Titanic: 25 Years Later with James Cameron (Full Episode) | SPECIAL

We released Titanic 25 years ago, but despite all our efforts to make the film as accurate as possible, there's one thing some fans just can't accept. They insist Jack could have survived if he climbed on that floating piece of debris with Rose. People even claim to have proved it. Of course, Jack and Rose were fictional characters. Nearly 1,500 real people died that night, and my aim was to honor their memory. You know, imagine all of these people out there in the ocean. This is the crowd that was floating at sea. But if we look at Jack and Rose's plight as a reflection of real events, it raises interesting questions. What actually happened when Titanic sank? Would having more lifeboats on board have saved more lives? I think I probably would cut faster if my life depended on it. To find the answers, I'm going to revisit some relevant tests my team of experts and I have conducted. Yes! Then, for the first time, I'm going to recreate Jack and Rose on the raft in a controlled laboratory setting. So we're taking them to clinical hypothermia. I don't think he could sustain this for very long. We'll find out once and for all whether Jack could have survived the sinking of Titanic. Well, I think we've seen enough. 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 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. Are you ready to go back to Titanic? On April 14th, 1912, at 1140 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 the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Of the more than 2,200 passengers and crew on board, 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 U.S. Navy. His expedition changed the way we explore the deep. It changed my life. Bob and I met at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to take a look at their exhibit on Titanic. 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 a wreck for the first time? And I always want to tell them the story they want to hear, which was there she was in, you know, this beautiful stately ruin coming out of the dark. That's not what happened. Oh, I remember when we, this was where we came in. We landed here. And it's a cliff, you know, the wall of China. I mean, this is a wall. And the first thing I recognized was the anti-fouling paint. Yeah, the red paint. It was still pink. And I said, too bad they didn't paint the whole ship with that stuff. And the bilge keel is sitting up on top. Exactly. It was right back here, right there. And then the pilot, he said, we got to 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 type, like the people were looking at us. Did you get spooked? It was spooky. Yeah. Because we were now on free ascent. Yeah. There was no, you couldn't stop. You dropped all your weights. Yeah. 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. He came up and we just cleared here. And then we wound up sitting up here. Yeah. But there's also nothing cooler than coming up on her from the. Yeah. 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 old Rose's face. We come to that shot of the stem, the vertical bow, and then we transition into 1912 and we crane up over and we see the whole ship. If we're going to seriously consider the question of whether Jack and Rose both could have survived, we need to look at the hardships they endured that night. For starters, the shocking way the ship broke apart. 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 want to 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 want to 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 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 because then I don't have to remake the freaking film. We're going to 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 have 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. 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. Why did Titanic go down the way it did? The mystery of the ship sinking has puzzled me for decades. In the movie it breaks and the stern falls back with a big wave and then the bow pulls it down and it stands up straight and then the bow breaks off, sinks straight down and that stern's sitting 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 of the ocean floor. We've got a mast that's knocked aft. All of 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. 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've 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 a 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 the 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 would happen 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 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 from the break point here. We knew that the model was going to 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? This is just right here. No that's not what I'm calling the hinge piece. The hinge isn't here. The hinge is here. Jim he'd given us some direction. We kind of got it half right but he wanted the hinge in a different place. It's what I call the 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. That's your hinge piece and as it ripped away it formed almost like a third piece. The keel it goes like that. No it doesn't take off yet necessarily. Necessarily. That's what we want to 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 out, 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 once 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 exactly we're doing the banana peel. Okay well 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 yeah this should all be packed with sponge. 