Titanic turns 25: Kate Winslet settles fan question once and for all

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett in the movie Titanic. Photo / Supplied

This week is the 25th anniversary of Titanic, that epic romance-tragedy which spawned one hell of an earworm from Celine Dion, an unforgettable meme before there were memes and one inescapable question.

It’s the question that will haunt everyone until the end of time, or at least another 25 years when we gong in Titanic’s 50th anniversary.

It’s a question that’s been so debated that Kate Winslet is sick of it – but that didn’t stop her from weighing in.

It’s that damned door. The floating piece of wood which saved Rose but not Jack, whose frozen body sunk into the Atlantic. The door was so generous, so many fans have cried, surely he would’ve fit too, they added.

Rose and Jack deserved a chance to be happy together – or at least until the string of global catastrophes that followed the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. You know, World War I, The Great Depression and World War II.

OK, so they at least deserved a chance to see if Jack could dodge conscription or make it back from the front alive.

Asked on the Happy Sad Confused podcast during the promotional trail for Avatar: The Way of Water, her reunion with Titanic director James Cameron, Winslet started with saying, “You just have to make a joke of it, don’t you? I don’t f**king know, that’s the answer, I don’t f**king know.”

But she then must’ve thought about it some more because her deductive reasoning side took over.

Winslet said she has a “greater understanding of water and how it behaves than most” after filming Avatar: The Way of Water, where she held the set record for holding her breath – seven minutes. And she’s an avid swimmer, surfer, kite-surfer, wind-surfer, scuba-diver and, perhaps most relevantly, paddle-boarder.

“If you put two adults on a stand-up paddleboard, it becomes immediately extremely unstable. That is for sure. If you put two adults and, say, a 7-year-old on a paddleboard, you can’t do anything. You’ll be tipping, you’ll be falling in the water.

“I have to be honest. I actually don’t believe that we would have survived if we had both gotten on that door. I think that he could’ve fit, but it would have tipped, and it would not have been a sustainable idea.

“So you heard it here for the first time: Yes, he could have fit on that door, but it would not have stayed afloat.”

Winslet’s reasoning is sound, and it will be backed up, according to Cameron, by scientists who will prove in a special that Jack had to die.

Cameron told the Toronto Sun, “We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie and we’re going to do a little special on it that comes out in February.

“We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them, and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they would have survived.

“[Jack] needed to die. It’s like Romeo and Juliet. It’s a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality. Maybe after 25 years, I won’t have to deal with this anymore.”

Titanic opened this week 25 years ago, and went on to win 11 Oscars including Best Picture. It grossed US$2.2 billion and was in the number one spot until it was overtaken by another Cameron film, Avatar. It currently sits in third, half a billion behind Avengers: Endgame.