Director James Cameron has spoken out about the Titan submersible tragedy.
The Titanic film-maker appeared on ABC News after today’s announcement that the crew are believed to have died in a “catastrophic implosion”. The five men were in a remotely operated vehicle to tour the wreckage of the Titanic two miles beneath the ocean’s surface.
“Many people in the community were very concerned about this sub,” Cameron said in an on-air interview. “A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified and so on. I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result. For us, a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.”
He went on to call the death of Paul-Henri Nargeolet “impossible for me to process”. The 77-year-old submersible dive pilot, whom Cameron calls a friend, was onboard alongside businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman as well as Stockton Rush, co-founder of OceanGate, the company that operated the lost sub.
In a statement released on Twitter, the company referred to the men as “true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure”. The news follows a four-day search for the sub after it went missing less than two hours into its planned trip to the wreck.
Cameron has made 33 dives himself to the wreck, having made not only the Oscar-winning 1997 film but also the documentary Ghosts of the Abyss. He claims to have spent “more time on the ship than the captain did back in the day”.
The Titanic disaster occurred on its maiden voyage in 1912, sinking after hitting an iceberg. Cameron’s film about the tragedy, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, won 11 Oscars and made over $2bn at the global box office.
