Amid the disappearance of a tourist submersible on an expedition to the Titanic wreckage, a story of one of filmmaker James Cameron’s most harrowing dives to study the Titanic — and what he would find out after — has come to the surface.
The Academy Award-winning movie director behind “Titanic” was inside a submersible vessel nearly 13,000 feet underwater on the fateful date of September 11, 2001.
After the 68-year-old director and his crew finished their exploration of the 1912 tragedy that killed about 1,500 people and returned to the main ship, Cameron was told of the nightmare that happened on U.S. land just 12 hours earlier.
“What is this thing that’s going on?” Cameron asked actor Bill Paxton, who played treasure hunter Brock Lovett in the film.
“The worst terrorist attack in history, Jim,” Paxton told him.
Paxton recounted for Cameron the nightmare that took place: planes crashed into the World Trade Centers’ Twin Towers in Manhattan, N.Y. just minutes apart in a terrorist attack that, all told, killed about 3,000 people, including those who were lost in separate crashes at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.
Cameron realized he “was presumably the last man in the Western Hemisphere to learn about what had happened,” he told Spiegel International in 2012.
The filmmaker also started to ponder why they were even diving toward the bottom of the North Atlantic on that day in the first place.
“The day the 9/11 terrorists murdered 3,000 people in New York and Washington, I was just diving into the Titanic,” he told the outlet. “For a while, I thought, ‘Why are we diving into history while new parts are made, while the very ground we are standing on is shaking?’”
Paxton, who died in 2017, told the Guardian in 2002, “I said, ‘Jim, the world changed from the time you went down till you came back.’ It was strange. We felt a little bit like survivors out there.”
In Cameron’s 2003 documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss” about the wreckage, he added, “We were all very wrapped up in what we were doing and we all thought it was desperately important. And then this horrible event happened and slammed us into this perspective.”
“The morning after the attack on September 11th, I kept thinking how trivial this expedition suddenly became. It just wasn’t a big deal anymore,” a crew member agreed.
Though, as Cameron struggled to explain to himself why they were still doing submersible dives, he came to realize that the movie could actually help people cope with a large-scale tragedy.
“Some days later, I realized that ‘Titanic’ gave us help in interpreting the new disaster, in exploring the feelings of loss and anger,” he told Spiegel International. “Why do people watch ‘Titanic?’ It’s partly because they can cry. Loss is a part of our life; it’s about love and death and about death partly defining love. And these are things we all have to cope with.”
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