Titanic director explains why Jack didn’t ‘get on the door’ to save himself at the end of the film

Film fans have always wondered.

How do Bruce Banner's trousers stay on after he morphs into The Hulk? What's actually in the Pulp Fiction suitcase? How did The Joker get those scars in The Dark Knight? They're just some of the mysteries that have riddled film fans for years but in terms of climactic endings, Titanic has one of the most puzzling finales of all and it revolves around one question, could Jack have climbed onto the door and saved himself? Mythbusters previously had a segment where they examined the buoyancy and capability of that piece of debris to support the weight of Jack and Rose, but in a recent Q&A session, James Cameron was asked that very question and his answer is very logical. “Had he lived, the ending of the film would have been meaningless,” he said in a recent Vanity Fair interview. “The film is about death and separation; he had to die.” Ok, that's logical in a narrative sense, but what about the physics? In January, the director of Aliens and True Lies said that the Mythbusters crew were “full of s**t” for their scientific determination that the door could have supported the weight of both Jack and Rose. Cameron added, “The answer is very simple because it says on page 147 [of the script] that Jack dies. Very simple. … Obviously, it was an artistic choice, the thing was just big enough to hold her, and not big enough to hold him … 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.” Ok, Mr Cameron. But what about a sequel to True Lies? That's the question that needs answering.