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 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 way back 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'm blowing my shirt up. Started to figure out how to do it in a way that we fine-tune the breakup. By changing that timing we could have the stern fall back more or fall back less have the bow swing down more 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 tilts it's 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 so 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 kind of popped up a little bit and you can kind of 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 breaks right at the water line. Oh that's sweet. Up a little bit. Sweet. Swings down pulls a stern more vertical. That's a banana model. Check that out. Touchdown. We did see some scenarios played out almost exactly it was filmed the stern going under vertically. Given Jack and Rose there are 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 a 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 100 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. Well we found 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's 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 kind of 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 and sometimes you forget that in the moment but I try never to forget it for very long. In our movie, Jack and Rose were among the hundreds of passengers who plunged into the freezing water. The safest place to be was in a lifeboat which brings up another controversy. If the ship had more lifeboats, could more people have been saved? Mr. Andrews, forgive me. I did this some 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 atop 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. So we pre-set 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. You're going to do that sort of there and there so we need to stay out of those. No we can put it right there. Well put it where you would have done it if you were really on the ship. Okay. And if we're in your way then move us out of the way because we're curious passengers and you're having to yell at us to get out of the way. Politely of course because we're you know rich passengers in the first class 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 lead screw. It takes a lot of cranks to get that down to move just a few feet. Keel cleared. Keep cranking. The other thing you noticed was the voice commands by the officer coordinating the two sides and in the beginning with that steam going off they're going to have trouble hearing. Somebody have to yell back and forth or somebody just have to see the other guys working and just imitate because they couldn't hear anything. Okay good. Lower boat to embarkation deck. So at one point do they start loading it? So they're going to lower down to the edge of the boat deck. Because then you just step into it. Right you want to step into it. You do not want them stepping over if you can avoid it. Hold it. Secure the boat. Okay. Eight minutes and 30 seconds. Eight minutes and 30 seconds. Now we're going to 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. So I think you're you're probably looking at 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 10 minutes. Okay. Let's say 10 minutes. Yeah. Okay that puts us up to 18 and a half minutes. Now let's see how long it takes us to lower one deck level. Ready and clock running. Ready. Okay lower. You're right it jerks its way down and look at that. 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. Stopping the clock. So what was that? Just shy of two minutes. Just shy two minutes. Okay so that's two minutes to go 10 feet. It's another 50 feet to the water so we have to add another 10 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. Right. 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. 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 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 wanted to see for myself how difficult that was. 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 off the ropes. Okay. No I was thinking more like a foot. Let's do an action shot. Let's raise it up a foot guys. All right so who's gonna do the honors? I'll do it. Whatever happens Jim we'll get it on film. Exactly. Let's go. Clock running. All right. Geez is this an actual knife? 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. Oh geez. Can you imagine like 50 people screaming? Yeah. Water coming up. There's a boat coming down in your head don't forget. Yeah that too. That'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? 140. 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 have just gotten in the way and it might have cost hundreds of lives. We've answered the lifeboat question. Now it's time to solve another controversy. Could both Rose and Jack have survived? I don't think he could sustain this for very long. When Titanic sank almost 1,500 people went into the freezing arctic water. Most were wearing life belts but death came quickly not from drowning but from the extreme cold. Floating in 28 degree water it doesn't take long for the body to start shutting down. And eventually you succumb to hypothermia. This is what took the lives of the passengers who hadn't made it into lifeboats. Is there anyone alive out there? 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. You know you get so into the forensics of it you know and 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 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 out of remove it wasn't a myth anymore these were real people. For the movie I wrote that Rose gets onto a piece of wooden debris that's too small and unstable to support them both. He's in love with her. He's looking at not clearly definitively enough buoyancy for them both to survive. Jack's survival might have come at the and that's all going through his head. But ever since the movie came out people have insisted they both could have survived. I'll never let go. Fans of the movie have been going on endlessly about the fact that Jack could have lived he could have gotten on that door so let's test it let's do some science you know let's see if he could have lived. We took two stunt people of the to the New Zealand laboratory of Dr. Jim Cotter. Jim and his team study the effects of cold on the human body. We created an exact replica of the raft in the movie as much as we could reproduce it and we carefully trimmed it to the same freeboard the same degree of buoyancy that we see in the film and then we started playing around with like how could he have gotten out of that situation without compromising her safety. There's a genuine element of danger to these experiments all right so we're taking them to clinical hypothermia. When you're talking about hypothermia you're talking about it clinically meaning that the core the internal organs of heart and everything are starting to get affected by the ambient temperature. Hypothermia sets in when the body's core temperature drops to 95 degrees