Titanic: 20 Years Later with James Cameron (2017) - full transcript
For the 20th anniversary of "Titanic," James Cameron reopens the file on the disaster.
We released Titanic
20 years ago.
Seems like a lifetime.
But I remember everything
like it was yesterday,
from the first dive
to the wreck,
to our last day of production.
We were creating
a living history,
so I needed every detail
as accurate as we could make it.
We owed the truth
to the hundreds of souls
lost that night in 1912.
Even now I feel a responsibility
to the living and the dead.
Did we get it right?
After decades of exploration
and scientific analysis,
we know a lot more than we did
when we made the film.
So I've gathered
a team of experts,
Parks Stephenson,
Ken Marschall, and Don Lynch,
to reopen the case file
on Titanic
and look at
what we've discovered
over the last 20 years.
We'll investigate whether
more lifeboats onboard
could have saved more lives.
I think I probably
would cut faster
if my life depended on it.
Hear the surprising story
of how the long-lost ship
was found.
- Did you get spooked?
- It was spooky.
And learn how the film
affected the families
of some of Titanic's
famous passengers.
Molly Brown sounds
like a real pistol.
I would have loved
to have met her.
She was larger than life.
We'll step back in time
to see how our sets match up
against what we found
at the wreck site.
And we'll mount tests
that may answer questions
about the sinking
that have bothered me
for almost two decades.
Yes!
We'll see where we were right,
and where we got it wrong.
Background and action.
When we made Titanic,
we tried to do a film
that was as if
we had gone back in
a time machine to that night.
We tried to be as accurate as
it was humanly possible to be.
You could walk
out of Rose's cabin,
down the corridor,
down the grand staircase,
through the reception room
and into the dining room.
It was every photograph
I had ever seen.
It was perfect.
And action.
That feeling that you had,
no longer was Titanic
just a story
in a book or a picture.
You were there.
James not only made this movie,
he embraced the subject.
And the success of the movie
made it possible
to deploy new technologies
to explore the wreck
in ways that had
never been done before.
Who would have thought that
stuff would still be there?
It's a dream come true for me.
To me, it just opened
the door to so many mysteries
and unanswered questions,
and then that snowballed
into a real lasting interest
in the forensic work
that kind of marine archaeology
of the wreck site.
And a lasting interest
in the history of Titanic
and the impact
that it had on society.
The wreck
is the last surviving witness
to the disaster.
It still has stories to tell
for anybody willing
to pay attention
and listen to what
the wreck has to tell us.
Are you ready to
go back to Titanic?
On April 14th, 1912,
at 11:40 p.m.,
the RMS Titanic
struck an iceberg
during its maiden voyage
from Southampton, England
to New York City.
Two hours and 40 minutes later,
it sank to bottom
of the Atlantic Ocean.
Of the more than 2,200
passengers and crew onboard,
just over 700
survived that night.
The wreck remained
lost at sea until 1985,
when oceanographer,
Robert Ballard, discovered it
while on a secret mission
for the US Navy.
His expedition changed
the way we explore the deep,
and it changed my life.
Bob and I recently met
at the Ronald Reagan
Presidential Library
to take a look
at their exhibit on Titanic.
This is the story
I could never tell.
Bob Ballard is one of the
nation's top oceanographers.
But of course,
what he's best known for
is discovering the Titanic.
And that's an amazing story
because it turns out that
that was just a cover story
for a mission that he was doing
for the US Navy at the time.
In the 1960s, the US Navy
lost two nuclear submarines,
the Thresher and the Scorpion,
under mysterious circumstances.
In the 1980s,
Dr. Robert Ballard
was brought in
to explore the wreck sites
and find out if the Soviet Union
had gotten there first.
My mission was to go out
to both the Thresher
and the Scorpion,
and completely document
100% of the wreckage.
As it turns out,
Ballard found the missing subs
and completed his mission
so quickly
that he still had
12 days left
to search for Titanic.
It was actually
mapping the wreckage
that told me
how to find the Titanic.
When the Thresher
and the Scorpion imploded,
all these pieces
came falling down
to the ocean floor.
So as it was falling down,
the currents carried it
for over a mile.
It was a comet of debris.
So instead of looking
for Titanic,
I looked for its debris.
When the Carpathia
got the distress call,
- it was down here.
- Yeah.
Headed to the reported position.
- Ran into them early. Yeah.
- Ahead of schedule.
So I said,
"What's the error of celestial
navigation back then?"
Five miles.
So I said,
"Let's go another five."
It has to be to the north.
Yeah, right. So then
you just run straight north?
So I then, I run
east-west lines across...
- The intersect...
- Across, across the...
the intersect,
but space them 0.9 miles.
And if I don't get it,
interspace 'em at half.
But you already knew
that at that depth
the debris field would be
more than a mile.
- Roughly a mile.
- Yeah.
So I cheated a little,
I said, "Let's do 0.9."
That's pretty smart.
And then if I don't get it,
I'll just interlace.
Yeah, right.
So we began running
lines back and forth
and on the ninth line,
hit the debris.
- Well...
- Did you know...
You didn't know it was Titanic
until you saw the boiler.
No. We didn't... Correct.
Wreckage.
Bingo! Yeah!
"Somebody ought to go
get Bob..."
For some reason that night,
I just wasn't sleeping.
And a knock on the door,
this is now at 2:00
in the morning,
and the cook stuck his head in,
and he said, "The guys
think you might want..."
He didn't even finish
the sentence and I was past him.
And I got into
the command center
and just as I entered
the command center,
they went over the boiler.
Boiler alert!
I got boiler!
Yes, yes.
We knew it wasn't any wreck,
it was the Titanic.
And it was like scoring
the winning goal at the buzzer.
So our reaction was jubilant,
jumping up and down,
celebrating.
And then someone said,
"She sinks in 20 minutes."
And that innocent comment
was devastating
'cause what were we doing
celebrating anything?
We were embarrassed
that we were dancing
on someone's grave.
So I just said, "Stop the ship,
I'm going outside."
We went out on the fantail
and we had a private memorial.
And that was it.
Everybody that dives Titanic
has their own story
of seeing it for the first time.
And probably the most
frequently asked question
to me is,
"What was it like seeing
the wreck for the first time?"
I get asked,
"Hey, what was it like?"
And I always
wanna tell them the story
they want to hear, which was,
there she was in, you know,
this beautiful, stately ruin
coming out of the darkness.
- That's not what happened.
- No.
It's like a cliff.
Oh, I remember
when we...
This was where we came in,
we landed here and...
It's a cliff.
The, you know,
the Wall of China...
I mean, it's just a wall.
And the first thing I recognized
was the anti-fouling paint.
Yeah, the red,
the red paint, right?
It was pink.
It was still pink.
And I said, "Too bad they
didn't paint the whole ship
with that stuff."
And the bilge keel
was sitting on top of the sand.
Exactly.
Back, back here.
It was right,
right there.
And then, the pilot,
he said, "We gotta go."
Yeah.
So he dropped his weights
and then we began our ascent.
But then these eyes...
Yeah, which is
your lights kicking back.
Your lights,
all the eyes of the Ti...
Like, the people in,
were looking at us.
- Did you get spooked?
- It was spooky, yeah.
- 'Cause we were now
in free ascent.
Yeah.
There was no...
You couldn't stop,
you dropped all your weights.
And it was just all these eyes
and then we cleared it.
It was amazing.
That's pretty much
what it looked like to me
the first time, except we were
down here someplace.
And we came in on her,
right about here.
Yeah.
And we had come
across this bermed-up mud.
Yeah, yeah.
He came up
and we just cleared here.
Yeah, all right.
And then we wound up
sitting up here.
Yeah.
But there's also nothing cooler
than coming up on her
from the, from the...
Yeah.
That was our second...
That's the money shot.
And that's the money shot
looking up.
We did it for fake in the movie,
and it's the transition shot
where it goes into 1912.
So we come past,
past Old Rose's face.
We come to that shot
of the stem, the vertical bow,
and then we-we
transition into 1912
where we crane up over it
and we see the whole ship.
Come on, get a rope.
You won't find
bodies at Titanic.
Uh, you won't find skeletons,
the bones actually
dissolve into solution
very rapidly at that depth.
What anybody
who's explored the wreck finds
is pairs of shoes.
Takes years
for a skeleton to vanish,
but the shoes,
treated with tannic acid,
they won't eat 'em.
So all around the Titanic
are the shoes.
There's a scene
where we were filming
and we came across
a pair of women's shoes.
Yeah.
Next to
a pair of girl's shoes.
These were people.
These were people whose shoes
- got to the bottom on people.
- Those double, double...
- They were in their cabin...
- Yeah.
Because the cabin
was all around them,
the destruction of it.
And there was a hand mirror...
- Yeah, yeah.
- Next to them.
And a comb and then a bone comb.
So I can imagine her
holding the mirror
as her mother combed her hair
- and then put the bone comb...
- You create a whole...
You create a whole story.
This is the human element.
This is what people touched,
it's what they lived with.
Amazing.
It's pretty daunting
when you see
all the names all at once.
- Exactly. I mean...
- How many people?
In this? 1,496 people.
You know, imagine all of these
people out there in the ocean.
This is the crowd
that was floating at sea.
Yeah, you get so into
the forensics of it.
- Yeah, yes.
- You know, and, uh...
studying the wreck
and the breakup
of the wreck and discovering
the artifacts and so on,
you really lose sight of
the human tragedy sometimes.
I know, I know that
that was an epiphany for me
when I was there
at the wreck the first time,
you know, how that hit me.
And I'd been studying it
for months,
you know, but it wasn't,
now it wasn't at a remove,
it wasn't a myth anymore.
These were real people.
Yeah, yeah.
Everybody had a family somewhere
that's probably
affected to this day.
- Hi, Paul.
- Paul is the...
Great-grandson
of Isidor and Ida Straus.
