This week is the 25th anniversary of Titanic, that epic romance/tragedy that spawned a hell of a Celine Dion ear, an unforgettable meme before there were memes, and an inescapable question.
It’s the question that will haunt everyone until the end of time, or at least for another 25 years as we enter. Titanic50th anniversary.
It’s a question that has been debated so much that Kate Winslet is sick of it, but that didn’t stop her from weighing in.
It’s that damn door. The piece of driftwood that saved Rose but not Jack, whose frozen body sank into the Atlantic. The gate was so generous, so many fans have cried, surely he would have fit in too, they added.
Rose and Jack deserved a chance to be happy together, or at least until the series of global catastrophes that followed the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. You know, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.
Okay, so at least they deserved a chance to see if Jack could dodge the draft or make it back alive from the front.
Asked at Happy Sad Confused podcast during the promotional tour of Avatar: The Way of Waterhis reunion with Titanic of director James Cameron, Winslet began by saying, “You just have to make a joke of it, right? I don’t know, that’s the answer, I don’t know.”
But then he must have thought more about it because his deductive reasoning took over.
Winslet said she has a “more understanding of water and how it behaves than most” after filming Avatar: The Way of Water, where he held the record for holding his breath for seven minutes. And she is an avid swimmer, surfer, kitesurfer, windsurfer, scuba diver and, perhaps most importantly, paddleboarder.
“If you put two adults on a paddle board, it immediately becomes extremely unstable. That’s for sure. If you put two adults and, say, a seven-year-old on a paddle board, there’s nothing you can do. You’re going to tip over, you’re going to fall into Water.
“I’ve got to be honest. I actually don’t think we would have survived if we’d both made it to that door. I think it might have fit, but it would have tilted, and it wouldn’t have been a sustainable idea.
“So you heard it here for the first time: yes, it might have fit in that door, but it wouldn’t have stayed afloat.”
Winslet’s reasoning is sound, and will be supported, according to Cameron, by scientists who will prove in a special that Jack had to die.
Cameron told him Toronto sun“We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the film and we will be doing a special on it coming out in February.
“We took two stunt people who were the same body mass as Kate and Leo and put sensors all over them and inside them, and put them in ice water and tested to see if they would have survived.
“[Jack] needed to die It’s like Romeo and Juliet. It is a film about love, sacrifice and mortality. Maybe after 25 years, I won’t have to deal with this anymore.”
Titanic opened 25 years ago this week and won 11 Oscars, including Best Picture. It grossed $2.2 billion and was in first place until it was overtaken by another Cameron film, Avatar. It is currently in third place, half a million behind Avengers: Endgame.