“Did I Really Get It Right?”: James Cameron Is Going Back To ‘Titanic’ 20 Years On

It’s been 20 years since James Cameron’s Academy Award-winning blockbuster Titanic! 20 years since Jack Dawson met and fell in love with Rose DeWitt Bukater on the ship of dreams! 20 years since Rose cruelly left Jack to freeze to death in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Two decades of rabid arguments and internet theorising over the shape and size of doors from fictional retellings of a disaster from the turn of the 20th century! Fandom is weird, hey.

To commemorate this anniversary, Cameron has just announced he’ll be returning to the story in the form of a one-hour documentary with National Geographic. “I was creating a living history; I had to get it right out of respect for the many who died and for their legacy,” Cameron said in a statement this morning. “But did I really get it right?”

Before anyone starts: sorry, he’s not talking about the door scene.

The new doco will see Cameron teaming up with a team of experts to see what more can be discovered about the 1912 disaster (and its representation in the iconic 1997 film) with the help of new technologies. They will be heading back down to the wreck to explore, creating more accurate CGI simulations, and analysing the veracity of scenes from the film to see how they hold up with current knowledge.

“When I wrote the film, and when I set out to direct it, I wanted every detail to be as accurate as I could make it, and every harrowing moment of the ship’s final hours accounted for,” Cameron said. “Now, with National Geographic and with the latest research, science and technology, I’m going to reassess.”

This has been a long-running concern for the director. In fact… he’s kind of done this documentary already. Back in 2003, he released Ghosts of the Abyss: a feature film about him and Bill Paxton re-examining the wreck with a team of experts. (Yeah, it’s pretty much Titanic if the old lady never rocked up.)

Of course, 14 years have now passed since that film was released and technology has undoubtedly advanced since then. Unfortunately Cameron’s long-time friend Bill Paxton has also passed away, so James Cameron will be carrying the legacy on his own from now on.

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The new documentary will be on National Geographic December 2017.