TV - Movies
The Titanic Scene
James Cameron
Regrets Shooting
By TIM LAMMERS
THIS STORY CONTAINS DISCUSSIONS OF suicide.
Content Warning
To this day, writer-director James Cameron's "Titanic," the colossal tale of enduring love and tragedy aboard the RMS Titanic, remains one of the highest-grossing films of all time. However, there was one storyline concerning the tragic demise of one of the historical characters that Cameron would come to regret.
While it's not unusual for directors to regret certain scenes in their films, James Cameron was haunted by a particular scene involving the legacy of First Officer Murdoch. It happens in the third act as chaos erupts and passengers fend for a place on the lifeboats, Murdoch takes to extreme measures as he shoots a passenger and then dies by suicide in front of the crowd.
In an August 2016 interview with USA Today, James P. Delgado, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said there is no clear evidence of Murdoch taking his own life. He noted how eyewitness reports claim an officer did shoot himself on the ship, but the identity of that officer was never specified.
In the 2017 TV special, Cameron said he made a mistake by attributing the suicide to a person that actually existed rather than a generic officer. He explained he was thinking like a screenwriter and not as a historian, and he should have taken into account the feelings of his family members. "I think I wasn't as sensitive about the fact that his family, his survivors might feel offended by that, and they were.”