- Narrator: Mrs. Johanna Stunke, a first class passenger on the North German Lloyd liner Bremen, sailed past a fateful iceberg on April 20th, one week after the disaster.
- Johanna Stunke: "It was between 4 and 5 o'clock on Saturday when our ship sighted off the bow to the starboard, an iceberg. As we drew nearer, and could make out small dots floating around in the sea, a feeling of awe and sadness crept over everyone and the ship proceeded in absolute silence. Looking down over the rail we distinctly saw a number of bodies so clearly that we could make out what they were wearing and whether they were men or women. We saw one woman in her night dress, with a baby clasped closely to her breast. Several of the women passengers screamed and left the rail in a fainting condition. There was another woman, fully dressed, with her arms tight around the body of a shaggy dog that looked like a St. Bernard. The bodies of three men in a group, all clinging to one steamer chair, floated close by, and just beyond them were a dozen bodies of men, all of them encased in life-preservers, clinging together as though in a last desperate struggle for life. Those were the only bodies we passed near enough to distinguish but we could see the white life preservers of many more dotting the sea, all the way to the iceberg." -Bremen First Class Passenger Johanna Stunke.
- James Cameron: The Titanic disaster was like a great novel, written for us by history. The most amazing thing about the ship is the complexity of her story. Of how thoroughly she illustrated the world into which she was born. Technology was moving rapidly ahead, void by a feeling of blind optimism. I set out to make a film that would truly capture not only the sinking, but the way Titanic looked beforehand, when she really was the Ship of Dreams. Touching down on her deck in that little Mir submersible, two and a half miles under the sea, was like time travel, like space travel, like visiting a legendary, but isolated shrine. All the different viewpoints about Titanic's sinking, all the unanswered questions have their roots in the wreck that lies broken and rusting away down there. The more we know about Titanic, the more compelling her story becomes.
- James Cameron: [closing lines] There have been many shipwrecks, but there was only one Titanic. The details of her sinking have fascinated a few generations of scholars. The courage and cowardice of individuals and sheer size of the tragedy became legends for the Twentieth Century. Hindsight lets us look back to analyzing blame, but when we ask who should have seen the ice warnings and how many lifeboats there should have been, we lose sight of a larger, more timeless lesson. From the shipbuilders to the White Star officials, from the men shoveling coal to the most privileged passengers, everyone was participating in a consensus reality built on sand. The world simply did not operate in the ways they had been led to believe. Our society is probably working under some popular myths of its own right now. People see this in Titanic's story, they understand that it was more than a big ship filled with famous passengers; they see hubris and tragedy that echoes the Ancient Greeks. The Titans challenged the Gods and the Gods struck them down, banishing them to the blackest depths. People also see examples of heroism and sacrifice that resonate to the core of everything we feel about human nature. In the end, Titanic is not just the story of a ship that sank, but the story of those who lived on afterward, whether physically or in spirit.