James Cameron compares OceanGate implosion to Titanic shipwreck

“Titanic” director James Cameron spoke out during an ABC News interview about the tourist submersible Titan that lost contact on its way to reach the wreck of the famous passenger liner.

After submarine company OceanGate released a statement on Thursday saying that the five people who went down are believed dead, Cameron gave his thoughts on the tragedy as a longtime member of the diving community, who has made 33 trips to the Titanic himself.

“People in the community were very concerned about this sub,” Cameron said. “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. 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, it’s 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.”

In 2018, the Manned Underwater Vehicles committee of the Marine Technology Society wrote to OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush warning him of their “unanimous concern” about Titan’s development, according to a letter obtained by the New York Times.

Cameron also spoke about how he had known Titanic explorer Paul-Henri “PH” Nargeolet for 25 years and was mourning the death of his friend, who was on Titan.

“PH, the French legendary submersible dive pilot was a friend of mine,” Cameron said. “You know, it’s a very small community. I’ve known PH for 25 years, and for him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process.”

International search teams from the U.S., Canada, France and the U.K. joined efforts this week in an attempt to locate and rescue the craft. A breakthrough came on Tuesday when a Canadian aircraft picked up “banging” noises from the underwater search area. But on Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard said debris had been discovered by a remote-operated vehicle on the seabed around the shipwreck. Within hours, it was confirmed that those onboard are believed to have died in a “catastrophic implosion” of the vessel.

In February, Cameron posted footage of the first discovery of the Titanic shipwreck in 1986 by the research submersible HOV (Human Occupied Vehicle) Alvin.

In 2012, Cameron piloted a submersible called the Deepsea Challenger to the ocean’s deepest point in the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep, which is 35,876 feet deep. There, Cameron collected samples and filmed the experience for a Nat Geo documentary.

Parks Stephenson — a Titanic specialist who advised on Cameron and Bill Paxton’s 2003 documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss” — made a public Facebook post on June 19 about the search for the Titan.

“No matter what you may read in the coming hours, all that is truly known at this time is that communications with the submersible have been lost and that is unusual enough to warrant the most serious consideration,” he wrote.

Those aboard included Nargeolet; British businessman Hamish Harding; British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman; and OceanGate CEO Rush, who was piloting Titan.

Watch Cameron’s full interview.