I know their story well.
I wanted to meet
with the families
of Titanic victims
and survivors,
to hear their stories
and learn how they felt
about how I depicted
their ancestors.
I started with Paul Kurzman.
His great-grandfather
Isidor Straus
was a self-made millionaire
and a former congressman.
He and his wife, Ida, chose to
die together on the Titanic.
The story, as you know so well,
is that she got into a lifeboat.
Women and children did,
and expected her husband,
Isidor, to follow.
To come in, yeah.
And he said,
"I will not enter a lifeboat
"until I see that all the women
and children onboard
are in lifeboats."
And she said...
No!
We've been together
for 40 years.
And where you go, I go.
Don't argue with me, Isidor.
You know it does no good.
"We will be on the ship
together as it goes down.
We will die
as we have lived, together."
When they found Isidor's body,
they found a locket
with initials, Isidor Straus.
- Here is a picture
of their eldest son, Jesse.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
And here is a picture
of their eldest daughter, Sara.
- Your grandmother.
- My grandmother.
Your grandmother.
So, that's what he...
That's what he kept
close to his heart.
And this is the most
precious item in my life.
Right. That's powerful.
That's powerful.
When the end of the film came,
I didn't wanna move.
I didn't wanna
leave the theater.
- Well, thanks.
- I was captured.
It was really the accuracy,
the work that you did
as director toward
ensuring authenticity
of the film.
It wasn't just me, though.
It wasn't just me,
because once we had
dived to the wreck,
everybody who came aboard,
production designer,
costume designer,
everyone felt that we had
to live up to that standard.
Twenty years ago,
we tried to bring Titanic
to life without compromise.
We did the best we could
with the information we had.
But since then, I've made
33 dives to the wreck site
and I've discovered surprising
new things about the ship
and solved mysteries that have
puzzled explorers for decades.
For the movie Titanic,
we unearthed
every known photograph,
poured over
architectural drawings,
and built our ship
rivet by rivet,
making sure everything
was in its rightful place,
as was known back in 1996.
Today at the
Reagan Library Exhibit,
we'll look back at
some of our film sets
armed with ROV footage
from my 33 dives to the wreck
to see what we got right
and what we didn't.
It's quite proper, I assure you.
This is the sitting room.
Wow. So they've
completely rebuilt the set.
You know, I haven't seen this
since we made the film
- 20 years ago.
- Isn't this great?
It's great, yeah.
This was like one of our
first couple days of shooting.
And one of the very first things
that Kate Winslet
and Leonardo had to do were,
you know, get naked.
We were inspired by
this Regency motif
that was known to be on Olympic
and known to be on Titanic
in other rooms,
and we placed it into the...
A portside millionaire's suite,
- the three-room suite.
- Yes. Yes.
Because nobody knew
what was in there.
We didn't know that at the time.
I was
working in what was not known.
The crazy thing about all this
is we made the movie in '96,
and in 2005 we got into
the Straus suite on B deck,
and it looked just like
the fake set that we have built.
The most excited
I've ever seen you.
Oh, man.
That, that was, like,
I was geeking out.
Oh, say, it's not the clock.
It's... It looks like
a clock to me.
Say it, it's
not the clock on the mantel.
Oh, my God!
And look at the, the woodwork.
This is outrageous.
It was just sitting there.
KEN It was utterly surreal.
It was like a little
bubble of perfect preservation.
Oh, it's unbelievable.
If you wrote a screenplay
with that,
it's almost, you know,
like, pushing it.
Yeah, sure, the clock's gonna
still be sitting on the mantel.
- It was.
- Of course it was attached
for heavy seas in
the North Atlantic, but that it,
that nothing hit it,
that no furniture floating
- around the room...
- Took it out.
- Or broke the glass.
- Yeah. Exactly.
And that clock holds
an important forensic clue.
That clock has the time
that this cabin flooded.
Right.
And we know the times
on the chronometer
on the bridge.
So if we can get
the time off that clock
and match it to the time
on the bridge chronometer,
we have the rate of
Titanic sinking.
You're telling me
I got to go back down there?
Well, there's
some muck on that thing.
- We need to clean it off
and see what it says.
Yeah.
CQD? Sir?
That's right, CQD.
The distress call.
That's our position.
When we shot the film in '96,
this was based on
the best information we had.
- Mm-hmm.
- Right.
There was one kind of funky,
double-exposed picture.
- Of Titanic.
- Yeah.
And it showed
kind of this area, as I recall.
And this is not in the photo.
You didn't see
any of that.
You didn't see any of that.
We assumed it was there...
Because the Olympic
photos showed it.
Yeah.
So this was actually
a pretty good reproduction
of Olympic,
and it turned out to be
completely wrong for Titanic
once we got
in there with the ROV.
So we kinda got this part right
and we got this part
completely wrong,
'cause this is all actually
in a separate room.
The silent room, right?
The thing is,
these guys were heroes.
I didn't have time
to get it into the film,
but the wireless operators
were like the hackers
of their day.
The actions taken by
operators, Bride and Phillips,
saved hundreds of lives.
They lost power on the set
the day before the disaster.
The Marconi
maintenance manual says
in this situation,
you leave it alone,
- wait for a Marconi Engineer
ashore to fix it.
Yeah, yeah.
And you're gonna operate
off this emergency coil here.
Yeah.
Which is battery powered,
which had zippo for range.
About 60,
70 miles theoretical range.
Yeah.
Which Carpathia was
a little bit outside that range
when she started to pick up
Titanic's distress call.
And going
in the other direction.
So if they hadn't
rebuilt the set,
they wouldn't have
been able to talk to Carpathia.
Probably not.
Carpathia saved over 700 people.
The point is they wouldn't
have been saved
if these guys hadn't
disobeyed the rules.
So you wanna go to a real party?
So this is the grand staircase,
which we built it
from the plans,
the way they actually
built the staircase.
So the staircase
has got a steel footing.
Then when we sank
the ship, it lifted.
Wood is buoyant.
It ripped off that footing
and it all floated up.
And it actually
pinned two stunt players.
Fortunately, they weren't hurt,
but it was
a pretty scary moment.
When the wreck
was first found,
there was no staircase.
And the assumption was made
that there were
little wood-boring mollusks
that had eaten the whole thing.
But then we couldn't figure out
why all the columns
and wall paneling,
and everything
on the D deck level
and so on were still there.
And this is
so substantial.
It doesn't add up.
I mean, this is solid oak.
Oak is one of the strongest,
densest woods.
Yeah.
And even if
the wood had disappeared,
where did all those
iron balustrades go?
Yeah, exactly.
So we went down
and we looked around
the bottom with the ROV,
- we couldn't even
find remnants.
No.
We couldn't find
remnants of the balustrades.
We couldn't find
remnants of the stairs
or any of that stuff.
So we thought,
"Ah, it floated out."
That was an interesting,
you know,
- kind of
art-imitating life where...
Yeah.
Exactly.
If we hadn't made
the movie, we wouldn't have
come to that answer,
I don't think.
Wandering through
the Titanic Exhibit,
it's hard not to feel haunted
by the relics of the past,
a deck chair,
a gold pocket watch,
a traveling coat.
You feel the lost souls
standing there beside you.
And I felt that way
making the movie as well.
- This is Jim Cameron.
- A pleasure to meet you.
- This is Jackie Drexel.
- Very nice to meet you.
Her grandparents were
John Jacob Astor
- and Madeleine Astor.
- Sure, of course, yeah.
In the case of
John Jacob Astor
and Madeleine,
here was the richest man
on the Titanic
with this brand-new wife
and starting a new family
and everything.
Jackie had a strong personality,
and I saw kind of a through line
in that spark of life
that I imagine JJ Astor had.
Thank you for joining us here.
Your father,
I believe, was in...
Yes, five months.
In Madeleine Astor's
abdomen at that point.
She was five months pregnant.
His little wifey
there, Madeleine,
is my age
and in a delicate condition.
See how she's trying to hide it?
He seemed like
a really interesting man.
He's an absolutely
fascinating man.
He was more praised
for dying as a hero,
rather than the life
that he actually led,
which was quite amazing.
He had a curious mind.
We shot a couple scenes
around their story
that got cut out of the movie.
I was fascinated by the moment
where he was cutting open
the life preserver
and seeing the cork
and figuring out
how the life preserver worked.
- But this is what Madeleine wore.
She died
at a young age.
It looks tiny.
Yeah, well, this is,
this-this life jacket
kept her warm and maybe,
maybe kept her alive.
My father went to Halifax
and he was offered that.
And he said... He just
couldn't even talk about it.
- Hmm.
- Couldn't even think about it.
Too traumatic.
They changed his life,
and I think his mother
was totally traumatized.
Yeah.
Do you by any chance
know how my grandfather died,
and if the lifeboat number four
that my grandmother was in,
was close enough to have seen...
Have seen it?
Well, I don't think
they would've seen it.
Because he died
with the funnel collapsing.
It's thought because of
the soot on his body.
Your vision of the faces
in the water
gave just the most amazing
chilling feeling.
I think one of my realizations
after the film
was released is that,
you know,
this isn't ancient history.
This isn't 200 years ago.
In trying to sell viscerally
how traumatic it must
have been for the survivors,
including going back
into that field of bodies,
trying to find
somebody still alive,
you know, I probably
wasn't as sensitive
to how that might've felt
to people
whose families had been
traumatized by the event.
I'd never
thought about it before.
Yeah.
And then I saw it,
and it really hit me.
The film Titanic
depicted 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.
I've dived to the wreck
dozens of times
and I brought in naval engineers
to analyze all the complex
variables at work.
Now, I wanna take it
to the next level,
doing an actual,
real-world physical test
of the sinking that incorporates
the new information
we've gathered.
Will it sink the way
we portrayed it?
I don't know.
Our mission is to mirror
the physics at work
as best we can,
and see what happens.
