Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron Page #11

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the wrong thing to do to me.

It just seemed like

the wrong thing to do to me.

My first favorite idea is to

put everybody on the iceberg

'cause it's not sinking.

Take a fur coat, sit on the iceberg.

If you have access to the iceberg.

Why don't you have access to it?

You just ran into it.

You left it behind.

A couple hundred meters away.

It's sitting right there.

If you have trouble convincing people

to get into a lifeboat...

(ALL CHUCKLING)

They didn't have any trouble

when they got up to boat 13 and 15.

- That was later.

- Yeah.

STEPHENSON:
That was later.

How are you going to put 2,000 people

on an iceberg that

you know is pretty irregular?

And how in the hell are

you going to get them on top?

- What I would do is...

- I think I'd be taking a chance on that.

- Here's the option.

-It's either that,

or cling to the stern, which is going down.

No, no. Option two.

They had received reports for days

that there was field ice,

and they knew

they were within five miles of it.

- Field ice. Pack ice.

- Right.

Now that you can easily walk right onto

from any shell door.

Sure. Just drive the ship right into it.

I would've headed northwest

until I hit the pack ice.

Much easier than climbing.

- But then you have to sail.

- Yes, yes.

Why you don't sail to the ship?

To the ship?

Because of the transfer problem.

I would prefer to be on the ship than...

What if the ship turns out to be

a 50-foot fishing sloop?

How do you get 3,000 people

on a 50-foot ship.

I don't think we came up

with any super brilliant ways to solve it.

There were a couple

that might have worked,

if you were incredibly ballsy

and just went for them.

You could've spent your time

fashioning rafts.

Oh, that's another...

That could be a possibility

with all the chairs and stuff like that.

But the people,

they will be already in the water.

You could go tear the woodwork

off the first-class lounge

-and throw more of that into the water.

- One guy took a bunch of deck chairs

and he made a raft out of it and survived.

Yeah, but you can put

more and more on them...

STEPHENSON:
No,

but that's one guy on his own initiative.

If you had the crew concentrated

on fashioning rafts

from the carpenters' stores, I think that...

I don't see that happening.

You might've saved another 50 people.

MARSCHALL:
Some people have come up

with the idea of

gathering together

a whole bunch of mattresses

and lowering them over by ropes

over the side, and they suck against the...

'Cause they knew from the inside

where the leaks were.

Ken had an interesting idea of putting

mattresses down the side of the ship

and trying to block the inrush of water

into Boiler Room 5 and Boiler Room 6.

And I think, as we argued it,

there was some possibility that,

that might've worked.

So our model indicates that if you just

lower the permeability in the holds

and forward spaces enough,

that you would reach equilibrium

and you would never go down,

or it would take

hours and hours and hours and hours.

So how do you...

THOMAS:
So take

all the lifejackets on board,

just all of them,

and shove them down

in those four compartments.

You would lower the permeabilities

really low.

- That's pretty scary.

- Like a ping-pong ball?

- Yeah.

- CAMERON:
That's pretty scary.

But all you got to do is

reduce, like, 20% of that total volume.

- I mean, that's a lot of volume, but...

- How do you get them in?

Because you try to push them down,

they keep popping up.

You put them in before the flooding.

- I like that.

- MARSCHALL:
That is really cinematic.

The risk of taking the lifejackets

off of all the passengers,

saying, "We're going to do this instead."

Well, they can live, or they can die

in the water wearing lifejackets.

MARSCHALLI Yeah.

Now take away every lifejacket from

every man, woman, and child on the ship,

and put them all into one room.

(SIGHS SKEPTICALLY)

That might be piling your chips

on one, kind of, long shot.

Now based on

what we've learned in this room,

what did we get wrong

in depicting the tragedy

in the feature film?

MAN:
All right boys. Like the Captain

said, nice and cheery, so there's no panic.

"Wedding Dance."

(PLAYING)

CAMERON:
We never really took much of

a beating for what we showed in the movie.

There were people

that disagreed with certain aspects of it

because they had their own

preconceptions of what it was like.

Stop, stop, stop!

(SCREAMS)

Hold the left side!

It was generally, broadly

well-accepted in the Titanic community.

I think it's really more that

we're just hard on ourselves.

Based on what we know now,

what did we screw up in the movie?

(LAUGHS)

We didn't screw it up. We were basing it

on what we knew at the time.

Exactly.

So, I think, of course, Ken could

give us a list about 100 things long.

Are we just really nitpicking

over physical things

that we would do different

with your sinking?

What you would consider nitpicking

and what I would consider nitpicking

are two different things.

- Your broad strokes are my nitpicks.

- No, I'm talking about the sinking.

- The way you depicted the sinking.

- Yeah.

- There is a mistake. There was a...

- The broad strokes are very accurate.

At one point during the sinking,

there was a clear list where

lifeboats were really scraping the side

and they were trying to push with oars

to even lower the boats,

and that isn't depicted in the movie.

So that's something that could be changed,

if it were ever to be done.

The next time I build a 1.5 million pound set

and lower it four stories into a tank,

I'll make sure I get that list on there.

MAN:
Action!

Boat 11, which is caught

with the condenser discharge,

is trying to row away while

13 is coming down almost on top of it,

right behind that.

And just about the time

that 13 hits the water,

15 will be coming down on top of that.

And the wash from that discharge

washes 13 aft,

right underneath 15

to the place where the passengers

can reach up and touch the bottom

of that 15 coming down.

And they were panicked.

They didn't know if they could hear them.

But, fortunately, they were able to

release the falls on 13 just in time

to row out of the way.

And then 15 came down right

where 13 had been just moments before.

LYNCH:
Can you hear me, Jim?

They should be able to stand up

and touch the bottom,

and it shouldn't be

really much lower than that.

Thanks for your opinion.

Now I'm going to make it exciting.

What I told various interviewers

during the marketing of the film was,

"I want this movie to be

like you went back in a time machine

"and you actually were there for the sinking.

"That's how accurate I want it to be."

Now that didn't prove to be possible.

What about the colors of the rockets?

(PEOPLE GASPING IN AWE)

LYNCH:
We talked about that at the time

and there was...

CAMERON:
The consensus was

they were white.

Well, no. It wasn't the consensus.

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