn’t have had the courage to jump into the water. They couldn’t quite believe that the ship was really going to sink.”
“But if you knew for sure it was going to sink and you weren’t 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’d pull you in, and the officers would go, ‘Well, f***, there’s nothing I can do about that.’ Boat four would be a good one for this,” he notes.
Titanic was released in 1997.