There's a gazillion
theories floating around,
there always have been.
We wanna come up
with a credible theory.
The whole purpose
of this investigation
is to understand, does this
hang on or does it go away?
I've been talking about
the bow swinging down
and breaking off for 20 years,
but I never had any proof.
It's just outside of science
at this point.
And I thought, we'll just
build a model and break it.
I, I have no way of saying
that 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 freakin' film.
We're gonna be doing practical
rigging with pyrotechnics,
and sinking it in a tank.
I immediately thought
of Gene Warren.
I've known him forever,
we've done a few projects
together over the years.
Let's think about
what would be the best way
to help hold that up
when this breaks.
He wanted us to do
a disaster forensics
on really what happened
when Titanic sank.
Because water is water.
Water doesn't change
its dynamics.
Let's see what the bow does.
Let's see what the stern does,
and recreate
what might've happened.
I've been wanting
to do this damn model test
for a long time.
I knew that trying to
incorporate all the lessons
we'd learned about the sinking
into a single model test
wouldn't be easy.
Well, that's not
what I believe happened.
But I was about to find out
just how hard it would be.
You're not following
what I'm saying.
Iceberg right ahead!
For over 20 years, I've wondered
why Titanic went down
the way it did.
In the movie, it breaks,
and the stern falls back
with a big wave,
and then the bow pulls it down,
and its stern
stands up straight.
And then the bow breaks off,
sinks straight down,
and that stern's sittin' there
and it slowly goes down.
It's a dramatic image,
and as accurate as
I could make it at the time.
But I've never stopped
trying to find out
exactly what happened.
Over the years,
our little analysis team
has used a wide variety
of source material
in order to try and put together
the pieces of the puzzle
that is the sinking
of the Titanic.
We know from the wreck
exactly where the steel broke.
Right to the rivet.
Jim's exploration
of the bow section
has fine-tuned our understanding
of what was going on
during the flooding
and during the descent
to the ocean floor.
We got a mast
that's knocked aft,
all the B deck
forward-facing windows...
broken, broken, broken.
To me, that all adds up to
a very strong
longitudinal flow over the ship.
We see a consistent pattern
of the effects of an almost
hurricane-like flow of water
from the front of the ship
toward the back of the ship.
That can only be explained
by the ship sinking
vertically straight down.
A big piece of the keel,
70-feet long,
two big frames
of the double bottom
were found way out
in the debris field.
They had been
ripped off the ship. By what?
Well, they'd been ripped off
by the bow separating.
Bit by bit, putting all these
little data points together,
we're essentially able to
reverse-engineer
major key frames of the sinking.
We engaged
the United States Navy
to build two computer
simulation models of Titanic.
One showed us
how the water progressed
through the ship as it sank.
The other measures
the stresses in the hull.
And what it told us was,
Titanic didn't need to rise
90 degrees out of the water.
The model calculated
approximately 23 degrees
before peak stresses
were realized
in the structure and she broke.
But for a ship
the size of Titanic to sink,
there's an unlimited number
of variables
going on during the sinking.
The computer simulation
would bear some of that out,
but too many variables
to nail down
exactly what happened,
so we got to try
a different dimension,
and that's where
the physical model comes in.
Hydrodynamically,
it's got to be pretty close
to what the ship was, I think.
It's a one-off model.
It's not a 100% accurate
in some of its fine details,
but it was accurate
in terms of the overall shape,
which is all we really need
for a hydrodynamic study.
The biggest part was
having this model float
and then sink,
like we learned from
all of our research gathering.
It's a known length,
right, 70 feet?
Yes.
70 feet from the break aft.
From the breakpoint here.
We knew that the model
was gonna have to break,
so we had to put in a mechanism
that would allow it
to break at the point
where our computer simulation
had indicated.
And so this is
the hinge piece down here?
The hinge is right here.
No, that's not what
I'm calling a hinge piece.
The hinge isn't here.
The hinge is here.
Jim, he'd
given us some direction.
Um, we kinda got it half-right,
but he wanted the hinge
in a different place.
It's what I call
a banana theory,
which is, as the ship broke,
that keel, the strongest part
of the ship held on.
This falls back,
and that's there,
- and then it rips away.
- Mm-hmm.
That's your hinge piece.
And as it ripped away,
it formed almost
like a third piece.
The keel, it goes,
grrsh, like that.
No, don't take off yet,
necessarily, necessarily.
That's what we wanna understand.
It's a kind of
a proof of concept.
We can never prove
what actually happened.
We can only prove
what might have happened.
The hydrodynamic forces on this
were enough to
snap the mast aft,
blow the wheelhouse off.
Jim came in and looked at it,
and what he did not see
is the water flow that accounts
for a lot of the damage
that we've seen at the wreck.
So he's directed some changes
so that we can truly remove
any latent buoyancy
left in the bow.
We didn't have
all the interior walls
and everything
that would have slowed down
the rate of flooding.
So, we used a combination
of sponges and foam,
foam to provide buoyancy,
sponges to provide
a delaying factor
in how quickly a space
will fill up with water
when it's flooding.
It's all very catastrophic
right in here
and very fast, which is
the equivalent of this
wicking the water in rapidly.
Each successive run
was basically
a fine-tuning of the model
to where we would see it perform
the way that we knew it had to.
Haven't we sunk
this damn ship yet?
Believe it or not,
we're doing actually exactly...
We're doing the banana peel.
Okay. Let's see what we got.
That thing's buoyant,
so that's no good.
It needs to be negative.
Then we
came up with another problem,
when the ship breaks,
it loses buoyancy.
Our buoyancy was foam.
We couldn't just make it
disappear when it broke.
So we had to come up
with a method
to have the foam work
its own way out of the hull
to simulate the loss of
buoyancy after the break.
If they tried to adjust
flotation in this
so that the break happened
where it's always been filmed,
it's too high out of the water.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
We definitely got that wrong.
At that point,
it became a team effort.
I would drill up
this area, right?
This should all be packed
with sponge up in here.
He jumped in with us like
we were at Roger Corman days,
like he was in his 20s again.
So, we'll probably have
to cut these up, all right?
There we were,
back rigging stuff together,
and doing tape and soldering
and all the things that you do.
That wasn't setting
the wayback machine
for 20 years ago on Titanic.
That was setting it back
to the early '80s for me.
You've done this before.
A few times.
I've blown my share of up.
We started to figure out
how to do it in a way
that we fine-tune the breakup
by changing the timing.
We could have the stern fall
back more or fall back less,
have the bow swing down more
or swing down less.
When we did
our computer simulation,
there was a moment
where the stresses on the ship
exceeded the strength
of the material.
And that's when
it should have broken.
And that happened when
the ship tilted to 23 degrees.
So when we sank
the ship at 23 degrees,
it seemed to do everything
that was observed.
We said it broke at 23 degrees.
We were actually breaking
at around 25, 26 degrees,
according to this crude test.
But I mean, I think, you know,
it's telling us something.
We're homing in on this.
And in fact, that was even
increased when it broke,
the stern kinda
popped up a little bit
and you could kinda
see the break.
And the bow swung down
and detached
and fell vertically.
So we feel pretty comfortable
that it was somewhere between
maybe 20 and 30 degrees
of tilt when it broke.
All right, here we go.
Let's do it, let's roll.
All right, so props are clear.
And it breaks
right at the waterline.
- It's up a little bit.
- Ah, sweet. Sweet.
Swings down,
pulls the stern more vertical.
That's the banana model.
Check that out.
Touchdown!
We did see
some scenarios played out
almost exactly as it was filmed.
The stern going
under vertically,
giving Jack and Rose
a few moments,
right there at the fantail.
As the stern came up
and went vertical,
it always turned
almost 90 degrees.
And that's exactly
what people saw.
Now people describe it
standing up like, uh,
like a tower or like a finger
pointing at the sky
and that's exactly what we saw.
Yes! Vertical stern!
Yes!
It's not like we did
a battery of a hundred runs
with a very precision model.
But I think it does show what
is possible to have happened.
I think what we're seeing is
there's a range, right?
You can get it to
where the stern falls back.
But then it doesn't go
vertical when it goes under.
When we found out that 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.
There are about
five or six instances
of hydrodynamic effects,
and there's only one way
that can happen.
It swung down,
and it shot off like a bomb
dropping straight down.
So 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.
With each thing that we try,
each step that we take,
I think we're getting
closer and closer
to what actually
did happen that night.
Okay, let's do it again.
That was perfect.
Let's do it again.
I'm constantly fascinated
by the engineering,
the hardware, the forensics,
and I'll get very excited
about the ideas, you know.
You always have to
kinda grab yourself
by the scruff of your neck
and remind yourself
what happened there
was a real tragedy
that happened to real people,
and it still resonates
down through time
in this very powerful way.
Sometimes you forget that
in the moment,
but I try never to forget it
for very long.
Our scale model sinking
took only seconds.
In real life,
the passengers and crew
had about an hour
and a half to escape.
More than two-thirds
of them didn't make it.
Which brings up
another controversy,
could more people
have been saved?
Mr. Andrews,
forgive me.
I did the sum in my head,
and with the number of lifeboats
times the capacity
you mentioned,
forgive me, but it seems
that there are not enough
for everyone aboard.
About half, actually.
Titanic carried 20 lifeboats,
but they only managed
to launch 18
in an hour and a half.
Now we've all been told
that if the ship
carried more boats,
more lives
could have been saved.
But would that really
have made a difference?
Could the crew
have launched more boats
in the time they had?
I've wondered about this
for a long time,
and we never
tested it until now.
So what we did was
we took a replica lifeboat
left over from the movie
with a set of davits
mounted on top of a platform
that was tall enough
to represent
the height of
the promenade deck,
boat deck being up on top.
Got a crew to man
and lower the lifeboat
so that we could see
how long it took.
We figured that it would
take about two minutes
to roll the canvas back
on these lifeboats.
