How To Survive The Real-Life Titanic Sinking, Explained By James Cameron

If you thought James Cameron's life's work peaked with his "Avatar" franchise, I'm afraid you're solely mistaken. While we absolutely should continue to root for more sequels to come following the (predictable) box office success of "Avatar: Fire & Ash," there's another reason to do so beyond simply wanting to spend more time in Pandora. As long as he keeps making these movies, Cameron will be forced to go on extended press tours around the globe. And if he's going to have microphones thrust in front of his face at every possible moment, he's bound to deliver some of the most fascinating quotes of any working filmmaker around. That's precisely what he's done now and, well, let's just say this is what the James Cameron Experience™ has been building towards all along.

Of his many legendary contributions to film over the decades, few would dare dispute the staying power of Cameron's "Titanic.". The epic 1997 historical romance has lingered in our public consciousness thanks to its sheer storytelling prowess, the real-life tragedy at the center of the action, and the most debated moment in cinema history involving a door. But here's a much broader question that we've been overlooking all along: What would've been the optimal way to survive the sinking in the first place?

Luckily, The Hollywood Reporter brought this up directly with Cameron himself:

"I think there were interesting ways to what-if or second-guess the whole thing. One I like to play with my Titanic experts is [...] how could you save everybody? The other is: What if you're a time traveler, you go back and want to experience the sinking, and your little time-travel thing that gets you back fails, and you're like, 'Oh f***, I'm really on the ship, I've got to get off it."

Is anyone remotely surprised that the man who nearly killed himself (and his cast) filming "The Abyss," waited literal decades for technology to catch up to his sky-high ambitions for Pandora, and explored the wreck of the real-life Titanic would conduct thought experiments with actual experts over how best to survive the 1912 disaster? Of course he would. That's just what separates James freaking Cameron from the rest of us mere mortals.

That's probably why THR decided to provide the filmmaker with a very specific set of conditions: Imagine he was a second-class passenger on the Titanic (since first-class civilians received preferential treatment and third-class ones were basically left to fend for themselves), traveling alone (thus unencumbered by responsibilities to save a wife and/or child first), and somehow knew ahead of time that the "unsinkable" ship was doomed to do exactly that (which most on board refused to believe until it was too late). What would be the best course of action to save his skin? As it turns out, it's surprisingly simple ... provided you're familiar with basic human psychology, that is:

"If you knew for sure [the Titanic] was going to sink and you weren't on a lifeboat, you jump in the water next to the boat the second it casts off. Once they rowed away, you were screwed. [But] are they going to let you drown when Titanic is still there and everybody [still on board] is watching? No, they'd pull you in, and the officers would go, 'Well, f***, there's nothing I can do about that.' Boat four would be a good one for this."

There you have it, folks. The answer is peer pressure. Go forth and use this information wisely.

If anyone was looking for an anecdote that best exemplifies what puts James Cameron a cut above the vast majority of other storytellers, this is it. Plenty of directors are good at the technical side of things. Even more are adept at getting audiences swept up in the emotion of it all. But only a rarified few can meld both those aspects together into something that feels utterly human. And a large part of that, naturally, has to do with truly understanding what makes us tick.

While the actual narrative of "Titanic" itself is concerned mainly with the doomed "Romeo & Juliet"-inspired romance at its heart, you can bet that these sorts of logical puzzles were never far from the director's mind. How else would he breathe life into such a shamelessly arrogant villain like Billy Zane's Cal Hockley (who, lest we forget, merely hopped aboard an empty lifeboat at his earliest convenience), or so brilliantly capture the mix of arrogance and denial in Bruce Ismay's (Jonathan Hyde) protests that not even God could sink the Titanic? Even in a hypothetical exercise, there's a certain sense of wisdom in knowing that the otherwise uncaring officers on board various lifeboats would have no interest in saving passengers freezing to death in the icy Atlantic waters – except if hundreds of passengers were still watching their every move from the railing of the ship.

While the "Avatar" movies may bounce off many types of moviegoers, there's no denying that Cameron's grasp of the human condition helped make so many of his directing efforts hit as hard as they do. Maybe just don't ask him about "Alien 3." 

"Avatar: Fire & Ash" is currently playing in theaters.