A fan-favorite movie debate has fresh input now from one of its subjects. Kate Winslet was asked whether Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) could reasonably have climbed on the floating door beside her character Rose at the end of Titanic. While she did her best to answer, it seemed clear that Winslet has had this conversation before.
“I don’t f-ing know. That’s the answer. I don’t f-ing know,” Winslet said on the latest episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast. Ever since Titanic premiered in 1997, some viewers have questioned the dramatic death scene at the end when Jack freezes and drowns while ensuring that Rose stays afloat on a wooden door. This debate has become something of a meme among movie buffs, and Titanic director James Cameron revived it recently by conducting a kind of experiment to see if Jack and Rose could both have stayed on the floating wreckage and lived.
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Winslet, for her part, said that she feels she is qualified to weigh in on this debate as well. Aside from starring in the infamous scene, she has become an avid lover of ocean-going hobbies such as paddleboarding, scuba diving and kitesurfing. She said: “Look, all I can tell you is, I do have a decent understanding of water and how it behaves. If you put two adults on a stand-up paddleboard, it becomes immediately, extremely unstable. That is for sure.”
“I have to be honest: I actually don’t believe that we would have survived if we had both gotten on that door,” she continued. “I think he would have fit, but it would have tipped and it would not have been a sustainable idea. So, you heard it here for the first time. Yes, he could have fit on that door. But it would not have stayed afloat. It wouldn’t.”
Fans unwilling to take Winslet’s experience for the gospel can also read Cameron’s recent explanation in an interview with The Toronto Sun. The filmmaker said: “We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie, and we’re going to do a little special on it that comes out in February.”
Cameron’s findings sound pretty conclusive. He said: “We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived. Only one could survive.”
Still, the debate about Jack and Rose’s dramatic final scene will undoubtedly rage on as one of the most timeless questions in movie history. Fans can look for more plot holes in Cameron’s new movie Avatar: The Way of Water, which is in theaters now.