Roll back that cover!
Roll back that cover!
So we preset
our clock to two minutes.
Okay, so the ropes are in,
and you guys know
what to do, right,
- to get them flaked out
on the deck.
Yes.
You gonna do that,
sort of there and there
so we need to stay out of this.
We can put it right there.
Well, put it
where you would've done it
- if you were really on the ship.
- Okay.
And if we're in your way,
then move us out of the way
'cause we're curious passengers,
and you're having to yell at us
to get out of the way.
Politely, of course,
'cause we're also, you know,
rich passengers in
the first class area
of Titanic.
So, when we say go,
ready the boat and then
tell us when it's ready, okay?
Bring lines on deck.
Clock is running.
Remove cradle.
Swing boat out.
Yeah, you can see
how geared down it is
on that leadscrew.
It takes a lot of cranks
to get that davit to move
just a few feet.
Keel cleared, keep cranking.
The other thing you notice is...
Was the voice commands
by the officer
coordinating the two sides.
And in the beginning
with that steam going off,
they're gonna have
trouble hearing.
Somebody would
have to yell back and forth
or somebody would just
have to see
the other guys working
and just imitate,
'cause they couldn't
hear anything.
Okay, good.
Lower boat to embarkation deck.
So, at what point
do they start loading?
So they're going
to lower it down
to the edge of the boat deck.
'Cause then
you just step into it.
- Right.
- You wanna step into it.
You do not want them stepping
over, if you can avoid it.
Hold it! Secure the boat.
Okay.
All right, stop the clock.
Eight minutes and 30 seconds.
Eight minutes and 30 seconds.
Now we're gonna
have to just estimate
the loading time.
The key here is, is that
you don't know
how much time you have,
you've never practiced this.
But just as a baseline,
let's get some values
- for how long it takes to do
each part of the operation.
Yeah, exactly.
So I think you're probably
looking at a-a time that varied.
Initially it was
probably slower,
as people were reticent,
and then later as they
got more desperate,
it probably sped up.
- Let's say ten minutes.
- Okay.
- Let's say ten minutes.
- Yeah.
Okay. That put us up to
18 and a half minutes.
Now let's see
how long it takes us
to lower one deck level.
And clock running.
Ready. Okay, lower.
All right, it jerks
its way down. And look at the...
You can see how jerky
it is even now, not loaded.
It'd be like three times that
when it was fully loaded.
That'd make it
a lot harder to lower.
- Okay, hold it.
- Okay.
Stopping the clock.
- So what was that?
- Just shy of two minutes.
Just shy of two minutes.
Okay, so that's two minutes
to go ten feet.
It's another 50 feet
to the water,
so we have to add
another ten minutes.
So that's 30 minutes,
30 seconds.
And they
were working simultaneously.
They were loading passengers in
while they were
cranking out the next boat.
Then our times can
telescope somewhat.
When you start
multiplying it out,
it should have taken
more like two hours.
From the time the lifeboats
were ordered launched,
you had about
an hour and a half.
However they managed it,
they had just enough time
to get those boats off.
- Not quite enough time.
- Yeah, not quite.
The truth is the last two boats,
the last two collapsibles
were washed off the ship.
They did not have time.
It's actually pretty amazing
that they managed to launch
as many lifeboats as they did.
And what made it
even more challenging
was that in the final stages
of Titanic sinking,
the lifeboats
were being launched
right on top of each other.
To avoid being crushed,
men were cutting the ropes
connected to the davits
with pocket knives.
I mean, I want to see for myself
how difficult that was.
Well, let's raise up
one end of the boat,
in contact.
About one inch
out of the cradle.
- And then they want to
cut one of the ropes.
Okay.
No, I was thinking
more like a foot.
- Let's do an action shot.
- A foot?
Let's raise it up a foot, guys.
All right, so who's
gonna do the honors?
What, somebody
has to go onto the boat?
I'll do it. I'll do it.
Whatever happens, Jim,
we'll get it on film.
Exactly.
- Let's go.
- Clock running.
All right.
Jeez, is this an actual knife?
It-it should have been
a really sharp knife.
And it's sharp.
We do know
this type of knife was used.
All right, I'm gonna
go with your expertise.
I think I probably
would cut faster
if my life depended on it.
- That's promising.
- We're getting close.
Ah, jeez.
You imagine, like,
50 people screaming.
- Yeah.
- Water coming up.
There's a boat coming
down on your head, don't forget.
Yeah, that too.
It's gonna get dramatic
here in a second.
I can hear it.
All right, that's promising.
Beauty. And we're free.
Yeah.
So how long
did that take?
1.40.
I would say
if my life depended on it,
I could probably shave
about 30 seconds off that.
And you go for a ride.
I think if you had more
lifeboats on that ship,
they would've just
gotten in the way
and it might've cost
hundreds of lives.
At Cherbourg,
a woman came aboard
named Margaret Brown,
but we all called her Molly.
History would call her
the Unsinkable Molly Brown.
Well, I wasn't about
to wait all day for you, sonny.
Yes.
Here, if you think
you can manage.
Yes, ma'am.
Margaret Brown
was one of the most
famous survivors of the Titanic.
Her warmth and strength
after the disaster
became part of the legend.
Margaret Brown, Molly Brown
as the world knows her,
uh, was obviously
quite a character.
She sounded like a real pistol,
I would have loved
to have met her.
It seems like you
got a little bit of her,
her gene of vivaciousness.
Oh, that's nice of you to say.
She was intelligent.
She had like that
emotional intelligence
- to read the situations.
- Yeah.
And I-I really like that.
The fact that she was
in boat six with, uh,
with the guy
that was at the helm
when they hit the iceberg,
the guy that was
in the crow's nest
who should have
spotted the iceberg
maybe a little bit sooner.
And then the helmsman, Hichens,
he refused to go back
and got into
a real tussle with her.
There's plenty of room for more!
And there'll be
one less on this boat
if you don't shut
that hole in your face!
I like to say that
my great grandmother's story
starts where
your movie left off.
Ah, well...
Because later
in the night
she actually
took over that boat.
Right.
Actually using the same threat
that Hichens had used on her
that, "If you interfere
"with us doing what I think
we need to do right now,
I'm gonna
throw you overboard."
You don't understand.
If we go back,
they'll swamp the boat!
They'll pull us right down,
I'm telling ya!
Knock it off.
You're scaring me.
And they told me that
he had said during his lifetime,
"Mrs. Brown could have gotten
into any boat that night,
- why did she have to step in mine?"
"Why did she
get in mine?"
Well, she was
very confronting with him.
He was at the helm
when the ship hit an iceberg.
So, now I've learned
a little bit more
about my ancestor,
but is there anything that
you would really like
to have changed now
that this much time has gone by,
or based on reaction
from the movie, or...
Well, you know,
it's interesting,
I think that meeting people
such as yourselves
who are connected,
whose families
are connected to the event,
really made me appreciate
something that I don't think
I quite realized
when I was making the film.
Yes, I knew it was history,
but I wasn't as sensitive
to the families,
I don't think, the descendants,
and how that story
meant so much to them
and in the case of First Officer
William McMaster Murdoch,
I took the liberty
of showing him
shoot somebody
and then shoot himself.
He's a named character,
he wasn't a generic officer,
we don't know that he did that,
but, you know,
the storyteller in me says,
"Oh, I start
connecting the dots.
He was on duty, he's carrying
all this burden with him,"
made him
an interesting character,
but I was being a screenwriter,
I wasn't thinking
about being a historian.
And I think
I wasn't as sensitive
about the fact
that his family is,
that his survivors
might feel offended by that,
and they were.
- Mm-hmm.
- And, uh...
you know, I-I feel like
I should have made him more of
a generic character than...
And just...
Then it could have been
any one of a number of people
who were at that place
at that time.
What was that, Mr. Murdoch?
An iceberg, sir.
When we would
go out on an expedition,
we'd wait until
11:40 at night,
which was the moment
the ship hit the iceberg,
right at that exact spot
and we'd go out onto
the bow of the research ship
and we'd raise a glass
in honor of the passengers
and the crew of the RMS Titanic.
And so, I would just like
to propose a toast to you,
the descendants
and the representatives
of that history.
And thank you
for sharing it with us.
So, to your ancestors.
These are people that have
grown up with Titanic
in their family.
And it's kind of
always looming over them
and it, and it means
something to them.
And in some ways
it's defined them
to an entire global community
of Titanic enthusiasts
and historians,
these people are
passing on the torch
of what their family knows.
To making it count.
Jim Cameron's Titanic
was beyond
anybody's expectations.
We knew when we were
working on it,
it was going to be epic.
What a great setting
for a love story,
this fantastic shipwreck
that has fascinated people
for decades anyway,
presented so vividly
and so accurately.
To go back there
is to risk being pulled down
into that icy water with them.
So it's really a choice between
your lives and their lives.
James Cameron
brought Titanic back to life
as I have tried to do
through my entire life
with my paintings
and you can't put
enough value on that.
I knew
the old lady in her grave,
that's the Titanic I knew.
Jim showed me this
beautiful young woman,
we sailors tend to
think of ships as women.
He showed me
that beautiful ship.
I just loved it.
That movie used
Titanic as a stage
to tell a teenage love story.
It wasn't meant to be
a historical narrative,
but it created a passion in Jim
to follow up that movie
with actual expeditions
to the actual wreck
and because of
that continued interest
that goes way beyond
a feature film,
we have made discoveries
and learned things
that have actually
changed the history
and our understanding
of Titanic.
I just really
was fascinated by Titanic,
the story, the archaeology of it
and just wanted to know more.
What happened that night,
in terms of the final moments
of the ship and the breakup,
the way it sank.
We will never know
exactly what happened,
but we can say what is
possible to have happened.
Titanic wasn't just a story.
This was something real.
This really happened
to real people.
And we need to honor those
that died and their families.