Fahrenheit. As you cool you lose blood flow to your extremities and then your organs begin to shut down. We're basically seeing how long it takes Jack to cool down to 95. We're not going to let him go more than 95. It's clinically hypothermic. We shouldn't take him colder than that. Our Jack and Rose have been fitted with three internal thermometers. One in the lowest part of the digestive tract, one that travels through the intestine and one that sits in the esophagus next to the heart. Jack right now reading 98.6 baseline core temperature pretty good. Rose is just over 98.6. The pool's water temperature can't go below 50 degrees Fahrenheit so we're running each test twice as long to approximate the effects of 28 degree arctic water. Fifth officer Lowe testified that it was almost two hours before he could row back to rescue people in the water. In the movie Rose is still barely alive but Jack has died. Jack. So our first experiment will be a baseline test to see what would have really happened to them. Okay all right now so come around here. We put him in the same position he was in the movie, put her in the same position she was in the movie and saw how rapidly his core temperature dropped. So you're obviously shivering pretty intensely. That's that's pretty early. Our Jack is losing heat even faster than expected. Rose's core temperature is dropping much more slowly. So you were underwater at the start. No I don't feel too wet. I think this colt is doing a really good job. Yeah. This is made out of wool and that's keeping me quite warm plus the life jacket as well so I feel quite warm around my core. You got three big benefits over Jack. Yes. After only 20 minutes in titanic time Jack is clinically hypothermic and has to be taken out of the water. In 28 degree water it can be pretty quick. People will lose consciousness and their heart will cease to function adequately and pump adequately. And it was pretty steep curve and it was a very clear curve. He was losing the heat fast. Dropping down he wouldn't have made it. The movie was correct. Jack could not have survived as it was played in the film. But what if Jack and Rose had tried something different? With our modern understanding of hypothermia could we save them both? He clearly made a decision to sacrifice himself so she could have all the buoyancy for herself. But what if they split it? So we'll start with you in that initial position. The object is to get your head and shoulders over a bit toward the far side because the idea is if you can get your core up out of the water then you'll be better off. Okay I'm on. So ease up on it get your weight yep. So the next test is let's look at what what if they just did the natural next thing. Try to solve this problem without tipping the raft. Okay. Yeah you got this. Okay. Okay you try to shift up and turn over. Shift around to the end so you're coming along the end. Find your balance. All right. Pretty unstable. All right. It doesn't look like it's a roaring success. He says all right I'm just gonna try that again a little slower and I'm gonna creep up. So he just creeps up and he gets his upper body kind of as much out of the water as possible. Feels pretty stable. Yeah. So if a swell came along kind of bounced you a little bit you're okay right? Yeah. Jack and Rose are able to get on the raft but now they're both submerged in dangerous levels of freezing water. We started with her putting her arm around him. Go for it. Go for it as long as you feel that you're stable on the raft. But it actually pushed him down and his chest was awash in the water and he was losing a lot of heat through the front. He is still cooling down quite a bit more than Rose. What if Jack put his arm around her lifted his chest up and put her more at risk? Oh yeah. If you think about it from character he would have wanted to protect her as much as possible. How's Jack's core temperature doing? Steadily dropping. Slower than yesterday when he was more immersed but he's still creeping down. Okay that's yesterday that's today right? He's going down continuously but at a slower rate. With Rose you can see there's almost no difference between our baseline experiment yesterday and today. I would have expected more but it's obviously not getting to her core right because he was still getting pretty cold pretty fast. So the question is how do we save his life? How do we get this curve up? Yeah. Right? How do we get him up where she is? My pals over at Mythbusters opined that oh well they could have just solved the problem because the buoyancy that she was carrying wasn't doing them any good out of the water. You're wearing a life jacket. What say Rose? Spread some of her buoyancy around. Let's put it underneath this thing and get every bit we can out of it. So we tried that. The task is going to be to work together to take her life jacket off and put it underneath the raft. Think for a moment about what a life jacket does. It's just to get your mouth out of the water so you can breathe. So it takes you from here to here. It doesn't lift your entire weight. So let's say Jack weighed 170 pounds. He doesn't have 170 pounds of lift available if he's wearing a life jacket. Buoyancy that it's generating is so so little. I don't see a big difference by eye. Your greatest loss here would be that would be losing it. Also with Rose there in the life jacket with her big coat and dress on would she just go down? The life jacket thing was was a waste of time. I think for the degree to which it compromised her safety by taking it off it added very little. It's not doing anything. You'd be better off keeping it on her and not trying to use it for buoyancy but trying to use it for thermal insulation. So we can bust that myth guys. Sorry. Our tests at the hypothermia lab showed that if Jack had climbed onto the raft with Rose they would have both been partially submerged in freezing water. He would still have died before the rescue boat arrived two hours later and she might have died too. But if Jack and Rose knew what we know today about hypothermia could they both have survived? What would it be like if we just said let's do the best case? Best case we can imagine is they both kneel on the raft facing each other use their body heat together you know kind of in an embrace and she shares her heat with him and vice versa