If blockbuster director and diver James Cameron has learned anything from his underwater adventures, it’s that his most popular film, “Titanic,” is full of little mistakes and errors.
Since filming the major movie about the ship in 1997, Cameron has traveled to the wreck site of the real Titanic numerous times in deep-sea submersibles and has become something of an expert underwater explorer. Cameron’s exploration of the wreck site has helped to better understand what happened on that fateful April night in 1912, but it also proved to the director that he got many small details about the look and feel of the ship wrong.
“We found places where the set didn’t work well… a little bit,” Cameron told ABC’s “Nightline.” “This didn’t work well, that didn’t work well. There was a glass missing from a door or something like that.”
As they say, hindsight is everything. If there’s one lesson to be learned from Cameron, it’s that having access to a deep-sea submersible actually helps improve the film’s accuracy.
Maybe it’s those little details that get lost when you’re as busy as Cameron is. In addition to diving to the deepest point on Earth this week and remastering “Titanic” in 3-D, Cameron has helped put together a documentary for National Geographic called “Titanic: The Final Word,” to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking.
The director assembled a team of experts to closely examine how the massive ship sank. What did they discover? Computer simulations told Cameron’s team that the Titanic did not sink exactly as depicted in the film.
Ever the perfectionist, Cameron admitted that he was tempted to correct some of these minor inaccuracies in the 3-D re-release of “Titanic,” but decided against it for fear that his obsession would get the better of him. (Was that a warning to notorious “Star Wars” tinkerer George Lucas?)
Given Cameron’s experience in the fields of filmmaking and shipwrecks, the director can certainly be forgiven for taking some artistic license. And in the grand scheme of things, what’s a trifle like getting a door wrong when you’re a successful multi-millionaire explorer like Cameron?
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