Me Before You Director Responds To Criticism Over The Movie’s Ending

The highly anticipated romance movie Me Before You came out Friday, and people have been talking about it all weekend. The film was perhaps best known for starring The Hunger Games' Sam Claflin and Game of Thrones' Emilia Clarke, but the topic that's received the most attention since the film's release is the ending. The plot (spoiler alert) centers on a paralyzed man who falls in love with his caretaker, and the ending is a tear-jerker: He decides to end his life at an assisted-suicide facility because he doesn't want to go on bound to his wheelchair. Disability-rights advocates have pointed out that this ending — and many similar ones we see in movies — implies that life with a disability is not worth living. In an Entertainment Weekly interview published Sunday, the film's director Thea Sharrock responded to the public outcry surrounding the film, arguing that it had to stay true to the Jojo Moyes novel from which it is adapted. “Can you imagine...we would be saying, ‘It’s exactly like the book. It’s just we have this whole new [take] on the ending'?” she said. She also said the choice made for a better movie. "This is a brave ending. It’s too easy to do it the other way," she said. "We could all tell that story tomorrow. But this way…this is the more interesting way." Changing the ending of a book for the film version isn't unheard of, though. A number of famous films, including Jurassic Park and Breakfast at Tiffany's, had different endings than the books on which they were based. Still, Sharrock did bring up an interesting point in an interview Tuesday with EW Radio: “The controversy has been much more so then what Jojo ever got for the book... And I guess that says a lot about movies and how out there they are in comparison to books.”