() — James Cameron is not only one of the most successful Hollywood directors in history, he is also a lover of exploring the depths of the sea.
Those paths have crossed on two of his biggest hits, “Avatar” and “Titanic.”
James Cameron poses during a photo shoot for “Avatar: The Way of Water” in London in 2022. Credit: Isabel Infantes/AFP/Getty Images/File
Although Cameron has not commented publicly on the current search for the OceanGate submarine that was exploring the wreck of the Titanic with five people on board, he has personally made 33 dives at the wreckage site.
has contacted representatives for Cameron for comment.
This is what the director has said in the past about exploring the depths of the ocean.
His motivation for making “Titanic”
cameron told playboy in 2009 that it wasn’t a love story aboard the doomed Titanic that inspired him to make his hit 1997 film.
“I made ‘Titanic’ because I wanted to dive the wreck, not because I wanted to make the movie,” he told the publication.
“Titanic was the Everest of shipwrecks, and as a diver, I wanted to get it right.” “When I heard that other guys had been diving on the Titanic to make an IMAX movie, I said, ‘I’ll do a Hollywood movie to pay for an expedition and do the same thing.’ I loved that first contact, and I wanted more.”
Cameron considers that his cinema and marine exploration are related.
“I think the common thread is telling stories”, the director told NPR in 2012. “I think the job of the explorer is to go and be on the remote edge of the human experience and then come back and tell that story.”
grow with fascination
Cameron told National Geographic that, although he grew up in Ontario, Canada —hundreds of kilometers from the ocean—, as a child he remembers “watching in awe” the specials of marine explorer Jacques Cousteau.
In his youth, Cameron took a field trip to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where he saw an exhibit of an underwater habitat designed by Joe MacInnis that prompted him to write him a letter.
To the surprise of Cameron, then 14, MacInnis responded.
“He sent me the address of his contact at…the plexiglass manufacturer…I contacted them and they sent me a plexiglass sample,” Cameron recalls. “At that time, I already had the window [para el hábitat submarino]. He just had to build the rest. That was important. That creates the feeling that it’s possible.”
Beyond the depths of the Titanic
Cameron has done dozens of deep-sea dives since filming “Titanic.” In 2012, she plunged into the Mariana Trench, considered one of the deepest places in Earth’s oceans, almost 11 kilometers below the surface.
He did it in one submersible ship of 7 meters designed by him, called Deepsea Challenger.
Cameron brought cameras to document the entire journey across the western Pacific. In a video and essay by National Geographicdescribed the experience that began with an early morning descent.
“I darted out, the fastest I’ve ever seen. The surface just receded,” he said in the video.
“It just went away. I’m looking at the depth gauge and I’m at 1,000 feet [300 metros] in the first couple of minutes. Then 2,000, then 3,000. The submarine was going like a bat.”
Quickly, he said, he passed the depth of the Titanic. When she reached 27,000 feet or about 8 kilometers, which was the deepest Cameron had ever dived, she still had 2.7 kilometers to go to the bottom of the ocean.
As he continued to dive, Cameron reflected on the seven years it had taken to make the voyage and was enjoying the solitude when his wife, Suzy Amis Cameron, who played Lizzy Calvert on “Titanic,” contacted the comm system. from the surface.
“Here I am, in the most remote place on planet Earth, which has taken so much time, energy and technology to reach, and I feel like the loneliest human being on the planet, completely isolated from humanity, with no possibility of rescue in a place that no human eye has ever seen,” Cameron said. “And my wife calls me. Which, of course, was very sweet.”
“I call it witnessing. I get to witness a miracle that’s down there all the time,” Cameron told 60 Minutes Australia in 2018 about his explorations in the deep sea. “This isn’t just, you know, some rich guy ego thing. It’s about you having so much time on this planet, so much life, so much breath in your body. You’ve got to do something. If you’re lucky enough to make some money and have some capital, some working capital, why not invest it in your dream?”
