Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron Page #6

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To honor their memory,

to keep it alive in peoples' memory.

The ship and the people.

When Bob Ballard's expedition

with the French found the wreck in 1985,

the first images confirmed

that the ship had broken apart.

But it was impossible to

see the entire wreck in one shot,

so Ballard's publisher enlisted me

to paint composites,

big-picture views of the ship created

from studying hundreds of close-ups.

And that was my first exposure

to the wreck,

other than the few pictures I'd seen

in magazines or in the news.

Seeing all of this imagery for the first time,

Bob setting me up in a room downstairs,

right below his lab.

Thousands of feet of individual stills

and I had to crank through this film.

And I was doing sketching,

and I was pinpointing particular images

that I needed enlargements of and

duplicates of in order to do these paintings.

I thought we would find her, and

she'd still be in relatively good condition

and still would look more like the ship,

but instead she was just nuked,

just blasted apart.

It was like going to an autopsy.

It was quite a rude awakening.

After three days of that,

I broke down in tears one night.

I remember I called home

to speak to a friend,

and I remember saying words to the...

It kind of makes me tear up right now

to think about it.

But I said to him,

"My ship! My ship, it's gone."

Um...

It was... It was so destroyed.

And I knew the ship was in two pieces,

(CLEARS THROAT)

but to see these close-up images

and the high resolution of some of them,

and to look down and see how

completely ripped apart the ship was...

I know it as I would a brother, a sister,

a mother, a father.

And there she was,

in a million pieces. Dead.

CAMERON:
Some of the damage is

easy to understand.

Other aspects are downright mysterious,

like the stern.

It's completely bizarre at first sight.

Just like a bomb went off overhead.

When I dived it, it was remarkable

to see the extent of the damage.

The rudder and the enormous propellers

pinned in the sediment

are hauntingly intact.

Surrounding the stern is

a large concentration of mangled debris.

It really looks like a plane crash.

How do we know that the stern took off

toward the bottom going pretty fast?

The poop deck.

So the aft-most deck, the poop deck,

is doubled over completely.

One centimeter of steel folded like a taco.

How did this happen?

It's got a big electric crane sitting here,

that's got a lot of sail area across,

on that axis.

Right? So to take off toward the bottom,

you got a really powerful

hydrodynamic loading here.

So you got a big, sort of prying moment

right here,

and it just rips this deck up,

which then catches lift,

peels back, and flops over double,

and winds up like that.

And you think that happened

in the first 500 feet...

The first 30 seconds.

Now, you might have had some implosions

in here, loosening rivets.

You know, bang-bang.

(PEOPLE SCREAMING)

The stern left the surface

in a very different configuration.

It had all its broken parts

faced into the current.

And I think it just blew off,

all pretty close to the surface.

And if something held on, it might

have been packed up against the face of it

or flat back against the underside.

And it took a while

for that to exercise loose,

and all the loose stuff

had already been blown off.

He is proposing that

the stern fell leading edge first,

and that it was water passage

into and around that damage area

that sort of peeled off and exfoliated,

basically, the first third of the stern.

We didn't get this right in the '95 animation,

but we're gonna nail it now.

SCHATZ:
I think the point you are making is,

this is not like

that DD one, where it was just...

- It was just leaves...

-it was just coming off in regular...

- Right, right.

- Yeah, yeah. Copy.

So all this stuff has come off the ship

pretty much by the time the ship

is probably two-thirds or three-quarters

of the way through that end swap,

so it's quick.

So that's happening now.

So stuff's coming off,

and, boom, decking is coming off,

and now it's all off.

Yeah, oh, it is fast. Wow.

If you stick your hand out the window of

a moving car with a deck of playing cards,

if you turn it this way, you can hold on to it,

and that's what the bow was.

You turn it that way, they are all gone.

They'll all spilt apart and blow backwards.

Because the second their angle of attack

increases to a few degrees,

then it increases rapidly.

Once it's at 90 degrees,

there's no holding on to it.

It's gone. It all happens instantaneously.

And at the moment that happens,

when those cards blow like that,

there's a much stronger back force

on your hand.

Yeah.

- Try it sometime.

- Yeah, I will. (CHUCKLES)

- Might get busted for littering.

- Exactly!

CAMERON". It feels great to have

a second chance to get this stuff right.

In the '95 animation, the stern didn't spiral,

but we now know that it did.

Because I think that

when the stern hit the ground,

it did not hit straight down. I think it slid.

Oh, definitely, because its back is broken.

The axis of this part of it...

- MARSCHALL:
Perfectly centered.

- Rudder is pinned in the sediment perfectly,

and the props are pinned

in the sediment perfectly,

and that's the anchor,

and then it comes down.

Which actually makes sense,

'cause it peeled off all this stuff over here

and blew that side out flat.

- Yes, that's true.

- Right.

It still doesn't explain

these freaking cranes.

Yeah, I know.

CAMERON:
Why were those cranes there?

Where did they come from?

Did they originate from the poop deck?

Did they originate from the well deck?

Or the A deck level?

We had to have an answer.

Those cranes are loose,

and they are two-and-a-half miles up.

- And somehow they end up...

- No, no, no. I think...

- These cranes came down with the stern.

- Exactly.

Somehow attached to the overturn

on the underside of the poop?

How did they end up over there,

when the poop deck went like that,

way up there?

That's just my question.

Did they fall from the surface?

Were they deposited there toward the end?

It's kind of hard to tell. Every time we tried

to poke at a scenario that would explain it,

there was a problem with it.

- All right, let's take a look.

- Which one they are?

I think there was this one part still there.

I'm not sure.

Well, here is an interesting thing, these

cranes can be completely gone, unrelated,

and the three that

you see sitting right here are these.

STEPHENSON:
Right, this one is still there.

CAMERON". Okay. All right.

So it's these three.

STEPHENSON:
It would be these three.

So, now you are talking about

a hydraulic outburst impact effect.

The ship hits the bottom, plows in,

compresses all of this shell plating

underneath here,

and everything gets ejected up.

Including the entire well deck,

which winds up lying someplace nearby.

I had to bring to bear

some of my observations

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