Ever since Titanic became one of the biggest movies in history in 1997, fans have speculated about whether Jack could have fit on the door during the film’s climactic sequence. In that sequence, Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Jack freezes to death in the icy Atlantic, while Kate Winslet’s Rose survives because she is laying on a floating door.
While that debate may never end, Winslet added a new wrinkle to it during a recent interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. Winslet explained that filming that sequence was awkward because the actors were pretending to be in the middle of the ocean when they were really in a relatively shallow water tank.
“That was quite an awkward tank, that one, because — to burst a bubble, it was waist-height, that tank,” the actress explained. “Leo is, I’m afraid, kneeling down on the bottom of the tank.”
Winslet added that, because the tank was fairly easy to get in and out of, she often took bathroom breaks during the shoot. “I was regularly like, ‘Can I just go for a pee?’” the Lee actress said. “And then I’d get up, get off the door, walk to the edge of the tank that was 20 feet away, and I’d literally have to fling my leg over and climb out of the tank and go for a pee, and then come back and crawl back on the door again. I know, it’s terrible to admit these things.”
The water in the tank was constantly being recirculated, and Winslet said that that led to major audio issues and ultimately forced the cast to re-record their dialogue.
“Which, let me tell you, everybody, means that the last 22 minutes of that movie are entirely looped. Everything… completely looped the whole thing. I promise you, because you could hear this water noise the whole time,” she explained.
Winslet also expressed some minor fears about revealing so much about the film and said that she missed multiple opportunities to see it after it first premiered. While we may never know whether Jack could have survived, now we know that Leo wasn’t actually doing much kicking while filming that crucial sequence.
Titanic is streaming on Paramount+.
