When submarines meet the Titanic, James Cameron is an inspiration
James Cameron, the Academy Award-winning film director behind “Titanic,” knows the risks of deep ocean exploration. A seasoned underwater explorer himself, in 2012 he prepared to descend nearly seven miles into the world’s deepest known ocean trench.
“You’re going to one of the most brutal places on Earth,” he said said in an interview with The New York Times shortly before departure: “It’s not like you can call AAA to come get you.”
Still, he wanted to take the risk. Seeing things that “people have never seen before,” he said that year in another conversation, was more exciting than filmmaking. “Forget about red carpets and all that glitzy stuff,” he added.
This week, in the days since a submarine with five people disappeared during an expedition to see the remains of the Titanic, many movie fans have been waiting for Cameron to give his take on the situation.
Cameron’s 1997 film ‘Titanic’, which grossed more than $2 billion at the box office one of the highest-grossing films of all time, revived interest in the story of the ill-fated luxury liner, fueling the mystique that drives some wealthy veteran pursuers to go miles underwater to see the wreck. Cameron has made dozens of visits to that spot in the North Atlanticand knows the terrain well.
This week, Cameron’s representatives did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment.
But in previous interviews, Cameron has revealed many of the psychological factors that drive explorers to visit shipwrecks despite the risks, as well as explaining why adventurers feel the need to see the ruins of the Titanic with their own eyes.
“I like shipwrecks,” he said in one documentary released with a DVD edition of “Titanic”, and RMS Titanic was “the ultimate wreck”.
Cameron has said that as a boy he became obsessed with going deep under the sea. “I can think of no greater fantasy than to be an explorer and see what no human eye has seen before,” he said said in a 2011 Times interview.
In 1988, while making “The abyss”, about a drowned nuclear submarine, Cameron learned to operate a remote-controlled submarine. Then in 1995, before he had even written the “Titanic” script, he visited the shipwreck to film it for that movie.
Cameron captured the footage by going underwater in Russian-owned submarines. His brother, Michael, a mechanical engineer, built a special housing for a 35-millimeter film camera so that it could withstand the water pressure two and a half miles below sea level.
In the years since, the director has repeated that journey to the wreck of the Titanic and has become a major figure in the field of deep-sea exploration. “I’ve owned and operated my own submarines and know pretty much everyone in the deep-sea world outside of the oil business,” he told The Times in 2010. That year, he assembled a panel of underwater technology experts. to advise the Obama administration about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Cameron also directed the documentary features “Deep Sea Challenge 3D,” about a 2012 journey to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Western Pacific, and “Aliens of the Deep,” an exploration of the strange underwater creatures that live in the depths of the ocean.
In February, he released ‘Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron’, a documentary streaming on Huluwhich attempts to answer some of the hottest fan questions about the film, including whether characters Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) could have survived by climbing onto a wooden door that plunges into the ocean in a key scene floats .
Such thought experiments are worthwhile, Cameron says in the documentary. “If nothing else, it gives you an appreciation for what those people went through,” he said.