There are few movie deaths we’ve taken harder than Jack’s death from hypothermia in Titanic after he refused to climb onto the floating door with Rose, even though there was *clearly* enough room for two people.
However, it turns out that not everyone views Jack’s death as being as tragic as the rest of us do — namely, Titanic‘s director James Cameron. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair to discuss the film’s twentieth anniversary, the director offered up some answers to the age-old question of why Rose couldn’t just move over and make enough room to fit both she and Jack on the door. (Spoiler alert: his explanation is totally savage and heartbreaking.)
“The answer is very simple,” Cameron told Vanity Fair. “Because it says on page 147 [of the script] that Jack dies. Very simple.”
After referring to the size of the door “an artistic choice,” and saying it’s, “very silly” that we’re all still freaking out about this twenty years later (ouch), Cameron elaborated.
“The film is about death and separation; he had to die. So whether it was that, or whether a smoke stack fell on him, he was going down. It’s called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons.”
In case you were wondering, yes that is in fact the sound of my heart splitting in half. I think I’ll just stick to believing that Mythbusters episode that confirmed what we all know: there was definitely enough room for TWO people on that door.