James Cameron Compares Fatal Sub Implosion to Titanic Disaster: ‘Warnings Went Unheeded’

Director James Cameron is speaking out after news broke that OceanGate’s Titan sub had imploded while on a mission to view the Titanic wreckage, killing the five men on board.

Cameron directed the film “Titanic,” and is a member of the diving community after making 33 trips to view the ship’s wreckage, among other voyages.

Speaking to ABC News, he revealed, “People in the community were very concerned about this sub. A number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company, saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that it needed to be certified.”

Drawing comparisons between this tragedy and the Titanic catastrophe, he said, “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 people died as a result.”

He said, “For us, it’s a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded. To take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.”

Cameron also mourned the loss of his friend of Paul-Henri “PH” Nargeolet, who was among those who died.

“PH, the French legendary submersible dive pilot was a friend of mine,” Cameron said. “You know, it’s a very small community. I’ve known PH for 25 years, and for him to have died tragically in this way is almost impossible for me to process.”

On Thursday, OceanGate told CNN in a statement, “We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.”

The news came after CNN reported that a debris field discovered approximately 1,600 feet from the wreckage of the Titanic’s bow was from the exterior of the Titan. The Coast Guard confirmed during a press conference that the debris was "consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.”

Search crews were able to find “five different major pieces of debris” including the nose cone and tail cone of the Titan.

Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard told reporters, “This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor, and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel."