Surviving the Titanic sinking…..

Hugely over budget it was felt that James Cameron’s film, ‘Titanic’ would be a disaster to match that on screen. It was anything but and the rest is history. But doing the promotional rounds for Avatar 3 he was asked about surviving the Titanic sinking. Now whilst its not generally known than the captain certainly did not shoot himself as per the film the other misnomer is that Second Officer Charles Lightoller mistakenly took the captain’s order of “women and children first” to mean “women and children only,” which resulted in some boats not being filled to capacity. But Cameron was asked the carefully phrased question, “If you were traveling by yourself as a second-class passenger on Titanic when it hit an iceberg, what would you have done?”

Second class was chosen because its known that many of the third class passengers were locked into their quarters whilst the first class passengers got onto the life boats first. ‘Travelling by yourself” was the criteria because a man traveling with his family would surely prioritize his family’s survival over his own.

So how would he be surviving the Titanic sinking?

It’s a query that the director has played out in his own mind and he replied, ‘“I think there were interesting ways to what-if or second-guess the whole thing. One I like to play with my Titanic experts is — with what we know now, and if you had the captain’s ear — how could you save everybody? The other is: What if you’re a time traveler, you go back and want to experience the sinking, and your little time-travel thing that gets you back fails, and you’re like, ‘Oh f–k, I’m really on the ship, I’ve got to get off it.‘”

It seems that clinging on to a broken floating door was not the answer and he went on to explain, ‘“Most people wouldn’t have had the courage to jump into the water,…… They couldn’t quite believe that the ship was really going to sink. But if you knew for sure it was going to sink and you weren’t on a lifeboat, you jump in the water next to the boat the second it casts off. Once they rowed away, you were screwed. Are they going to let you drown when Titanic is still there and everybody is watching? No, they’d pull you in, and the officers would go, ‘Well, f–k, there’s nothing I can do about that.’ Boat four would be a good one for this.”

…….and that’s how James Cameron would go about surviving the Titanic sinking according to James Cameron!

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source: THR