and they kind of insulate them they huddle against the the elements right? So we get them on the raft we try to do that guess what pretty unstable all right it ain't happening that thing is way too unstable So Jim Cotter in this situation is them using energy to stay balanced working for them or against no against any muscle that's having to move this needs a little bit more blood that's taking the heat away okay a bit more heat production but proportionally more heat loss. The only real thing is if somehow Jack could keep his whole trunk out of the water but they did manage to find a stable position took a little bit of trying where their upper bodies were out of the water both and that's when it got interesting out of the water when violent shaking was helping him his curve now was above the other two curves and projecting it out he could have made it pretty long like hours but the interesting thing was he's taking buoyancy from her getting into a threshold where he can live that's not affecting her. We saw that Kristen wasn't violently shaking the way he was her core was still in pretty good shape because of all her insulation he never gets up anywhere near where she is. The best thing we came up with was them trying to keep their their body out of the water right there their core. I really learned something interesting here is when you shiver and shake like that underwater it's conducting away heat very rapidly but when you do it in in air above water it's actually working for you. And then survival time for him depends on being able to keep shivering. Now remember you just have to do this for another hour. If that plateau could have lasted long enough to get to where the boat came back to he might have made it. He has got a chance that's all we can say. But that sort of best case scenario was kind of a fantasy because they didn't really go through all the stuff that our characters are seen doing before they got to that they didn't just magically teleport themselves to the raft. So now let's do the real test let's put them through a simulation of all the things that Jack and Rose went through. So we did exactly what what they did in the movie except that we doubled the time for every stage of it because our water wasn't as cold. Going into 28 degree water and that just makes you gasp and that's the cold shot accelerates the heart rate against blood vessels so your blood pressure goes up immediately. And a guy pushes her under one one thousand two one thousand back up one one thousand two one thousand and Jack save me Jack swims over and one right swim Rose and the faster your heart's beating the faster that cooling blood from your arms and legs is coming into your core taking your temperature down. So I was really curious to see what that did to Jack's situation and it's pretty interesting. What we saw was that he got up on there and he immediately went into the really strong shaking shivering right. The two big factors still having enough dexterity and power in their limbs to get on to the raft right and still being warm enough to actually shiver intensely. Now she saw him shivering like that and saw that he was in worse shape than her. She might get the idea to give him the life jacket as an insulator. Wouldn't you try to help him? Oh for sure. Okay all right well let's go for that then. The number one is stability. Keep the balance keep the balance. Yep. He had a dramatic decrease initially after the swim and since he's been up here shivering aggressively like this he's stabilized somewhat he's still coming down but oh this is definitely me and the curve. Yeah he went down he went way down he went way down to our baseline. Which is our worst case scenario with his body fully immersed. So this is probably our most accurate line for what our characters were supposed to have experienced and then he starts to inflect up and he kind of stabilizes up kind of halfway between our mid case and our best case. Yeah he's shivering quite aggressively that seemed to protect him and he was actually looks like almost on the upswing and he pulled up a little bit and he stabilized. He got into a place where if we projected that out he just might have made it until the lifeboat got there. But what's interesting is there's actually a precedent for it in the in the history. There was a Chinese passenger who was found drifting on a on a piece of wooden debris. We actually shot that scene. My assistant at the time was a guy named Van Ling and I said Van get in the water. So Van got out there and was yelling in Mandarin to be rescued. So and that's kind of what I based the whole Jack and Rose thing on. It's like okay if you get on a piece of wooden debris you can live longer. Final verdict Jack might have lived but there's a lot of variables. How much swell is there? How long does it take the boat to get there? In a well-lit experiment in a test pool we can't possibly simulate the terror the adrenaline all the things that would have worked against them. He couldn't have anticipated what we know today about hypothermia. He didn't get to run a bunch of different experiments to see what worked the best. Jack's survival might have come at the price of her life. You know there's a code of chivalry that men had in those days. Add to it his individual character. He's in love with her. A grand epic love which is self-sacrificial. I think his thought process was I'm not going to do one thing that jeopardizes her. There's x amount of buoyancy and I'm not going to take any of it. I'm not going to jeopardize her life and that's 100% in character. Now we are talking about a fictional story. I do want to remind people. So based on what I know today I would have made the raft smaller. So there's no doubt. What can it tell us about the Titanic sinking? Probably a lot. If people are still interested in Titanic and they want to see what we're doing here they might learn something about hypothermia. There might be one person out there in the that remembers what they see and it actually saves their life. Who knows? But if nothing else it gives you an appreciation of what those people went through. You know so from my perspective it's about preserving the history of Titanic. Understanding that it was a real event that took place and 1,500 people died and they died horribly and not the way people think.