For some moviegoers, the question of why Jack didn’t simply get on the board with Rose at the end of Titanic is one of those controversial “plot holes” frequently discussed in YouTube videos, with some suggesting Jack is an idiot for sacrificing his life and Rose is a selfish jerk for letting him do it. The argument is that the piece of debris they were floating on was big enough for both to live, and seeing as how that’s a reasonably simple thing to determine with science, Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters tackled that very topic back in 2012.
As you can see in the video above, the Mythbusters guys first determined that the board was a bit too wobbly to keep them both safe. Then they decided to use a life preserver to give the board a bit more buoyancy, thereby proving that both Jack and Rose could’ve survived. On the show, Titanic director James Cameron accepted that their approach was solid, but at the end of the day, the script said “Jack dies” so Jack had to die.
Apparently, Cameron has spent the years since then just simmering with rage about this assertion that Jack and Rose could’ve survived, to the extent that he (jokingly) lashed out at a Daily Beast interviewer this week for bringing it up. Here’s what Cameron said when the interviewer asserted that Jack could’ve lived:
We’re gonna go there? Look, it’s very, very simple: you read page 147 of the script and it says, “Jack gets off the board and gives his place to her so that she can survive.” It’s that simple. You can do all the post-analysis you want.
He goes on to explain that Jack and Rose were in 28-degree water and were starting to get hypothermia, so they never would’ve had the time or the foresight to take off a life jacket and use it to buoy the raft a little more. Cameron says the Mythbusters duo are “fun guys” and that he “loved doing that show with them,” but, unfortunately, “they’re full of shit.” The interview also touches on how Cameron believes that the people in Donald Trump’s administration “are insane,” but nobody’s going to argue with that the way they will with this Titanic stuff.