Oscar-winning “Titanic” filmmaker James Cameron isn’t giving up on deep sea exploration just yet.
Rising as one of the most prominent proponents of the continued, safe exploration of our oceans in the wake of June’s OceanGate submersible tragedy, Cameron told The Guardian in an interview published Saturday that he believes deep sea dives are still “safer than getting an elevator and safer than getting on an airplane.”
Cameron did not just write and direct the defining piece of entertainment surrounding the sinking of the Titanic. He has also for years been part of a small community of people who willfully explore the furthest reaches of the sea, making him a subject matter expert that many turned to last month after five people, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, died when the company’s Titan submersible imploded while journeying to the wreckage of the Titanic at the bottom of the Northern Atlantic.
Despite that devastating loss, Cameron maintains that exploration is safer than ever and should continue. In the case of OceanGate, he believes that the team of people who designed and engineered the Titan sub failed to anticipate the “most obvious risks” of traveling at such incredible depths.
Cameron, who has finished more than 75 deep sea dives of his own, previously spoke out against the carbon-fiber hull that encased the Titan and again referenced the ill-conceived design in Saturday’s interview.
“The things you can imagine being problems — and the obvious ones are implosion and pressure — you can engineer against or you can create processes and procedures to mitigate.”
The potential for catastrophic error during extreme exploration isn’t something that Cameron takes lightly. He credited his understanding of associated risks with the time he spent as a member of the NASA advisory council that was put together following the 2003 explosion of the Columbia space shuttle, which disintegrated as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere and killed all seven onboard.
Cameron said, “When you’re 25 years into the process of building vehicles to go very deep and you’re working with people that are experienced, you’ve pretty much seen almost everything that can go wrong.”
That expertise doesn’t mean your project is completely safe, however, and he added: “It’s the risks, you can’t imagine — a piece of foam falling off the space shuttle and hitting the carbon leading edge of the wing. Nobody ever imagined that, so you can’t engineer against something that you can’t imagine.”
Despite the Titan’s implosion, Cameron doesn’t believe that deep sea trips and research should be halted. After all, in the 50 years that humans have been exploring the depths of the sea, things have gone well almost every time.
“There have been no fatalities in the deep submergence community; zero. Zero fatalities, zero incidents where people were injured or where a sub was lost and had to be recovered by the coastguard in some big rescue operation. Zero in half a century,” he enthused. “But it takes one incident to wake everybody up.”
The director has been previously forced to deny online rumors that he is making a movie about the Titan implosion. On July 15, he tweeted, “I don’t respond to offensive rumors in the media usually, but I need to now. I’m not in talks about an OceanGate film, nor will I ever be.”
He also lamented the similarities between the Titan implosion and the sinking of the ship that inspired the crew onboard the submersible, the Titanic. Cameron told ABC News last month, “I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result.”
Cameron concluded, “And for a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded, to take place at the 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.”
