Canadian director out to solve Titanic mystery

London Free Press ^ | 2005-07-23 | JOHN MCKAY

[nickcarraway]

TORONTO -- Live from the Titanic, it's Sunday night.

Tomorrow night, Academy Award-winning filmmaker James Cameron plans to take TV viewers on a live tour of the ill-fated ocean liner from its resting place at the bottom of the Atlantic, where it sank nearly a century ago in one of history's most notorious marine disasters.

Last week, Cameron was in a Los Angeles editing suite putting together pre-taped sequences from the latest of the 30 expedition dives he's taken to the Titanic site over the last decade.

He was then going to fly back to the site to do more filming and to prepare for the live elements of Last Mysteries of the Titanic, a two-hour special to air tomorrow on Discovery Channel.

"I will be in the sub, 12,500 feet down, sitting there with an archeologist to my right," Cameron says by phone from L.A. "We will both be flying ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) during the show and will be conducting a kind of very personalized tour of Titanic."

Cameron plans to show never-before-seen images from deep in the interior of the vessel, some of which he expects may resolve lingering mysteries about the sinking.

Because capturing such images is often time-consuming and tricky, those exploration shots will be pre-recorded. But, he promises, even the live exterior shots of the bow section will constitute must-see television.

"It's going to be a whole different feel. We're gonna be really down there, on the deck, flying these small vehicles around," he says excitedly. "It's going to put you right there.

"These little robots can get you into all kinds of cool places. It feels more like you're walking the deck."

If all goes well, the equipment will transmit a signal via fibre-optic cable up to the mother ship on the surface and from there to an overhead satellite.

As for the mysteries the documentary promises to deal with?

First, Cameron says, they want to get a first-ever close-up look at the actual iceberg damage, but even more dramatically, he says, an inspection of the boiler room's coal bunker, where a fire was said to have started and perhaps weakened the steel of a critical watertight bulkhead.

"Which may have made the difference between the ship sinking in a little under three hours as it did -- two hours and 40 minutes -- or it may have taken much longer, eight to 10 hours. Had it taken longer to sink, all the people who died probably would have been saved by rescue ships."

Discovery Channel's press releases trumpet this special as "a final farewell" to the shipwreck because it is in a "grave state of deterioration and time for future dives and exploration is quickly running out."

But Cameron says that while some parts of the ship have understandably collapsed into rust, other parts have not changed at all during the 10 years he's visited it.

"In terms of saying farewell, it's my farewell," he says with a chuckle. "Because I'm not going back. This is my last expedition."

As for those who have considered bringing parts of the wreckage to the surface to preserve them in museums, the renowned director doesn't believe in that.

"I've personally felt a great connection with some of the people on board Titanic, seeing some of their artifacts, wallets, papers, things like that," he says. "I think that's OK. But to start blowtorching out big sections of the ship and bringing it up so you can stick it on display someplace, that feels wrong."

Cameron, who grew up in Chippawa, near Niagara Falls, has been involved in several Titanic projects since his 1997 motion picture blockbuster, including 1997's Titanic Explorer for the USA network, the 1998 TV documentary Beyond Titanic and the 2003 big-screen 3-D docudrama Ghosts of the Abyss.

He's also put together a special-edition DVD of his Oscar-winning movie for release by Paramount this fall.

Discovery, meanwhile, will precede the Last Mysteries of the Titanic telecast with Lost Treasures of the Deep, a one-hour special that takes viewers to some of the 20th century's other famous undersea wrecks, from Cleopatra's sunken palace to Blackbeard's lost ship.

[Gator101]

Just when I thought James Cameron had milked the Titanic for all it was worth...

Ah well, it's still pretty cool to see. At least in this case all us ship nuts benefit from some rich guy's obsession.

[cripplecreek]

I watched the show last night. It's amazing what survived without damage.

[lowbridge]

What mystery? It hit an iceberg. The metal plating buckled. Letting all that water in. It sunk.