Rose let go, but ever since Titanic came out, the rest of the world has not. In an interview with the Daily Beast, Titanic director James Cameron was confronted with the age-old question of whether Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack could’ve climbed up next to Kate Winslet’s Rose on that floating board and therefore survived at the end of Titanic. Cameron had confronted this question before on an episode of Mythbusters, which concluded that Jack could’ve placed his life preserver under the raft to add buoyancy, and when the Beast asks him about it again, he is having none of it:
[Laughs] We’re gonna go there? Look, it’s very, very simple: you read page 147 of the script and it says, “Jack gets off the board and gives his place to her so that she can survive.†It’s that simple. You can do all the post-analysis you want. So you’re talking about the Mythbusters episode, right? Where they sort of pop the myth? OK, so let’s really play that out: you’re Jack, you’re in water that’s 28 degrees, your brain is starting to get hypothermia. Mythbusters asks you to now go take off your life vest, take hers off, swim underneath this thing, attach it in some way that it won’t just wash out two minutes later—which means you’re underwater tying this thing on in 28-degree water, and that’s going to take you five to ten minutes, so by the time you come back up you’re already dead. So that wouldn’t work. His best choice was to keep his upper body out of the water and hope to get pulled out by a boat or something before he died. They’re fun guys and I loved doing that show with them, but they’re full of shit.
James Cameron also has a 72-slide PowerPoint ready for when you tell him “unobtainium†was a dumb name for that rare mineral in Avatar.