Titanic director James Cameron revealed that after 33 dives to the ship's wreck, he calculated that he spent more time on it than its captain did during its maiden voyage in 1912. Cameron's Titanic was a massive success commercially and critically, winning 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Cameron, while also grossing a then-record $1.8 billion at the worldwide box office.
While discussing the recent Oceangate submersible disaster with ABC News, Cameron drew on his experiences diving 33 times to the Titanic's century-old wreck, which sits around 12,500 feet below the surface in international waters in the North Atlantic. Cameron discussed "the gold standard" that most other deep-sea submersibles exhibit when it comes to deep-sea safety measures and explained the process he went through in creating the submersible he took on his voyage to Challenger Deep, the deepest known point on Earth. Read his full quote below:
Well I've been down there many times, and I know the wreck site very well as does my friend Bob Ballard. I've made 33 dives, I've actually calculated that I've spent more time on the ship than the captain did back in the day. And of course, as a submersible designer myself, I designed and built a sub to go to the deepest place in the ocean, three times deeper than the Titanic, so I understand the engineering problems associated with building this type of vehicle and all the safety protocols that you have to go through. I think what Bob said is absolutely critical for people to really get the take-home message from this from our effort here is deep submergence diving is a mature art.
Breaking Down James Cameron's History With The Titanic
Cameron's fascination with deep-sea diving and shipwrecks began as a teenager when he wrote a short story called The Abyss about a deep-sea diving mission, which eventually became his movie of the same name in 1989. Filming for The Abyss took place largely underwater, which gave Cameron his first experiences with the intricacies of diving. He rediscovered his interest in the Titanic wreck, which he calls the "Mount Everest of shipwrecks," a few years later when Titanica, an IMAX film made from footage of the actual wreckage, was released in 1992.
Cameron then searched for Hollywood funding to pay for his own expedition down to the wreckage, itting that, at first, it was more for his own curiosity than to research for a movie. After diving towards the wreck a dozen times to shoot actual footage, which was used in the movie's opening sequence, Cameron realized the responsibility of telling a story about a real-life tragedy of this magnitude. The filmmaker placed extra emphasis on the story's authenticity, spending months researching the engers and crew to do their real-life counterparts justice.
His experience making Titanic served to accentuate his obsession with deep-sea diving. Since the movie's release in 1997, Cameron has executive produced a deep-sea thriller, 2011's Sanctum, while also appearing in or producing no less than six documentaries on various deep-sea subjects, such as underwater volcanoes and strange deep-sea life forms. In 2012, Cameron piloted the Deepsea Challenger vessel on the second-ever crewed dive to the Challenger Deep, the deepest point on Earth known. Those exploits were documented and subsequently turned into the 2014 documentary movie Deepsea Challenge 3D.
Source: ABC News
