The director of ‘Terminator’ points out that he thought as a screenwriter and not as a historian when he made that decision
James Cameron He made one of the most popular films in history with ‘Titanic’. The controversy surrounding the fact that the character of Leonardo Dicaprio He should not have died, something that he himself ended up recognizing, but there is another that did not make so much noise that it led the director of ‘Avatar 3’ to admit that he had made a mistake and that he had not handled the issue with enough delicacy.
“That made him an interesting character.”
As you well know, many characters that appear in ‘Titanic’ are based on real people, and that was where Cameron found himself in serious trouble when he decided to take certain liberties with Murdoch, the ship’s first officer. The filmmaker himself spoke about it in the documentary ‘Titanic: 20 years later with James Cameron’:
I took the liberty of showing him shooting someone and then shooting himself. He is a named character; he was not a generic officer. We don’t know if he did that, but, you know, the narrator in me goes, ‘Oh.’ He started connecting the dots. He was on duty. He carried all this burden on him…. That made him an interesting character.
The problem is that Cameron was not aware that telling something like that about a real person was going to have its repercussions, since he introduced that into the film as a screenwriter and not as a historian:
I don’t think I was sensitive to the fact that his family, his survivors, could be offended by it, and they were.
The thing is that There is no evidence that Murdoch did that. and took his own life, although some witnesses did affirm that an officer chose to take his own life on the ship, but his identity was never known. Of course, historians tend to agree that Murdoch did everything he could to help passengers reach the lifeboats.
Besides, Cameron also apologized in the extras of the home edition of ‘Titanic’noting that his way of portraying Murdoch wanted to be that of “an honorable man“and not that of”a cowardly murderer or a man who turns evil“The truth is that he didn’t get it.
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