James Cameron is one of the most creative and revolutionary directors of Hollywood. He has directed some of the most iconic passion projects, which have earned critical acclaim and acquired iconic status over the ticket. No one can match his creative genius. Cameron has made dozens of over-the-top, highest-grossing, and visually appealing films, one of which, of course, includes Titanic.
Cameron made history with his 1997 American epic romance and disaster film directorial Titanic. At the time when the film hit theaters, it became one of the most commercially hit and critically acclaimed films in the history of American cinema and remains the best film he ever made.
However, earlier this year, he released a National Geographic special, Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron, in which the director explored how he crafted an iconic Titanic ship model to examine if he got the ship sinking scene in the movie accurate.
James Cameron Reveals The Part In Titanic He Got “Half Right”
On February 5, 2023, directing genius James Cameron released a special documentary titled Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron, in which he probes and recreates some of the complex scenes of his 1997 hit movie Titanic. The film is based on a real-life tragic incident of the 1912 RMS Titanic, which sank in the North Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg.
Cameron recreated one of the scenes from his 1997 movie where the humongous ship sank after hitting an iceberg. In the documentary, he recreated that scene using several hydrodynamic tests and realized that his depiction of the actual 1912 incident was “half right.”
James Cameron shared,
“The film Titanic depicts what we believed was an accurate portrayal of the ship’s last hours. We showed it sinking bow-first, lifting the stern high in the air before its massive weight broke the vessel in two. Over the past 20 years, I’ve been trying to figure out if we got that right.”
He explained,
“I have no way of saying that is in fact what happened, but I’d like to be able to rule it in as a possibility ’cause then I don’t have to remake the freaking film!” he quipped, noting that the portrayal of the ship’s stern gradually sinking was “as accurate as I could make it at the time.”
The True Lies movie director noted that while he tried his best to portray the original tragic ship sinking incident in his movie, it may differ from how the original RMS Titanic may have sunk underwater.
James Cameron Went to Great Lengths For His Magnum Opus Titanic
The Titanic movie director James Cameron reveals he and his team ran multiple tests on the model version of the ship and used “pyrotechnics to sink the model in a controlled water tank” to experiment if he depicted this scene accurately in the movie.
Speaking about the result of his experiment, he said,
“We found out you can have the stern sink vertically, and you can have the stern fall back with a big splash, but you can’t have both. So the film is wrong on one point or the other — I tend to think it’s wrong on the ‘fall back of the stern’ because of what we see at the bow of the wreck.”
Cameron continued,
“I think we can rule in the possibility of a vertical stern sinking, and I think we can rule out the possibility of it both falling back and then going vertical. We were sort of half right in the movie.”
James Cameron is a par excellence director, who has worked with several legendary stars on his iconic films like Titanic, which earned 14 Academy Awards nominations and won 11. The movie starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Gloria Stuart, Bernard Hill, and Jonathan Hyde.
Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron is available to stream on Hulu.
Source: EW
