Titanic director and explorer James Cameron warned he would go to the Titanic wreck
James Cameron, director of the Titanic movie, warned of the dangers of visiting the legendary shipwreck after making 33 dives to the bottom of the ocean to film his hit.
“You’re going to one of the most unforgiving places on Earth,” said the Academy Award-winning director in a 2012 interview.
“It’s not like you can call AAA to come get you,” he warned.
The comments have resurfaced as a massive search mission searches for a group of five missing Titanic tourists.
The missing OceanGate submarine, the Titan, lost contact with the mother ship on Sunday morning during its descent to the shipwreck. That sparked an international response to find the missing ship before the skies run out.
James Cameron, director of the film Titanic, warned of the dangers of visiting the legendary shipwreck
Academy Award winner director James Cameron traveled to the shipwreck in 1912 while working on the Titanic movie
Despite the risks, however, Cameron said witnessing what “people have never seen before” was better than “red carpets and all that glitzy stuff.”
Cameron, who has written a book on exploring and documenting the Titanic, has visited the wreck more than 30 times.
“I can think of no greater fantasy than to be an explorer and see what no human eye has seen before,” the explorer said in a conversation in 2011.
Cameron first visited the wreck in 1995 aboard a Russian-owned submarine to capture footage for the Titanic movie.
“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.
The Academy Award-winning director has yet to publicly respond to the missing submarine.
Parks Stephenson, who was technical director on Cameron’s 1997 epic, said Monday he feared the missing submarine could be “a great tragedy.”
“Regardless of what you may read over the next few hours, all that is really known at this point is that communications with the submarine have been lost, and that is unusual enough to warrant the most serious consideration,” the Titanic expert said. wrote in a Monday Facebook post.
Stephenson and Cameron wrote a book about their exploration of the Titanic wreck
Cameron first visited the wreck in 1995 aboard a Russian-owned submarine to capture footage for the Titanic movie
Parks Stephenson has warned that the currently missing submarine could be “a great tragedy.”
Tourists and explorers began their descent to the wreck, but lost contact with the mothership on Sunday morning
The missing OceanGate submarine, the Titan, lost contact with the mother ship during its descent to the shipwreck on Sunday morning
“I’m most concerned about the souls on board,” said Stephenson, who made the journey to the legendary wreck himself.
Stephenson traveled to the 1912 shipwreck with Cameron as they worked on the film that eventually grossed over $2 billion at the box office.
Last night, hopes to find the missing Titan five grew after rescue groups reported “probable signs of life” and “popping noises.”
A Canadian plane, part of the massive search mission to find the missing Titanic tourists, heard “thumping” at 30-minute intervals in the area where the submarine disappeared.
The banging was noted in emails exchanged with the US Department of Homeland Security and seen by Rolling Stone.
Richard Garriot de Cayeux, president of The Explorers Club, confirmed in a social media post on Tuesday night that “there is cause for hope.”
In a statement, he said: “We are much more confident that 1) there is cause for hope, based on data from the field – we understand that probable signs of life have been detected at the site.”
Coast Guard officials confirmed that an aircraft heard underwater noises and operations were “rescheduled” to determine the origin. As of Wednesday morning, they have produced “negative results.”
Billionaire Hamish Harding, French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and Shahzada Dawood, 48, a UK-based board member of the Prince’s Trust charity, and his son Sulaiman Dawood, 19, are said to be the people trapped in the sub.
The DHS memo about the popping noises read: ‘RCC Halifax launched a P8, Poseidon, which has aerial underwater detection capabilities,’ the DHS memo read, ‘reported a contact in a position close to the emergency position.
“The P8 heard popping noises nearby every 30 minutes. Four hours later extra sonar was deployed and the thumping was still heard.’
The timing – or cause – of the banging is not revealed by the memo.
Garriot de Cayeux added. The Explorers Club is confident that the U.S. Coast Guard “understands precisely the experienced personnel and technology that we can deeply understand” and “believe that they are doing the best they can with all the resources they have.”
One of the five men on the ship, Harding is a founding member of the Explorers Club’s Board of Trustees.
The group said they have direct lines to Congress, the Coast Guard, the Air Force and Ship and the White House.