I think it's important
for filmmakers to,
to understand
that responsibility
and actually get it right.
-Captioned by Point.360.
20 years ago.
Seems like a lifetime.
But I remember everything
like it was yesterday,
from the first dive
to the wreck,
to our last day of production.
We were creating
a living history,
so I needed every detail
as accurate as we could make it.
We owed the truth
to the hundreds of souls
lost that night in 1912.
Even now I feel a responsibility
to the living and the dead.
Did we get it right?
After decades of exploration
and scientific analysis,
we know a lot more than we did
when we made the film.
So I've gathered
a team of experts,
Parks Stephenson,
Ken Marschall, and Don Lynch,
to reopen the case file
on Titanic
and look at
what we've discovered
over the last 20 years.
We'll investigate whether
more lifeboats onboard
could have saved more lives.
I think I probably
would cut faster
if my life depended on it.
Hear the surprising story
of how the long-lost ship
was found.
- Did you get spooked?
- It was spooky.
And learn how the film
affected the families
of some of Titanic's
famous passengers.
Molly Brown sounds
like a real pistol.
I would have loved
to have met her.
She was larger than life.
We'll step back in time
to see how our sets match up
against what we found
at the wreck site.
And we'll mount tests
that may answer questions
about the sinking
that have bothered me
for almost two decades.
Yes!
We'll see where we were right,
and where we got it wrong.
Background and action.
When we made Titanic,
we tried to do a film
that was as if
we had gone back in
a time machine to that night.
We tried to be as accurate as
it was humanly possible to be.
You could walk
out of Rose's cabin,
down the corridor,
down the grand staircase,
through the reception room
and into the dining room.
It was every photograph
I had ever seen.
It was perfect.
And action.
That feeling that you had,
no longer was Titanic
just a story
in a book or a picture.
You were there.
James not only made this movie,
he embraced the subject.
And the success of the movie
made it possible
to deploy new technologies
to explore the wreck
in ways that had
never been done before.
Who would have thought that
stuff would still be there?
It's a dream come true for me.
To me, it just opened
the door to so many mysteries
and unanswered questions,
and then that snowballed
into a real lasting interest
in the forensic work
that kind of marine archaeology
of the wreck site.
And a lasting interest
in the history of Titanic
and the impact
that it had on society.
The wreck
is the last surviving witness
to the disaster.
It still has stories to tell
for anybody willing
to pay attention
and listen to what
the wreck has to tell us.
Are you ready to
go back to Titanic?
On April 14th, 1912,
at 11:40 p.m.,
the RMS Titanic
struck an iceberg
during its maiden voyage
from Southampton, England
to New York City.
Two hours and 40 minutes later,
it sank to bottom
of the Atlantic Ocean.
Of the more than 2,200
passengers and crew onboard,
just over 700
survived that night.
The wreck remained
lost at sea until 1985,
when oceanographer,
Robert Ballard, discovered it
while on a secret mission
for the US Navy.
His expedition changed
the way we explore the deep,
and it changed my life.
Bob and I recently met
at the Ronald Reagan
Presidential Library
to take a look
at their exhibit on Titanic.
This is the story
I could never tell.
Bob Ballard is one of the
nation's top oceanographers.
But of course,
what he's best known for
is discovering the Titanic.
And that's an amazing story
because it turns out that
that was just a cover story
for a mission that he was doing
for the US Navy at the time.
In the 1960s, the US Navy
lost two nuclear submarines,
the Thresher and the Scorpion,
under mysterious circumstances.
In the 1980s,
Dr. Robert Ballard
was brought in
to explore the wreck sites
and find out if the Soviet Union
had gotten there first.
My mission was to go out
to both the Thresher
and the Scorpion,
and completely document
100% of the wreckage.
As it turns out,
Ballard found the missing subs
and completed his mission
so quickly
that he still had
12 days left
to search for Titanic.
It was actually
mapping the wreckage
that told me
how to find the Titanic.
When the Thresher
and the Scorpion imploded,
all these pieces
came falling down
to the ocean floor.
So as it was falling down,
the currents carried it
for over a mile.
It was a comet of debris.
So instead of looking
for Titanic,
I looked for its debris.
When the Carpathia
got the distress call,
- it was down here.
- Yeah.
Headed to the reported position.
- Ran into them early. Yeah.
- Ahead of schedule.
So I said,
"What's the error of celestial
navigation back then?"
Five miles.
So I said,
"Let's go another five."
It has to be to the north.
Yeah, right. So then
you just run straight north?
So I then, I run
east-west lines across...
- The intersect...
- Across, across the...
the intersect,
but space them 0.9 miles.
And if I don't get it,
interspace 'em at half.
But you already knew
that at that depth
the debris field would be
more than a mile.
- Roughly a mile.
- Yeah.
So I cheated a little,
I said, "Let's do 0.9."
That's pretty smart.
And then if I don't get it,
I'll just interlace.
Yeah, right.
So we began running
lines back and forth
and on the ninth line,
hit the debris.
- Well...
- Did you know...
You didn't know it was Titanic
until you saw the boiler.
No. We didn't... Correct.
Wreckage.
Bingo! Yeah!
"Somebody ought to go
get Bob..."
For some reason that night,
I just wasn't sleeping.
And a knock on the door,
this is now at 2:00
in the morning,
and the cook stuck his head in,
and he said, "The guys
think you might want..."
He didn't even finish
the sentence and I was past him.
And I got into
the command center
and just as I entered
the command center,
they went over the boiler.
Boiler alert!
I got boiler!
Yes, yes.
We knew it wasn't any wreck,
it was the Titanic.
And it was like scoring
the winning goal at the buzzer.
So our reaction was jubilant,
jumping up and down,
celebrating.
And then someone said,
"She sinks in 20 minutes."
And that innocent comment
was devastating
'cause what were we doing
celebrating anything?
We were embarrassed
that we were dancing
on someone's grave.
So I just said, "Stop the ship,
I'm going outside."
We went out on the fantail
and we had a private memorial.
And that was it.
Everybody that dives Titanic
has their own story
of seeing it for the first time.
And probably the most
frequently asked question
to me is,
"What was it like seeing
the wreck for the first time?"
I get asked,
"Hey, what was it like?"
And I always
wanna tell them the story
they want to hear, which was,
there she was in, you know,
this beautiful, stately ruin
coming out of the darkness.
- That's not what happened.
- No.
It's like a cliff.
Oh, I remember
when we...
This was where we came in,
we landed here and...
It's a cliff.
The, you know,
the Wall of China...
I mean, it's just a wall.
And the first thing I recognized
was the anti-fouling paint.
Yeah, the red,
the red paint, right?
It was pink.
It was still pink.
And I said, "Too bad they
didn't paint the whole ship
with that stuff."
And the bilge keel
was sitting on top of the sand.
Exactly.
Back, back here.
It was right,
right there.
And then, the pilot,
he said, "We gotta go."
Yeah.
So he dropped his weights
and then we began our ascent.
But then these eyes...
Yeah, which is
your lights kicking back.
Your lights,
all the eyes of the Ti...
Like, the people in,
were looking at us.
- Did you get spooked?
- It was spooky, yeah.
- 'Cause we were now
in free ascent.
Yeah.
There was no...
You couldn't stop,
you dropped all your weights.
And it was just all these eyes
and then we cleared it.
It was amazing.
That's pretty much
what it looked like to me
the first time, except we were
down here someplace.
And we came in on her,
right about here.
Yeah.
And we had come
across this bermed-up mud.
Yeah, yeah.
He came up
and we just cleared here.
Yeah, all right.
And then we wound up
sitting up here.
Yeah.
But there's also nothing cooler
than coming up on her
from the, from the...
Yeah.
That was our second...
That's the money shot.
And that's the money shot
looking up.
We did it for fake in the movie,
and it's the transition shot
where it goes into 1912.
So we come past,
past Old Rose's face.
We come to that shot
of the stem, the vertical bow,
and then we-we
transition into 1912
where we crane up over it
and we see the whole ship.
Come on, get a rope.
You won't find
bodies at Titanic.
Uh, you won't find skeletons,
the bones actually
dissolve into solution
very rapidly at that depth.
What anybody
who's explored the wreck finds
is pairs of shoes.
Takes years
for a skeleton to vanish,
but the shoes,
treated with tannic acid,
they won't eat 'em.
So all around the Titanic
are the shoes.
There's a scene
where we were filming
and we came across
a pair of women's shoes.
Yeah.
Next to
a pair of girl's shoes.
These were people.
These were people whose shoes
- got to the bottom on people.
- Those double, double...
- They were in their cabin...
- Yeah.
Because the cabin
was all around them,
the destruction of it.
And there was a hand mirror...
- Yeah, yeah.
- Next to them.
And a comb and then a bone comb.
So I can imagine her
holding the mirror
as her mother combed her hair
- and then put the bone comb...
- You create a whole...
You create a whole story.
This is the human element.
This is what people touched,
it's what they lived with.
Amazing.
It's pretty daunting
when you see
all the names all at once.
- Exactly. I mean...
- How many people?
In this? 1,496 people.
You know, imagine all of these
people out there in the ocean.
This is the crowd
that was floating at sea.
Yeah, you get so into
the forensics of it.
- Yeah, yes.
- You know, and, uh...
studying the wreck
and the breakup
of the wreck and discovering
the artifacts and so on,
you really lose sight of
the human tragedy sometimes.
I know, I know that
that was an epiphany for me
when I was there
at the wreck the first time,
you know, how that hit me.
And I'd been studying it
for months,
you know, but it wasn't,
now it wasn't at a remove,
it wasn't a myth anymore.
These were real people.
Yeah, yeah.
Everybody had a family somewhere
that's probably
affected to this day.
- Hi, Paul.
- Paul is the...
Great-grandson
of Isidor and Ida Straus.
I know their story well.
I wanted to meet
with the families
of Titanic victims
and survivors,
to hear their stories
and learn how they felt
about how I depicted
their ancestors.
