James Cameron’s Titanic is based on a real-life tragedy, and while its main story is fictional, it features characters based on real-life passengers of the ship and other historically accurate details, including how long it took for the Titanic to sink, and it added this in a very subtle way. James Cameron’s name has become synonymous with big-budget productions and emotionally charged stories, and one of his most successful projects is the 1997 disaster drama Titanic, the most expensive movie ever made at the time and the highest-grossing movie of all time for many years.
Based on the real-life tragedy of the RMS Titanic in 1912, Cameron’s Titanic tells the story of two passengers from opposite social classes: Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), a wealthy woman traveling with her fiancé, Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), and her mother, Ruth (Frances Fisher), and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a third-class passenger who won his ticket on a very “lucky” hand of poker minutes before the ship sailed. Over the course of four days, Rose and Jack met, got to know each other, and fell in love, but their romance ended in tragedy as Jack froze to death after the Titanic sank, while Rose was eventually rescued.
The story of Jack and Rose is fictional, but there are many elements in Titanic taken from the real-life tragedy of the ship, such as some characters like Molly Brown (Kathy Bates), J. Bruce Ismay (Jonathan Hyde), and Captain Edward John Smith (Bernard Hill), and, of course, the events that led to the sinking of the ship. Cameron showed the Titanic hitting the iceberg and the way the ship began to sink, including how it split into two parts, but he also featured how long it took for it to sink in a subtle way: all the scenes set in the ship are two hours and 40 minutes long, which is how long it took for the Titanic to go down.
Titanic has been criticized for its length, as it has a running time of 3 hours and 15 minutes, but when taking out all scenes set in the modern-day and the credits, the movie is two hours and 40 minutes long. The Titanic is said to have taken approximately two hours and 40 minutes to sink, and Cameron’s precision to tell Jack and Rose’s story from beginning to end in that exact amount of time is definitely remarkable. CBC also pointed out that the Titanic’s collision with the iceberg reportedly lasted 37 seconds, which is the same length as the collision in the movie. The Titanic hit the iceberg on April 14, 1912, at 11:40 pm, and its rate of sinking increased between 2:10 and 2:15 am, and it foundered at 2:20 pm on April 15, 1912. At around 4 am, the RMS Carpathia arrived on the scene in response to the Titanic’s earlier distress calls, and about 710 passengers were conveyed by the Carpathia to New York.
James Cameron’s attention to detail in his movies is outstanding, and Titanic obviously isn’t the exception. Although the movie is mostly fiction as its main story is all about characters from Cameron’s imagination, he also added many historically accurate details to Titanic, some very obvious and well-known ones, and others more subtle that ultimately made the story’s emotional charge more intense, like the very precise length of the scenes in the ship and the collision with the iceberg.
