Titanic continues to be an impressive cinematic achievement and a story that audiences won’t forget, and while it’s based on true events, its main characters are fictional – but why did James Cameron decide to use fake characters? James Cameron has become one of the most respected filmmakers in the industry thanks to his movies exploring different genres and for his achievements through them, with the most notable example being Avatar. But many years before Avatar arrived, another of his projects marked a milestone in the film industry: Titanic.
Titanic is a romance-disaster movie based on the accounts of the RMS Titanic and 1912, but the story of its main characters is fictional. Titanic follows the romance of Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), two passengers from different social classes who fall in love aboard the title ship during its ill-fated maiden voyage. The story is told by old Rose, many years after the sinking of the Titanic, and it takes viewers back to 1912 to witness her intense romance with Jack. Although the movie is based on a real-life tragedy, the main characters are fictional, though one was inspired by a real person who didn’t have connections to the event.
James Cameron was inspired by artist Beatrice Wood, who influenced the portrayal of older Rose, but unlike the character, Wood wasn’t on board the Titanic. Jack Dawson, on the other hand, is entirely fictional, though there was a passenger who signed as “J. Dawson”, but the “J” stood for Joseph, and he was part of the ship’s crew, but Cameron didn’t know there was a J. Dawson on board the Titanic until after the script was finished. With Titanic being based on a real-life event, and even with footage of the real wreck shown throughout the movie, many viewers have wondered why Cameron decided to use fictional characters instead of real ones, and while he hasn’t explained this particular decision, it was most likely out of respect.
Cameron has shared that, during one of his expeditions to visit the wreck, he and the crew realized they wanted to live up to that level of reality but also understood that this “wasn’t just a story, it wasn’t just a drama”, and it was “an event that happened to real people who really died”. He added that he felt the responsibility to “convey the emotional message of it” and he wanted to honor the victims, which led him to intense research on the Titanic’s crew and passengers. Cameron did add historical characters to Titanic, though, but not in the main roles. Among the most notable ones are Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), the ship’s builder Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber), chief baker Charles Joughin (Lian Tuohy), and Isador and Ida Straus (Lew Palter and Elsa Raven), the elderly couple seen lying on their bed embracing each other as water filled their room.
Whether James Cameron truly managed to honor the victims of the Titanic with his movie or not is up to every viewer, but what’s true is that, by following a fictional romance, he immersed the audience in a double tragedy: that of the sinking of the ship and the end of the relationship between Jack and Rose, while also giving them a sense of loss with Jack’s death. Had Cameron decided to use the names, stories, and more of real passengers for the protagonists of Titanic, he would have risked getting a lot of backlash for exploiting a tragedy and would have been very difficult to honor the victims as he wanted, so going for fake characters was definitely the best decision.
