How Neil deGrasse Tyson changed James Cameron’s ‘Titanic’
By and large, blockbuster movies aren’t made with scientific accuracy at the forefront of the creative team’s thinking, which, by extension, has turned Neil deGrasse Tyson into something of a notable buzzkill when he decides to weigh in with his expertise.
Perhaps it would be for the best if such a famed astrophysicist were to avoid Hollywood’s repeated forays into sci-fi entirely, but that’s never been deGrasse Tyson’s thing. Instead, he’s regularly weighed in with criticisms of events depicted on-screen, the majority of which casual audiences either wouldn’t notice or were willing to forego in the name of entertainment.
Sometimes he does it for fun, like when he used the Moon’s orientation to determine that Greta Gerwig’s depiction of Barbieland would geographically be located somewhere in Florida, but nobody needed him to weigh in and call Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall the most scientifically-inaccurate movie in existence when that was abundantly clear going in, while his nit-picking of The Martian and Gravity among others felt like somebody making a point of sucking the fun out of two massively entertaining cosmic epics.
However, when it came to Titanic, James Cameron welcomed deGrasse Tyson’s pedantry to the extent he made alterations to his seafaring disaster story 15 years after its release. The director has famously spent more time aboard the titular vessel than its crew ever did during multiple expeditions, meaning he couldn’t stand for his painstaking recreation to be even the slightest bit inaccurate.
“Neil deGrasse Tyson sent me quite a snarky email saying that, at that time of year, in that position in the Atlantic in 1912, when Rose is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen,” he said to Discovery. “And with my reputation as a perfectionist, I should have known that and I should have put the right star field in. So I said ‘All right, send me the right stars for that exact time and I’ll put it in the movie’.”
As a result, the 15th-anniversary re-release of Titanic was digitally altered to ensure Kate Winslet’s Rose was looking at the exact field of stars that would have been occupying the night sky at the time the ship was sailing its plotted course, all driven by his inability to let deGrasse Tyson’s “snarky” communications go unanswered.
Again, it’s the sort of thing that 99% of the people who propelled Titanic to record-breaking heights at the box office and have rewatched it multiple times since then would never have even noticed, but Cameron’s meticulous nature meant it was something he simply couldn’t abide, spurring him into action and adding the tiniest amount of additional accuracy to his doomed romance.
