Cinematographer Remembers Titanic Sub Crew Member Hamish Harding, Collaborator on 2020 Doc ‘One More Orbit’

Carolyn Giardina
·3 min read
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As the news arrived Thursday of the discovery of the Titan wreckage, cinematographer James Neihouse especially remembered his friend Hamish Harding, the billionaire businessman and explorer who was one of the five people on the sub, which disappeared on Sunday during a dive to Titanic.

They met during the making of 2020 documentary One More Orbit, which followed former NASA astronaut Col. Terry Virts and a team, including Harding, as they broke the ’round-the-world speed record for an aircraft flying over the North and South Poles, while celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Harding was a mission director as well as the doc’s exec producer. Neihouse, who served as director of photography, described Harding as “one of the driving forces” behind the project, having been instrumental in logistics, including securing the Gulfstream G650 ER jet that was used to break the record.

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“We’re all just so broken-hearted over this,” Neihouse tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Hamish was a wonderful guy and we’ll miss him. But he was doing what he loved to do and there’s some solace in that.”

Neihouse remembered his friend as a “family man” and “for sure the explorer-adventurer,” having been to the South Pole, to space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and to the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep during a 2021 dive in another submarine.

“He was a very accomplished pilot and he knew how to assess risks,” says Neihouse.

He was also interested in continuing to make documentaries, the cinematographer adds. “I think probably we would have collaborated on another film in the near future had this not happened.”

They had not talked about Titanic as a subject, but Neihouse — an accomplished underwater cinematographer who also trained astronauts to film in space — reveals that during the ’90s, he was in talks to go to Titanic for a doc that stalled when the production company was unable to raise the funding. At that time, Neihouse learned about the vessels as they researched how to film at Titanic’s 12,5000 ft. depth.

The DP says of this week’s tragedy, “I think what we need to really take away from this is that you cannot be too safe at those depths. It’s unforgiving.

“I don’t know enough about the submarine’s [Titan] construction — just what I’ve heard on the news — but it seems like they could have had a few more precautions on board. But given that it was a catastrophic failure, those tend to happen instantaneously. It’s too early to put any hard speculation on any of that, because they need to bring up the debris and analyze what happened.”

Neihouse also believes regulations can be more stringent. “If you are going to sell this adventure to the general public, which is kind of what this was, I think there should be some expectations that the vehicle has been tested and certified as fully as possible.”

James Cameron, deep-sea explorer and director of the iconic Titanic film, echoed Neihouse in recent interviews, saying he was struck by the similarity to the sinking of the Titanic: “Many people in the community were concerned about this sub and even wrote letters to the company saying that what they were doing was too experimental and what they were doing needed to be certified,” he told ABC News. “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 died as a result. It’s a very similar tragedy at the exact same site. It’s astonishing and really quite surreal.”

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