Two decades after the Titanic sank on the big screen, director James Cameron is still defending one of Hollywood’s most heartbreaking movie deaths. After joking to Vanity Fair that Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) froze to death hanging off a wooden plank clearly big enough for him and Rose (Kate Winslet) happened “because it says on page 147 (of the script) that Jack dies,�? “I think it’s all kind of silly, really, that we’re having this discussion 20 years later. But it does show that the film was effective in making Jack so endearing to the audience that it hurts them to see him die. Had he lived, the ending of the film would have been meaningless,�? ‘Titanic’ returns to theaters for 20th anniversary 
 
 "Titanic" characters based on real people 
 
 “The film is about death and separation; he had to die.�? It’s called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons. "MythBusters," however, hasn’t taken Cameron’s frequent defense of Jack’s death well, devoting an entire 2012 episode to proving that the lovebirds could both have fit on the door and survived the frigid water. Therefore, I thought, hey, let’s make a movie about that.
– As the New York Daily News notes, the show Mythbusters once devoted an episode to proving that both Jack and Rose could have survived on that floating door near the end of Titanic. So why did Leo DiCaprio's character have to die? "The answer is very simple because it says on page 147 [of the script] that Jack dies," James Cameron tells Vanity Fair in a wide-ranging Q&A. "Very simple." The director think it's "silly" the topic still comes up 20 years after the film's release. It was an "artistic choice," says Cameron. "Had he lived, the ending of the film would have been meaningless," he explains. "The film is about death and separation; he had to die." Cameron adds that he thinks the door was, in fact, big enough only for Kate Winslet's character. But if even that weren't the case, Jack was still going to die. "It’s called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons." (Cameron's recent criticism of the Wonder Woman movie didn't go over well.)