I started with Paul Kurzman.
His great-grandfather
Isidor Straus
was a self-made millionaire
and a former congressman.
He and his wife, Ida, chose to
die together on the Titanic.
The story, as you know so well,
is that she got into a lifeboat.
Women and children did,
and expected her husband,
Isidor, to follow.
To come in, yeah.
And he said,
"I will not enter a lifeboat
"until I see that all the women
and children onboard
are in lifeboats."
And she said...
No!
We've been together
for 40 years.
And where you go, I go.
Don't argue with me, Isidor.
You know it does no good.
"We will be on the ship
together as it goes down.
We will die
as we have lived, together."
When they found Isidor's body,
they found a locket
with initials, Isidor Straus.
- Here is a picture
of their eldest son, Jesse.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
And here is a picture
of their eldest daughter, Sara.
- Your grandmother.
- My grandmother.
Your grandmother.
So, that's what he...
That's what he kept
close to his heart.
And this is the most
precious item in my life.
Right. That's powerful.
That's powerful.
When the end of the film came,
I didn't wanna move.
I didn't wanna
leave the theater.
- Well, thanks.
- I was captured.
It was really the accuracy,
the work that you did
as director toward
ensuring authenticity
of the film.
It wasn't just me, though.
It wasn't just me,
because once we had
dived to the wreck,
everybody who came aboard,
production designer,
costume designer,
everyone felt that we had
to live up to that standard.
Twenty years ago,
we tried to bring Titanic
to life without compromise.
We did the best we could
with the information we had.
But since then, I've made
33 dives to the wreck site
and I've discovered surprising
new things about the ship
and solved mysteries that have
puzzled explorers for decades.
For the movie Titanic,
we unearthed
every known photograph,
poured over
architectural drawings,
and built our ship
rivet by rivet,
making sure everything
was in its rightful place,
as was known back in 1996.
Today at the
Reagan Library Exhibit,
we'll look back at
some of our film sets
armed with ROV footage
from my 33 dives to the wreck
to see what we got right
and what we didn't.
It's quite proper, I assure you.
This is the sitting room.
Wow. So they've
completely rebuilt the set.
You know, I haven't seen this
since we made the film
- 20 years ago.
- Isn't this great?
It's great, yeah.
This was like one of our
first couple days of shooting.
And one of the very first things
that Kate Winslet
and Leonardo had to do were,
you know, get naked.
We were inspired by
this Regency motif
that was known to be on Olympic
and known to be on Titanic
in other rooms,
and we placed it into the...
A portside millionaire's suite,
- the three-room suite.
- Yes. Yes.
Because nobody knew
what was in there.
We didn't know that at the time.
I was
working in what was not known.
The crazy thing about all this
is we made the movie in '96,
and in 2005 we got into
the Straus suite on B deck,
and it looked just like
the fake set that we have built.
The most excited
I've ever seen you.
Oh, man.
That, that was, like,
I was geeking out.
Oh, say, it's not the clock.
It's... It looks like
a clock to me.
Say it, it's
not the clock on the mantel.
Oh, my God!
And look at the, the woodwork.
This is outrageous.
It was just sitting there.
KEN It was utterly surreal.
It was like a little
bubble of perfect preservation.
Oh, it's unbelievable.
If you wrote a screenplay
with that,
it's almost, you know,
like, pushing it.
Yeah, sure, the clock's gonna
still be sitting on the mantel.
- It was.
- Of course it was attached
for heavy seas in
the North Atlantic, but that it,
that nothing hit it,
that no furniture floating
- around the room...
- Took it out.
- Or broke the glass.
- Yeah. Exactly.
And that clock holds
an important forensic clue.
That clock has the time
that this cabin flooded.
Right.
And we know the times
on the chronometer
on the bridge.
So if we can get
the time off that clock
and match it to the time
on the bridge chronometer,
we have the rate of
Titanic sinking.
You're telling me
I got to go back down there?
Well, there's
some muck on that thing.
- We need to clean it off
and see what it says.
Yeah.
CQD? Sir?
That's right, CQD.
The distress call.
That's our position.
When we shot the film in '96,
this was based on
the best information we had.
- Mm-hmm.
- Right.
There was one kind of funky,
double-exposed picture.
- Of Titanic.
- Yeah.
And it showed
kind of this area, as I recall.
And this is not in the photo.
You didn't see
any of that.
You didn't see any of that.
We assumed it was there...
Because the Olympic
photos showed it.
Yeah.
So this was actually
a pretty good reproduction
of Olympic,
and it turned out to be
completely wrong for Titanic
once we got
in there with the ROV.
So we kinda got this part right
and we got this part
completely wrong,
'cause this is all actually
in a separate room.
The silent room, right?
The thing is,
these guys were heroes.
I didn't have time
to get it into the film,
but the wireless operators
were like the hackers
of their day.
The actions taken by
operators, Bride and Phillips,
saved hundreds of lives.
They lost power on the set
the day before the disaster.
The Marconi
maintenance manual says
in this situation,
you leave it alone,
- wait for a Marconi Engineer
ashore to fix it.
Yeah, yeah.
And you're gonna operate
off this emergency coil here.
Yeah.
Which is battery powered,
which had zippo for range.
About 60,
70 miles theoretical range.
Yeah.
Which Carpathia was
a little bit outside that range
when she started to pick up
Titanic's distress call.
And going
in the other direction.
So if they hadn't
rebuilt the set,
they wouldn't have
been able to talk to Carpathia.
Probably not.
Carpathia saved over 700 people.
The point is they wouldn't
have been saved
if these guys hadn't
disobeyed the rules.
So you wanna go to a real party?
So this is the grand staircase,
which we built it
from the plans,
the way they actually
built the staircase.
So the staircase
has got a steel footing.
Then when we sank
the ship, it lifted.
Wood is buoyant.
It ripped off that footing
and it all floated up.
And it actually
pinned two stunt players.
Fortunately, they weren't hurt,
but it was
a pretty scary moment.
When the wreck
was first found,
there was no staircase.
And the assumption was made
that there were
little wood-boring mollusks
that had eaten the whole thing.
But then we couldn't figure out
why all the columns
and wall paneling,
and everything
on the D deck level
and so on were still there.
And this is
so substantial.
It doesn't add up.
I mean, this is solid oak.
Oak is one of the strongest,
densest woods.
Yeah.
And even if
the wood had disappeared,
where did all those
iron balustrades go?
Yeah, exactly.
So we went down
and we looked around
the bottom with the ROV,
- we couldn't even
find remnants.
No.
We couldn't find
remnants of the balustrades.
We couldn't find
remnants of the stairs
or any of that stuff.
So we thought,
"Ah, it floated out."
That was an interesting,
you know,
- kind of
art-imitating life where...
Yeah.
Exactly.
If we hadn't made
the movie, we wouldn't have
come to that answer,
I don't think.
Wandering through
the Titanic Exhibit,
it's hard not to feel haunted
by the relics of the past,
a deck chair,
a gold pocket watch,
a traveling coat.
You feel the lost souls
standing there beside you.
And I felt that way
making the movie as well.
- This is Jim Cameron.
- A pleasure to meet you.
- This is Jackie Drexel.
- Very nice to meet you.
Her grandparents were
John Jacob Astor
- and Madeleine Astor.
- Sure, of course, yeah.
In the case of
John Jacob Astor
and Madeleine,
here was the richest man
on the Titanic
with this brand-new wife
and starting a new family
and everything.
Jackie had a strong personality,
and I saw kind of a through line
in that spark of life
that I imagine JJ Astor had.
Thank you for joining us here.
Your father,
I believe, was in...
Yes, five months.
In Madeleine Astor's
abdomen at that point.
She was five months pregnant.
His little wifey
there, Madeleine,
is my age
and in a delicate condition.
See how she's trying to hide it?
He seemed like
a really interesting man.
He's an absolutely
fascinating man.
He was more praised
for dying as a hero,
rather than the life
that he actually led,
which was quite amazing.
He had a curious mind.
We shot a couple scenes
around their story
that got cut out of the movie.
I was fascinated by the moment
where he was cutting open
the life preserver
and seeing the cork
and figuring out
how the life preserver worked.
- But this is what Madeleine wore.
She died
at a young age.
It looks tiny.
Yeah, well, this is,
this-this life jacket
kept her warm and maybe,
maybe kept her alive.
My father went to Halifax
and he was offered that.
And he said... He just
couldn't even talk about it.
- Hmm.
- Couldn't even think about it.
Too traumatic.
They changed his life,
and I think his mother
was totally traumatized.
Yeah.
Do you by any chance
know how my grandfather died,
and if the lifeboat number four
that my grandmother was in,
was close enough to have seen...
Have seen it?
Well, I don't think
they would've seen it.
Because he died
with the funnel collapsing.
It's thought because of
the soot on his body.
Your vision of the faces
in the water
gave just the most amazing
chilling feeling.
I think one of my realizations
after the film
was released is that,
you know,
this isn't ancient history.
This isn't 200 years ago.
In trying to sell viscerally
how traumatic it must
have been for the survivors,
including going back
into that field of bodies,
trying to find
somebody still alive,
you know, I probably
wasn't as sensitive
to how that might've felt
to people
whose families had been
traumatized by the event.
I'd never
thought about it before.
Yeah.
And then I saw it,
and it really hit me.
The film Titanic
depicted 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.
I've dived to the wreck
dozens of times
and I brought in naval engineers
to analyze all the complex
variables at work.
Now, I wanna take it
to the next level,
doing an actual,
real-world physical test
of the sinking that incorporates
the new information
we've gathered.
Will it sink the way
we portrayed it?
I don't know.
Our mission is to mirror
the physics at work
as best we can,
and see what happens.
There's a gazillion
theories floating around,
there always have been.
We wanna come up
with a credible theory.
