'Titanic' director James Cameron says he’s struck by the similarities between the 1912 disaster and the Titan submersible

The story that has gripped the world all week has been the disappearance of the Oceangate submersible, destined to visit the wreckage of the famous 1912 Titanic oceanliner, but lost contact on Sunday off the coast of Newfoundland. The five billionaires onboard the submersible, eerily named The Titan, each paid around $250,000 each to take this submersible down to view the 111-year-old wreck that spawned countless films, including the Oscar-winning 1997 mega-hit “Titanic,” directed by Canadian legend James Cameron. 

After almost a week and joint efforts by both the Canadian and American coastguards to locate the lost submersible, the US coastguard announced they had found parts of the submersible that suggested the submersible had imploded, killing all onboard instantly. Now, James Cameron is weighing in on this disaster, and finds that the two wreckages share “astonishing” similarities.

Speaking with ABC New on Thursday, the “Avatar: The Way Of Water” director admitted, “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,” he continued. “To take place at the same 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.”

Cameron isn’t just a director, he’s also a seasoned member of the diving community. In the interview he speaks about designing submersibles himself and the care and precise tech required therein. He has also completed 33 trips to the Titanic’s last resting place over the course of his life. In 2012, he dived to the Mariana Trench, considered one of the deepest spots in the Earth’s oceans,in a 24-foot submersible vehicle he designed himsel called the Deepsea Challenger.

“I call it bearing witness. I get to bear witness to a miracle that’s down there all the time,” Cameron told 60 Minutes Australia in 2018 of his deep sea explorations. “This is not just some, you know rich guy ego thing. This is about, you’ve got so much time on this planet, so much life, so much breath in your body. You have to do something. If you should be fortunate enough to make some money and have some capital, some working capital, why not put it into your dream.”

With so much experience under his belt, the Ontario native revealed that the diving community was “deeply concerned” for The Titan’s safety features.

“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,” he told ABC News.

Then, speaking with Anderson Cooper on Thursday, who was reporting from St. John’s, Newfound, Cameron added, “I mean, obviously, we're all – we're all kind of heartsick from the outcome of this. And I’ve been living with it for a few days now as some of my other colleagues in the deep submergence community."

“I watched over the ensuing days this whole sort of everybody running around with their hair on fire search, knowing full well that it was futile – hoping against hope that I was wrong but knowing in my bones that I wasn't,” he admitted. “And so, it certainly wasn't a surprise today, and I just feel terrible for the families that had to go through all of these false hopes that kept getting dangled, you know, as it played out.”

The “Terminator” director even said that once he heard the news, he reached out to his diving community right away. “I was out on a ship myself when the event happened on Sunday. The first I heard of it was Monday morning. I immediately got on my network because it's, you know, a very small community in the deep submergence group and found out some information within about a half hour that they had lost comms and they had lost tracking simultaneously.”

He even had a theory as to how the implosion happened. “The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion. A shock wave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply, which is the transponder that the ship uses to track where the sub is. So I was thinking of implosion then. That's Monday morning,” he explained.  

Growing up in Ontario, Cameron once told National Geographic that it was a trip to a Toronto museum that sparked his deep-water fascination. When he was 14, he took a trip to the Royal Ontario Museum where he saw an exhibit of an underwater habitat designed by Joe MacInnis that prompted him to write a letter to MacInnis. To his surprise, MacInnis responded. He told the outlet, “He actually sent me back the address of his contact at … the Plexiglas manufacturer… . I contacted them, and they sent me a sample of Plexiglas,” Cameron recalled. “And at that point, I had the window [for the underwater habitat]. I just had to build the rest of it! That was important. That creates the sense of it being possible.”

Reports suggest that it is unlikely to find the bodies of the five Titan passengers killed in the implosion as the impact on their bodies would have been too great.