Director James Cameron took to Twitter on Saturday to dispel the “offensive rumors” that he might be looking to direct a disaster movie based on the ill-fated mission of OceanGate’s Titan submersible.
Cameron noted that he didn’t normally find it necessary to address such rumors publicly, but that he felt this one was egregious enough to require immediate attention.
“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 tweeted.
Cameron, 68, who directed the Oscar-winning drama “Titanic,” has visited the wreckage that the doomed crew members of the Titan were traveling to see on a number of occasions — and has said he believed there were a number of comparisons to be made between the ill-fated ocean-liner and the OceanGate submersible.
“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 that it needed to be certified,” Cameron said during a recent appearance o ABC News. “I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result. For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded.”
A number of other experts have weighed in on what most believe was likely a preventable tragedy, saying that OceanGate chief Stockton Rush — who was piloting the vessel when it imploded en route to the wreckage of the Titanic — ignored numerous red flags.
Underwater expert and engineer Jose Luis Martin said he believed the passengers aboard the doomed submersible likely had just enough time to realize what was happening before the craft imploded.
“The Titan changes position and falls like an arrow vertically because the 400 kilos (880 pounds) of passengers that were at the porthole unbalance the submersible. Everyone rushes and crowds on top of each other. Imagine the horror, the fear, and the agony,” he said. “It had to be like a horror movie. In that period of time, they are realizing everything, and what’s more, in complete darkness. It’s difficult to get an idea of what they experienced in those moments … After those 48 seconds, or one minute, the implosion and instantaneous sudden death occurs.”
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