James Cameron has dispelled rumors that he is making a movie about OceanGate, the company that built a submersible meant to sustain tours of the Titanic wreckage that imploded last month with five passengers on board.
“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,” Cameron tweeted.
Cameron famously directed Titanic, the romantic epic about the 1912 shipwreck, and has himself traveled underwater to the crash site over 33 times. He has even visited the Mariana Trench, one of the deepest points in the ocean, in a submersible he designed and built himself (with a crew, of course). Following the Titan implosion, he joined a chorus of voices who criticized OceanGate for going ahead with a vehicle that wasn’t up to traditional safety standards.
“Many people in the community were very concerned about this sub, and 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 it needed to be certified, and so on,” he said. Because of these concerns, Cameron likened the Titan to the actual Titanic, where “warnings went unheeded” about an iceberg in the supposedly unsinkable ship’s path.
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The Titan began its journey down to the Titanic wreckage on June 18th and lost communication with OceanGate less than two hours into its dive. After days of searches to find the submersible, a remotely operated underwater vehicle detected debris from the sub, indicating that it had imploded. Aboard the ship were Stockton Rush, the founder and chief executive of parent company OceanGate Expeditions; Hamish Harding, a British aviator; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a French maritime expert and friend of Cameron’s; Shahzada Dawood, a British-Pakistani businessman; and Dawood’s 19-year-old son, Suleman.
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.
— James Cameron (@JimCameron) July 15, 2023
