History influenced Titanic

The ship, the voyage and the night are documented to the hour, and the film is built on that timeline. From the record: the maiden voyage, the iceberg at 11:40pm on 14 April 1912, the two hours and forty minutes, lifeboats for roughly half the people aboard and several launched half full, the class barriers below decks, the band, Captain Smith, Ismay leaving in a boat, and the Californian close enough to see the rockets. Cameron dived to the wreck repeatedly before and during production and reconstructed the interiors from the builder's plans. Jack and Rose are invented; the ship around them is not, and the film's method is to put a fiction inside a reconstruction accurate enough to argue with.