James Cameron is done discussing the ending of his hit 1997 film Titanic. He is no longer interested in debating about instances where Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) could have survived the iceberg crash which lead to the sinking of the British ocean liner in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Cameron, who won three Academy Awards in 1997 for writing, directing and producing Titanic, spoke candidly on The Hollywood Reporter's Awards Chatter podcast, where the iconic film inevitably resurfaced during a discussion of his career.
"Don't ask me about the raft, people!" Cameron, said bluntly, reflecting long-standing fan arguments over the film's climactic sequence where Jack sacrifices his life for Rose (Kate Winslet) to survive on the raft. Since then, numerous theories have been floating around on how both Rose and Jack could have survived on the raft.
Dismissing all these speculations, an exasperated Cameron reiterated, "Look, we even went to the lengths of doing an experiment to see if Jack could have in any way survived, or if they could have both survived, and people didn't even hear the answer when I told them the answer."
For Jack to survive, he would have required a highly specific knowledge that was not available at the time of the catastrophe in 1912. "If Jack somehow was an expert in hypothermia and somehow knew what science now knows back in 1912, it is theoretically possible, with a lot of luck, that he might have survived," he elaborated and remarked once again, "The answer is no, he could not have. There's no way."
The conversation underlined the noted filmmaker's penchant for crafting films with in-depth research and precision---the same qualities that has recently made him script history of being the first and only director to deliver four films that crossed the $1 billion mark at the global box office.