EVA HART: And I so clearly remember my mother saying to my father, oh, this is the ship they say is unsinkable. My father said, no, this is the ship that is unsinkable. My mother said, well, that is flying in the face of God. And that ship would never get there. And right up to us boarding the ship on the day of sailing, my mother begged my father not to go.
But the Harts did sail. Along with over 2000 other passengers on the Titanic's maiden voyage. It seemed the days of luxury cruising had finally arrived. To most of the people on board, the Titanic was a sumptuous, unsinkable palace. But just 36 hours from New York, the ship's hull was ripped open by an iceberg and the Titanic was doomed.
My mother, who was very nervous about the whole voyage, didn't go to bed at night. And so she was wide awake and fully dressed. And the moment the impact came, she wakened my father and myself. And so we were able to get up on deck in time to get into the lifeboats.
700 people were saved, but more than twice that number lost their lives when the Titanic finally sank
“Action”.
This is the latest version of the Titanic story. S.O.S. Titanic at $5.5 million. This mammoth production purports to give an accurate account of what really happened. The film has a predominantly British cast, including Ian Holm, Helen Mirren and Harry Andrews, but its director is American.
WILLIAM HALE: And we're trying to show sort of the upstairs, downstairs nature of the way this boat was run. We're going with some of the stewards and stewardesses and different first class people, and this sort of a just across mixture of different characters. We have 120 actors, in this and so they range all the way from steerage up to the multi multi-millionaires.
HELEN MIRREN: I think the side of it that I never realized before was that there were, a large number of third and second class passengers who were locked below, you know, below decks, just in order that they shouldn't come up and take the lifeboats that the first class passengers were taking. And that side of the story is brought up very much in this film.
WILLIAM HALE: I mean, if you look at the statistics, they're incredible. Most of the first class people were saved. Some third class women were saved, but, an awful lot of third class women went down with the ship, and, there was just no plan for anything like this. I mean, the the people who built the ship were so super confident they had no.., they never had lifeboat drills. I mean, they just just left it to their own security.
“All right.” “Background action.”
In this scene being shot. One man takes a seat in the lifeboats reserved for the women and children. He's the owner of the Titanic, J. Bruce Ismay, played here by Ian Holm. This act of cowardice was never to be forgotten, and it left him a broken man. Eva Hart was just seven years old when she sat with her mother in one of the last lifeboats, and even now, under the artificial glare of the studio lights, it all seems uncannily real.
EVA HART: When the whole thing is finished and undoubtedly on the screen will be a large ship gradually sinking nose first that I cannot look at and don't want to. I never looked at pictures of sinking ships. It has a terrible effect on me if I do. I'm convinced that as long as this world lasts, it will be this avid interest in the Titanic because it is the one major disaster. that has ever taken a place in this world for which there was no excuse for one life being lost? The Titanic took 2.5 hours to sink. The sea was calm. If there had been enough lifeboats, no one would have died. And I'm sure that the world reads about this, realizes it, and will always look upon it as the most dreadful, disaster and dreadful waste of life that ever took place.