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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.
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.