James Cameron Calls the Titan Sub Search a 'Nightmarish Charade,' Says Company Was 'Warned' About Safety Problems

Although the world waited days to learn the tragic fate of OceanGate's Titan submersible, the craft's demise didn't come as a surprise to James Cameron. After the U.S. Coast Guard announced yesterday that it found debris consistent with the Titan's exterior and last known location, the Oscar-winning director revealed that he'd correctly surmised what happened to the five explorers on Monday after it first went missing. He also offered strong criticism aimed at the company behind the fatal expedition.

"The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion — a shock wave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply, which is the transponder that the [mother] ship uses to track where the sub is," the Titanic director told Anderson Cooper on CNN.

Cameron then got in touch with people in the diving community he'd been connected to over the years, having made 33 dives to the Titanic wreckage himself. He "got confirmation that there was some kind of loud noise that was consistent with an implosion event" and knew that it was likely a tragic ending, admitting he was still "hoping against hope" that he was wrong.

“That seemed to me enough confirmation that I let all of my inner circle of people know that we had lost our comrades, and I encouraged all of them to raise a glass in their honor on Monday," he said.

As a result, the international search and rescue effort over the following days seemed futile to Cameron. "[It] felt like a prolonged and nightmarish charade where people are running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and all this other stuff," he told BBC of the various news developments throughout the week.

"That was just a cruel, slow turn of the screw for four days as far as I’m concerned,” he added. "Because I knew the truth on Monday morning."

As for the company behind the ill-fated voyage, Cameron didn't mince words and mourned the fact that the five divers' demise seems, like the Titanic disaster, linked to human oversight. "We now have another wreck that is based on unfortunately the same principles of not heeding warnings," he said. "OceanGate were warned."

Stockton Rush, the CEO of the company, piloted the craft as he showed his four paying guests the depths of the North Atlantic. His wife Wendy Rush is coincidentally a descendant of Isidor and Ida Straus, two prominent first-class passengers on the Titanic.