James Cameron is speaking up about the tragedy of the OceanGate Titan. The submersible vessel is confirmed to have suffered a “catastrophic implosion” while making a deep-sea dive to survey the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, ending five lives including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and Cameron’s longtime friend, diver/explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet.
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Multiple news outlets reached out James Cameron for comment on the Titan disaster, and as always the Oscar-winning director of Titanic and the Avatar films was frank in his assessment.
“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself,” Cameron told ABC News. “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 a very similar tragedy, where warnings went unheeded, to take place at the very exact site … I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.”
Cameron isn’t just a filmmaker who is obsessed with the ocean (see: The Abyss, Titanic, Avatar: The Way of Water), he’s actually one of the world’s best deep-sea explorers in real life. As credentials show during these Interviews, James Cameron has made over 30 dives to the Titanic wreckage site, as well as pioneering his own submersible craft technology to make a dive to the Mariana Trench, one of the deepest known areas of Earth’s oceans. With that kind of resume, Cameron is indeed uniquely qualified to speak on what the team at OceanGate may have overlooked or ignored before their ill-fated voyage. If nothing else, the filmmaker finds it hauntingly ironic to have us all learning the same lesson at the same site of a tragedy on the ocean:
“The collective ‘we’ didn’t remember the lesson of Titanic,” Cameron told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “These guys at OceanGate didn’t. Because the arrogance and the hubris that sent that ship to its doom is exactly the same thing that sent those people in that sub to their fate. And I just think it’s heartbreaking. I think it’s heartbreaking that it was so preventable.”
In a statement, OceanGate confirmed the passing of the five passengers of the Titan, and commemorated their legacy as explorers:
We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost. These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans. Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew.
James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water is now streaming on Disney+.