The whole purpose
of this investigation
is to understand, does this
hang on or does it go away?
I've been talking about
the bow swinging down
and breaking off for 20 years,
but I never had any proof.
It's just outside of science
at this point.
And I thought, we'll just
build a model and break it.
I, I have no way of saying
that 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 freakin' film.
We're gonna be doing practical
rigging with pyrotechnics,
and sinking it in a tank.
I immediately thought
of Gene Warren.
I've known him forever,
we've done a few projects
together over the years.
Let's think about
what would be the best way
to help hold that up
when this breaks.
He wanted us to do
a disaster forensics
on really what happened
when Titanic sank.
Because water is water.
Water doesn't change
its dynamics.
Let's see what the bow does.
Let's see what the stern does,
and recreate
what might've happened.
I've been wanting
to do this damn model test
for a long time.
I knew that trying to
incorporate all the lessons
we'd learned about the sinking
into a single model test
wouldn't be easy.
Well, that's not
what I believe happened.
But I was about to find out
just how hard it would be.
You're not following
what I'm saying.
Iceberg right ahead!
For over 20 years, I've wondered
why Titanic went down
the way it did.
In the movie, it breaks,
and the stern falls back
with a big wave,
and then the bow pulls it down,
and its stern
stands up straight.
And then the bow breaks off,
sinks straight down,
and that stern's sittin' there
and it slowly goes down.
It's a dramatic image,
and as accurate as
I could make it at the time.
But I've never stopped
trying to find out
exactly what happened.
Over the years,
our little analysis team
has used a wide variety
of source material
in order to try and put together
the pieces of the puzzle
that is the sinking
of the Titanic.
We know from the wreck
exactly where the steel broke.
Right to the rivet.
Jim's exploration
of the bow section
has fine-tuned our understanding
of what was going on
during the flooding
and during the descent
to the ocean floor.
We got a mast
that's knocked aft,
all the B deck
forward-facing windows...
broken, broken, broken.
To me, that all adds up to
a very strong
longitudinal flow over the ship.
We see a consistent pattern
of the effects of an almost
hurricane-like flow of water
from the front of the ship
toward the back of the ship.
That can only be explained
by the ship sinking
vertically straight down.
A big piece of the keel,
70-feet long,
two big frames
of the double bottom
were found way out
in the debris field.
They had been
ripped off the ship. By what?
Well, they'd been ripped off
by the bow separating.
Bit by bit, putting all these
little data points together,
we're essentially able to
reverse-engineer
major key frames of the sinking.
We engaged
the United States Navy
to build two computer
simulation models of Titanic.
One showed us
how the water progressed
through the ship as it sank.
The other measures
the stresses in the hull.
And what it told us was,
Titanic didn't need to rise
90 degrees out of the water.
The model calculated
approximately 23 degrees
before peak stresses
were realized
in the structure and she broke.
But for a ship
the size of Titanic to sink,
there's an unlimited number
of variables
going on during the sinking.
The computer simulation
would bear some of that out,
but too many variables
to nail down
exactly what happened,
so we got to try
a different dimension,
and that's where
the physical model comes in.
Hydrodynamically,
it's got to be pretty close
to what the ship was, I think.
It's a one-off model.
It's not a 100% accurate
in some of its fine details,
but it was accurate
in terms of the overall shape,
which is all we really need
for a hydrodynamic study.
The biggest part was
having this model float
and then sink,
like we learned from
all of our research gathering.
It's a known length,
right, 70 feet?
Yes.
70 feet from the break aft.
From the breakpoint here.
We knew that the model
was gonna have to break,
so we had to put in a mechanism
that would allow it
to break at the point
where our computer simulation
had indicated.
And so this is
the hinge piece down here?
The hinge is right here.
No, that's not what
I'm calling a hinge piece.
The hinge isn't here.
The hinge is here.
Jim, he'd
given us some direction.
Um, we kinda got it half-right,
but he wanted the hinge
in a different place.
It's what I call
a banana theory,
which is, as the ship broke,
that keel, the strongest part
of the ship held on.
This falls back,
and that's there,
- and then it rips away.
- Mm-hmm.
That's your hinge piece.
And as it ripped away,
it formed almost
like a third piece.
The keel, it goes,
grrsh, like that.
No, don't take off yet,
necessarily, necessarily.
That's what we wanna understand.
It's a kind of
a proof of concept.
We can never prove
what actually happened.
We can only prove
what might have happened.
The hydrodynamic forces on this
were enough to
snap the mast aft,
blow the wheelhouse off.
Jim came in and looked at it,
and what he did not see
is the water flow that accounts
for a lot of the damage
that we've seen at the wreck.
So he's directed some changes
so that we can truly remove
any latent buoyancy
left in the bow.
We didn't have
all the interior walls
and everything
that would have slowed down
the rate of flooding.
So, we used a combination
of sponges and foam,
foam to provide buoyancy,
sponges to provide
a delaying factor
in how quickly a space
will fill up with water
when it's flooding.
It's all very catastrophic
right in here
and very fast, which is
the equivalent of this
wicking the water in rapidly.
Each successive run
was basically
a fine-tuning of the model
to where we would see it perform
the way that we knew it had to.
Haven't we sunk
this damn ship yet?
Believe it or not,
we're doing actually exactly...
We're doing the banana peel.
Okay. Let's see what we got.
That thing's buoyant,
so that's no good.
It needs to be negative.
Then we
came up with another problem,
when the ship breaks,
it loses buoyancy.
Our buoyancy was foam.
We couldn't just make it
disappear when it broke.
So we had to come up
with a method
to have the foam work
its own way out of the hull
to simulate the loss of
buoyancy after the break.
If they tried to adjust
flotation in this
so that the break happened
where it's always been filmed,
it's too high out of the water.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
We definitely got that wrong.
At that point,
it became a team effort.
I would drill up
this area, right?
This should all be packed
with sponge up in here.
He jumped in with us like
we were at Roger Corman days,
like he was in his 20s again.
So, we'll probably have
to cut these up, all right?
There we were,
back rigging stuff together,
and doing tape and soldering
and all the things that you do.
That wasn't setting
the wayback machine
for 20 years ago on Titanic.
That was setting it back
to the early '80s for me.
You've done this before.
A few times.
I've blown my share of up.
We started to figure out
how to do it in a way
that we fine-tune the breakup
by changing the timing.
We could have the stern fall
back more or fall back less,
have the bow swing down more
or swing down less.
When we did
our computer simulation,
there was a moment
where the stresses on the ship
exceeded the strength
of the material.
And that's when
it should have broken.
And that happened when
the ship tilted to 23 degrees.
So when we sank
the ship at 23 degrees,
it seemed to do everything
that was observed.
We said it broke at 23 degrees.
We were actually breaking
at around 25, 26 degrees,
according to this crude test.
But I mean, I think, you know,
it's telling us something.
We're homing in on this.
And in fact, that was even
increased when it broke,
the stern kinda
popped up a little bit
and you could kinda
see the break.
And the bow swung down
and detached
and fell vertically.
So we feel pretty comfortable
that it was somewhere between
maybe 20 and 30 degrees
of tilt when it broke.
All right, here we go.
Let's do it, let's roll.
All right, so props are clear.
And it breaks
right at the waterline.
- It's up a little bit.
- Ah, sweet. Sweet.
Swings down,
pulls the stern more vertical.
That's the banana model.
Check that out.
Touchdown!
We did see
some scenarios played out
almost exactly as it was filmed.
The stern going
under vertically,
giving Jack and Rose
a few moments,
right there at the fantail.
As the stern came up
and went vertical,
it always turned
almost 90 degrees.
And that's exactly
what people saw.
Now people describe it
standing up like, uh,
like a tower or like a finger
pointing at the sky
and that's exactly what we saw.
Yes! Vertical stern!
Yes!
It's not like we did
a battery of a hundred runs
with a very precision model.
But I think it does show what
is possible to have happened.
I think what we're seeing is
there's a range, right?
You can get it to
where the stern falls back.
But then it doesn't go
vertical when it goes under.
When we found out that 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.
There are about
five or six instances
of hydrodynamic effects,
and there's only one way
that can happen.
It swung down,
and it shot off like a bomb
dropping straight down.
So 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.
With each thing that we try,
each step that we take,
I think we're getting
closer and closer
to what actually
did happen that night.
Okay, let's do it again.
That was perfect.
Let's do it again.
I'm constantly fascinated
by the engineering,
the hardware, the forensics,
and I'll get very excited
about the ideas, you know.
You always have to
kinda grab yourself
by the scruff of your neck
and remind yourself
what happened there
was a real tragedy
that happened to real people,
and it still resonates
down through time
in this very powerful way.
Sometimes you forget that
in the moment,
but I try never to forget it
for very long.
Our scale model sinking
took only seconds.
In real life,
the passengers and crew
had about an hour
and a half to escape.
More than two-thirds
of them didn't make it.
Which brings up
another controversy,
could more people
have been saved?
Mr. Andrews,
forgive me.
I did the sum in my head,
and with the number of lifeboats
times the capacity
you mentioned,
forgive me, but it seems
that there are not enough
for everyone aboard.
About half, actually.
Titanic carried 20 lifeboats,
but they only managed
to launch 18
in an hour and a half.
Now we've all been told
that if the ship
carried more boats,
more lives
could have been saved.
But would that really
have made a difference?
Could the crew
have launched more boats
in the time they had?
I've wondered about this
for a long time,
and we never
tested it until now.
So what we did was
we took a replica lifeboat
left over from the movie
with a set of davits
mounted on top of a platform
that was tall enough
to represent
the height of
the promenade deck,
boat deck being up on top.
Got a crew to man
and lower the lifeboat
so that we could see
how long it took.
We figured that it would
take about two minutes
to roll the canvas back
on these lifeboats.
Roll back that cover!
Roll back that cover!
So we preset
our clock to two minutes.
