Nearly a year after the OceanGate submarine left for its ill-fated deep-sea pe to the Titanic, James Cameron intervened in the “crazy” multinational rescue effort that had the entire world on the edge of their seats.
speaking to 60 minutes AustraliaCameron claimed that he knew from the beginning that the OceanGate crew had not survived the expedition.
“We all knew they were dead. We had already toasted our fallen comrades in [the] Monday night,” he said, according to The envelope.
The filmmaker also shared a note about 60 minutes which he claims to have written when he learned of the submarine’s tragic fate. He said: “9:25 implosion confirmed.”
“I literally wrote that on the pad the moment I heard from my naval source, a very reliable source, that they had heard an event and triangulated it on the spot. [of the sub],” he said.
The Navy supposedly detected an “anomaly” in acoustic data after the submarine disappeared on Sunday, June 18, just hours after its descent to the Titanic.
The United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany and France quickly coordinated a rescue effort to locate the submersible. On Thursday, June 22, the Coast Guard confirmed that they discovered debris in the area of the Titanic, suggesting that the ship suffered a “catastrophic implosion” that killed everyone on board.
“It just turned into a crazy thing,” Cameron said. “Everyone running with their hair on fire, when we knew exactly where the submarine was. No one could admit that they didn’t have the means to go down and look. Then they ran all over the surface and the entire world. [was] waiting with bated breath.”
Betweenvictimsthere were OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood, British explorer Hamish Harding and maritime explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
Cameron, an experienced maritime explorer, was openly critical of OceanGate after the tragic incident. He claimed to know the Titanic wreck site “very well” after having made 33 pes to see it, including the12 tripsdid while directingTitanic.
The director revealed that OceanGate received several warnings from experts before the expedition.
“Many people in the community were very concerned about this submarine,” he said during a television appearance after the implosion was confirmed. “And several major 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 needed certification.”
He also compared it to the sad fate of the Titanic ship itself.
“I am struck by the similarity to the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet sailed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night,” he said. “For a very similar tragedy where warnings were ignored to take place in exactly the same place… I think it’s just amazing, it’s really quite surreal.”
