James Cameron Says 'Arrogance and Hubris' Doomed Both Titanic and Titan

Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron says "arrogance and hubris" led to disaster for both the RMS Titanic and the submersible heading to tour the wreckage of the doomed ocean liner.

The U.S. Coast Guard announced on Thursday that OceanGate's Titan submersible was destroyed in a "catastrophic implosion" while diving to the site of the wreck, killing all of its five occupants, including OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg during its maiden voyage in 1912, killing over 1,500 occupants.

The sinking of the Titanic shocked the public in part because the ship was widely considered to be impervious to disaster. Phillip Franklin, then the vice president of the Titanic's operator White Star Line, maintained that there was "no danger" that the ship would sink shortly after learning that it struck the iceberg, claiming "the boat is unsinkable."

In the years prior to Titan's implosion, Rush made comments that may similarly be viewed as ironic. The CEO told CBS News that the submersible was "pretty much invulnerable" in 2017. He also touted the benefits of "breaking the rules" and argued that "at some point, safety just is pure waste" during an interview with CBS correspondent David Pogue last year.

Cameron, writer and director of the Oscar-winning 1997 film Titanic, suggested during a CNN interview on Thursday that Rush and OceanGate ignored the lessons of the ocean liner's demise in an ill-conceived rush to operate tours of the wreckage, which the company was selling for $250,000 per passenger.

"The collective 'we' didn't remember the lesson of Titanic," said Cameron. "These guys at OceanGate didn't. Because the arrogance and the hubris that sent that ship to its doom is exactly the same thing that sent those people in that sub to their fate."

"And I just think it's heartbreaking," he added. "I think it's heartbreaking that it was so preventable."

Cameron is himself an experienced deep-sea diver, having visited the Titanic wreckage on multiple occasions. He is also the first person to have completed a solo dive to Challenger Deep, the deepest point in all of Earth's oceans.

He made a similar comparison between the Titan and Titanic disasters during an ABC News interview earlier on Thursday, after saying that "a number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community" had been "very concerned" about the safety of Titan for years.

"I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself," said Cameron. "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 a very similar tragedy," he continued. "Where warnings went unheeded, to take place at the very exact site ... I think it's just astonishing. It's really quite surreal."

OceanGate argued against outside safety testing of its submersible in a 2019 blog post, asserting that it would be "anathema to rapid innovation." The company also claimed that its "real-time hull health monitoring" would be able to determine "if the hull is compromised well before situations become life-threatening."

During the previous year, a group of more than three dozen experts from the Marine Technology Society had sent a letter to Rush, unsuccessfully warning him of "catastrophic" consequences if he continued to ignore "the safeguards that protect all submersible occupants."

Newsweek has reached out to OceanGate via email for comment.