Okay, so the ropes are in,
and you guys know
what to do, right,
- to get them flaked out
on the deck.
Yes.
You gonna do that,
sort of there and there
so we need to stay out of this.
We can put it right there.
Well, put it
where you would've done it
- if you were really on the ship.
- Okay.
And if we're in your way,
then move us out of the way
'cause we're curious passengers,
and you're having to yell at us
to get out of the way.
Politely, of course,
'cause we're also, you know,
rich passengers in
the first class area
of Titanic.
So, when we say go,
ready the boat and then
tell us when it's ready, okay?
Bring lines on deck.
Clock is running.
Remove cradle.
Swing boat out.
Yeah, you can see
how geared down it is
on that leadscrew.
It takes a lot of cranks
to get that davit to move
just a few feet.
Keel cleared, keep cranking.
The other thing you notice is...
Was the voice commands
by the officer
coordinating the two sides.
And in the beginning
with that steam going off,
they're gonna have
trouble hearing.
Somebody would
have to yell back and forth
or somebody would just
have to see
the other guys working
and just imitate,
'cause they couldn't
hear anything.
Okay, good.
Lower boat to embarkation deck.
So, at what point
do they start loading?
So they're going
to lower it down
to the edge of the boat deck.
'Cause then
you just step into it.
- Right.
- You wanna step into it.
You do not want them stepping
over, if you can avoid it.
Hold it! Secure the boat.
Okay.
All right, stop the clock.
Eight minutes and 30 seconds.
Eight minutes and 30 seconds.
Now we're gonna
have to just estimate
the loading time.
The key here is, is that
you don't know
how much time you have,
you've never practiced this.
But just as a baseline,
let's get some values
- for how long it takes to do
each part of the operation.
Yeah, exactly.
So I think you're probably
looking at a-a time that varied.
Initially it was
probably slower,
as people were reticent,
and then later as they
got more desperate,
it probably sped up.
- Let's say ten minutes.
- Okay.
- Let's say ten minutes.
- Yeah.
Okay. That put us up to
18 and a half minutes.
Now let's see
how long it takes us
to lower one deck level.
And clock running.
Ready. Okay, lower.
All right, it jerks
its way down. And look at the...
You can see how jerky
it is even now, not loaded.
It'd be like three times that
when it was fully loaded.
That'd make it
a lot harder to lower.
- Okay, hold it.
- Okay.
Stopping the clock.
- So what was that?
- Just shy of two minutes.
Just shy of two minutes.
Okay, so that's two minutes
to go ten feet.
It's another 50 feet
to the water,
so we have to add
another ten minutes.
So that's 30 minutes,
30 seconds.
And they
were working simultaneously.
They were loading passengers in
while they were
cranking out the next boat.
Then our times can
telescope somewhat.
When you start
multiplying it out,
it should have taken
more like two hours.
From the time the lifeboats
were ordered launched,
you had about
an hour and a half.
However they managed it,
they had just enough time
to get those boats off.
- Not quite enough time.
- Yeah, not quite.
The truth is the last two boats,
the last two collapsibles
were washed off the ship.
They did not have time.
It's actually pretty amazing
that they managed to launch
as many lifeboats as they did.
And what made it
even more challenging
was that in the final stages
of Titanic sinking,
the lifeboats
were being launched
right on top of each other.
To avoid being crushed,
men were cutting the ropes
connected to the davits
with pocket knives.
I mean, I want to see for myself
how difficult that was.
Well, let's raise up
one end of the boat,
in contact.
About one inch
out of the cradle.
- And then they want to
cut one of the ropes.
Okay.
No, I was thinking
more like a foot.
- Let's do an action shot.
- A foot?
Let's raise it up a foot, guys.
All right, so who's
gonna do the honors?
What, somebody
has to go onto the boat?
I'll do it. I'll do it.
Whatever happens, Jim,
we'll get it on film.
Exactly.
- Let's go.
- Clock running.
All right.
Jeez, is this an actual knife?
It-it should have been
a really sharp knife.
And it's sharp.
We do know
this type of knife was used.
All right, I'm gonna
go with your expertise.
I think I probably
would cut faster
if my life depended on it.
- That's promising.
- We're getting close.
Ah, jeez.
You imagine, like,
50 people screaming.
- Yeah.
- Water coming up.
There's a boat coming
down on your head, don't forget.
Yeah, that too.
It's gonna get dramatic
here in a second.
I can hear it.
All right, that's promising.
Beauty. And we're free.
Yeah.
So how long
did that take?
1.40.
I would say
if my life depended on it,
I could probably shave
about 30 seconds off that.
And you go for a ride.
I think if you had more
lifeboats on that ship,
they would've just
gotten in the way
and it might've cost
hundreds of lives.
At Cherbourg,
a woman came aboard
named Margaret Brown,
but we all called her Molly.
History would call her
the Unsinkable Molly Brown.
Well, I wasn't about
to wait all day for you, sonny.
Yes.
Here, if you think
you can manage.
Yes, ma'am.
Margaret Brown
was one of the most
famous survivors of the Titanic.
Her warmth and strength
after the disaster
became part of the legend.
Margaret Brown, Molly Brown
as the world knows her,
uh, was obviously
quite a character.
She sounded like a real pistol,
I would have loved
to have met her.
It seems like you
got a little bit of her,
her gene of vivaciousness.
Oh, that's nice of you to say.
She was intelligent.
She had like that
emotional intelligence
- to read the situations.
- Yeah.
And I-I really like that.
The fact that she was
in boat six with, uh,
with the guy
that was at the helm
when they hit the iceberg,
the guy that was
in the crow's nest
who should have
spotted the iceberg
maybe a little bit sooner.
And then the helmsman, Hichens,
he refused to go back
and got into
a real tussle with her.
There's plenty of room for more!
And there'll be
one less on this boat
if you don't shut
that hole in your face!
I like to say that
my great grandmother's story
starts where
your movie left off.
Ah, well...
Because later
in the night
she actually
took over that boat.
Right.
Actually using the same threat
that Hichens had used on her
that, "If you interfere
"with us doing what I think
we need to do right now,
I'm gonna
throw you overboard."
You don't understand.
If we go back,
they'll swamp the boat!
They'll pull us right down,
I'm telling ya!
Knock it off.
You're scaring me.
And they told me that
he had said during his lifetime,
"Mrs. Brown could have gotten
into any boat that night,
- why did she have to step in mine?"
"Why did she
get in mine?"
Well, she was
very confronting with him.
He was at the helm
when the ship hit an iceberg.
So, now I've learned
a little bit more
about my ancestor,
but is there anything that
you would really like
to have changed now
that this much time has gone by,
or based on reaction
from the movie, or...
Well, you know,
it's interesting,
I think that meeting people
such as yourselves
who are connected,
whose families
are connected to the event,
really made me appreciate
something that I don't think
I quite realized
when I was making the film.
Yes, I knew it was history,
but I wasn't as sensitive
to the families,
I don't think, the descendants,
and how that story
meant so much to them
and in the case of First Officer
William McMaster Murdoch,
I took the liberty
of showing him
shoot somebody
and then shoot himself.
He's a named character,
he wasn't a generic officer,
we don't know that he did that,
but, you know,
the storyteller in me says,
"Oh, I start
connecting the dots.
He was on duty, he's carrying
all this burden with him,"
made him
an interesting character,
but I was being a screenwriter,
I wasn't thinking
about being a historian.
And I think
I wasn't as sensitive
about the fact
that his family is,
that his survivors
might feel offended by that,
and they were.
- Mm-hmm.
- And, uh...
you know, I-I feel like
I should have made him more of
a generic character than...
And just...
Then it could have been
any one of a number of people
who were at that place
at that time.
What was that, Mr. Murdoch?
An iceberg, sir.
When we would
go out on an expedition,
we'd wait until
11:40 at night,
which was the moment
the ship hit the iceberg,
right at that exact spot
and we'd go out onto
the bow of the research ship
and we'd raise a glass
in honor of the passengers
and the crew of the RMS Titanic.
And so, I would just like
to propose a toast to you,
the descendants
and the representatives
of that history.
And thank you
for sharing it with us.
So, to your ancestors.
These are people that have
grown up with Titanic
in their family.
And it's kind of
always looming over them
and it, and it means
something to them.
And in some ways
it's defined them
to an entire global community
of Titanic enthusiasts
and historians,
these people are
passing on the torch
of what their family knows.
To making it count.
Jim Cameron's Titanic
was beyond
anybody's expectations.
We knew when we were
working on it,
it was going to be epic.
What a great setting
for a love story,
this fantastic shipwreck
that has fascinated people
for decades anyway,
presented so vividly
and so accurately.
To go back there
is to risk being pulled down
into that icy water with them.
So it's really a choice between
your lives and their lives.
James Cameron
brought Titanic back to life
as I have tried to do
through my entire life
with my paintings
and you can't put
enough value on that.
I knew
the old lady in her grave,
that's the Titanic I knew.
Jim showed me this
beautiful young woman,
we sailors tend to
think of ships as women.
He showed me
that beautiful ship.
I just loved it.
That movie used
Titanic as a stage
to tell a teenage love story.
It wasn't meant to be
a historical narrative,
but it created a passion in Jim
to follow up that movie
with actual expeditions
to the actual wreck
and because of
that continued interest
that goes way beyond
a feature film,
we have made discoveries
and learned things
that have actually
changed the history
and our understanding
of Titanic.
I just really
was fascinated by Titanic,
the story, the archaeology of it
and just wanted to know more.
What happened that night,
in terms of the final moments
of the ship and the breakup,
the way it sank.
We will never know
exactly what happened,
but we can say what is
possible to have happened.
Titanic wasn't just a story.
This was something real.
This really happened
to real people.
And we need to honor those
that died and their families.
I think it's important
for filmmakers to,
to understand
that responsibility
and actually get it right.
-Captioned by Point.360.