‘Titanic’ filmmaker James Cameron calls the search for Titan a ‘nightmarish charade’, says he knew on Monday the sub imploded

Cameron has much experience with traveling in a submersible. He has visited the remains of the Titanic 33 times, and he also holds the record for the deepest dive of 35,787 ft in the Mariana Trench. He referred to the search for the then-lost submersible as a "nightmarish charade," per Fox 7.

Cameron said that OceanGate "shouldn't have been doing what it was doing. I think that's pretty clear. I wish I had been more vocal about that. But I think I was unaware that they weren't certified. Because I wasn't really studying it. I wasn't really interested."

The filmmaker said that Stockton Rush, an American businessman who was killed in the incident, had asked him if he wanted dive this season, but Cameron declined the offer.

Cameron said that there was already "a lot of concern" about OceanGate. He said that he did not look into it too much because he was making the second installment of the Avatar franchise at the time.

He also said that "a lot" of people in the diving community "got together and wrote a letter to OceanGate and said, 'You have to certify. You cannot take people down. It's irresponsible. And it could lead to catastrophe.'"

"Monday morning, when I first found out about the incident, I got on a whole bunch of calls and emails. It's a small community. Within an hour and a half, I had the following information: They were on descent. They were at 3500 feet. They lost comms and tracking. The last one being the critical one, because the transponder that's used to track itself during descent on the bottom is a fully autonomous system."

"It's in its own pressure housing, and it has its own battery power. So for them [those within Titan] to lose comms and tracking at the same time, sub it was gone. There was no question in my mind. For days, I tried to run other scenarios that could account for it. I could come up with nothing."

"So the next thing I did was contacted a few more people and managed to track down, you know, their acoustic networks around, some are research, some are intelligence."

"We got confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the sub was - its comms were lost. A loud bang on the hydrophones, loss of transducer or transponder, lots of comms."

"I knew what happened. Sub imploded. I sent emails to everybody. I know I said, We've lost some friends. The sub has imploded. It's on the bottom, in pieces right now. I sent that out Monday morning. I never believed in that technology of wound carbon fiber, you know, wound filament, cylindrical hull. I thought it was a horrible idea."

"I wish I'd spoken up, you know, but I I assumed somebody was smarter than me, you know, because I never experimented with that technology, but it just sounded bad on its face, because we make pressure holes out of contiguous material. Steel, titanium, ceramic, acrylic, and so you can model it. You can do finite element analysis of it. And you understand the yield properties. You understand the number of cycles that it can take."

"But you can't do that with a composite material, because it's too dissimilar materials, you know, sort of blended together. And so, we all knew that the danger was delamination and progressive failure over time with microscopic water ingress and fatigue, what they called cycling fatigue. And we knew that if the sub passed its pressure test, it wasn't going to fail on the first dive, it might fail on dive seven, or I don't know what they're at, you know, but it's going to fail over time, which is insidious."

"You don't get that with steel or with titanium. Now there's one wreck lying next to the other for the same damn reason."

OceanGate may now face multiple lawsuits in the tragedy. In 2018, the company faced a lawsuit over safety concerns, characterized as a "potential danger to passengers." However, there are some experts who claim that a successful lawsuit against the sub company is not likely.