Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron

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Iceberg, right ahead!

JAMES CAMERON:
This is the part

of Titanic's story we all know.

(METAL SCREECHING)

But what happened to Titanic

after the last eyewitness

saw her slip beneath the surface?

Titanic is

the perfect unsolved murder mystery.

It hit there, but then it kind of whiplashes

when it hits the ground back here.

What happened

in the final minutes of the ship?

How did it break up? How did it fall?

How did it hit the bottom?

Why did she sink so fast?

Could more lives have been saved?

Did I get the details right

in the feature film?

No, I'm talking about the sinking,

the way you depicted the sinking.

We didn't do it 'cause we didn't know.

For the first time ever,

I've gathered all the evidence

and eight of the world's

leading Titanic experts

all together, in one place.

Some have been to the wreck,

some approach it through the testimony,

some approach it

through the physical forensics.

We respectfully disagree.

CAMERON". No one gets out of this room

until we piece together, once and for all,

what happened in Titanic's final minutes.

We're going to argue.

I guarantee it. It'll get heated.

Ooh...

Coincidence? There's no coincidence.

There's no such thing as coincidence.

- I agree.

- No. (CHUCKLES)

CAMERON:
Now, on the 100th anniversary

of the tragedy,

fifteen years after the film's initial release,

it's time for the final word

on what really happened to Titanic.

MAN 1:
Mir I, Mir I. Jake is coming out

of his search. Over.

MAN 2:
Here he comes. He's out.

CAMERON:
I feel like I've lived on Titanic

certainly much longer than

any of the people who were

actually involved in the event did.

I've got it ingrained in my memory.

I could walk the ship in my sleep.

Keep lowering!

CAMERON:
When I see the model,

it just brings back to me all those nights

of shooting with the crowds,

running and screaming up the decks.

(SCREAMS)

Then going back to one

and doing it all again.

See you in the sunshine.

For me, filmmaking comes out of my desire

to explore unknown worlds.

You want to see Titanic on the sonar?

Check this out, bro.

You're gonna love this.

I wanted to dive the wreck

more than I wanted to make the movie.

Diving the wreck was

my way into the story.

- There she is, baby.

- MAN:
Oh, yeah.

It's a dream come true for me.

Titanic does not give up her secrets easily.

The more you work on this,

the more you can bring it into focus

and fill in the gaps.

And there are some enigmas.

Titanic:
is like a fractal,

the closer you get to it,

the more you see completely new patterns.

There have been a lot of ideas,

a lot of theories.

It's time to just say,

"This is what really happened,

to the best of our collective knowledge."

This shouldn't be all sort of nicey-nicey,

blowing pink smoke around.

Let's beat it up.

That's the best way to

arrive at an answer that makes sense.

My Titanic:
dream team includes

Ken Marschaii, artist, visual historian.

P. H. Nargeolet, explorer,

Underwater Operations, RMS Titanic.

Bill Sauder, historian,

Director of Research, RMS Titanic.

Parks Stephenson,

Naval Systems Engineer.

Don Lynch, Chief Historian

of the Titanic Historical Society.

Dave Gallo, Director of Special Projects

at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Commander Jeffrey Stettler,

Naval Architect, US Naval Academy.

Brian Thomas, Coast Guard Naval Architect

and Salvage Engineer.

We have the team and the tools.

From hundreds of hours

of my expedition dive footage,

to deck plans and survivor testimony,

we're going to take all we learned

and create a new visualization

of the sinking.

From iceberg to bottom,

it's never been animated so precisely

and so dramatically.

We're determined, once and for all,

to learn what happened

after Titanic disappeared

beneath the surface 100 years ago.

after Titanic disappeared

beneath the surface 100 years ago.

It's a good, just kind of

drive-a-stake-in-the-ground moment

for us to say, "Let's get the history right."

To me, the exercise of making the movie

and preparing to make the movie

was about understanding history.

Like, what is history?

History is

this kind of consensus hallucination.

There are some people who, they tell

the story like it happened yesterday.

And then there are others who,

over the years, have been telling the story

and the story changes, you know?

So, yeah.

And how much does the telling of the story

become the memory,

as opposed to the memory itself?

Our task here is to

separate perception from truth.

So what is it that we know for sure?

At the time of her construction,

Titanic was the largest ship ever built,

269 meters long

and standing nearly 20 stories high.

Her weight was over 46,000 tons.

Her hull spanned four city blocks.

She had nine decks

encompassing 370 first-class cabins,

168 second-class cabins,

and 297 third-class cabins.

Accommodations for up to 3,547 people.

(METAL CLANGING)

(BELL RINGING)

Mechanically, she was state of the art,

fitted with 29 boilers and 159 furnaces.

Each of her steam engines

was the size of a three-story house.

Over 6,000 tons of coal

filled her coal bunkers.

From her innovative double-bottom keel,

to her 16 water-tight compartments,

Titanic. was considered unsinkable.

Each compartment had doors

that were designed to close automatically

if the water level

rose above a certain height.

Titanic would be able to stay afloat

if any two compartments

or the first four became flooded.

According to her builders,

even in the worst possible accident at sea,

Titanic was virtually unsinkable.

-Iceberg, right ahead!

-Thank you.

CAMERON:
But we know

that on April 14, 1912,

Titanic sideswiped an iceberg

and sank in two hours and 40 minutes.

Full astern!

- Hard over.

- MOODY:
Helm's hard over, sir.

Why ain't they turning?

- Is it hard over?!

- It is. Yes sir. Hard over.

(METAL SCREECHING)

CAMERON:
One hundred years later,

this is what's left of Titanic,

a tangled wreck on the ocean floor.

Thousands of broken pieces.

But from her rust-covered remains,

we may still be able to figure out

what happened in her last moments.

Well, it's very important to find out

where all the objects wound up.

And then you can

work backwards from that

to sort of reconstruct

how the processes got started.

You've got to

peel away the bottom impact,

and you got to understand

what happened in the water column,

you got to understand

what happened at the surface.

Then maybe you can work your way back

to what actually set off the sinking

in the first place.

It's like a murder-mystery case

where some piece of evidence is an outlier.

Everything fits perfectly,

but there's one outlying piece of evidence,

and it seems so trivial,

and yet it unwinds everything else.

It's a great forensic process to go through.

It's the same thing that they do

at an NTSB analysis of a crash site

for an airliner.

You know, "How did that engine

get way over there?

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