The famed director took to social media to set the record straight.
James Cameron's fed up with rumors flying around that he's in talks to direct a film about the OceanGate Titan submersible tragedy. In an unusual move for the famed director, Cameron took to social media on Saturday to shut down those rumors once and for all.
"I don't respond to offensive rumors in the media usually, but I need to now," he wrote in an Instagram Story. "I'm NOT in talks about an OceanGate film, nor will I ever be."
It's unclear how the rumors started, but it's quite possible that the Avatar director's great deal of his own experience making 33 dives down into the depths of the North Atlantic to see the infamous wreckage of the Titanic seemingly made him the obvious choice. But it's not happening and, as Cameron underscored, it'll never happen.
The Titan submersible took a five-person crew on a dive to explore the wreckage site of the Titanic on June 18, but quickly went missing. The crew included an operator and four "mission specialists" -- a term used by OceanGate Expeditions for its passengers, who each paid $250,000 per seat for the experience.
The tourist sub lost contact with the Polar Prince research ship an hour and 45 minutes after submerging in an area approximately 900 miles east of Cape Cod, in the North Atlantic, where the ocean reaches a depth of around 13,000 feet. All five passengers were pronounced dead after it was revealed the Titan suffered a "catastrophic implosion."
But before that tragic news was delivered at a news conference by Rear Admiral John Mauger, it was Cameron who appeared on CNN and revealed he had learned of Titan's likely deadly end days before anything was firmly announced.
"The first I heard about it was on Monday morning. I immediately got on my network, because it's a very small community... and found out some information within about a half hour that they had lost comms and they had lost tracking simultaneously," Cameron said. "The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion."
Cameron, who noted he was "struck" by the subs' similarity to the Titanic disaster, explained that he "tracked down some intel that was probably of a military origin, although it could have been research -- because there are hydrophones all over the Atlantic -- and got confirmation that there was some kind of loud noise consistent with an implosion event."
"I let all of my inner circle of people know that we had lost our comrades, and I encouraged everybody to raise a glass in their honor on Monday," Cameron recalled. "Then 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."
He also said, "This was such a preventable tragedy."
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