James Cameron has shut down reports that he is set to make a film about the OceanGate Titan submersible disaster.
The Titanic director, who has visited the wreckage of the famous doomed ship on 33 occasions, moved to address media speculation that had begun to swirl earlier this week.
On July 13, The Sun reported that the Titanic director had been approached by a streaming network to work on a project telling the story of the Titan and the five men who died onboard after it imploded en route to the Titanic.
The submersible went missing on June 18 and, despite a mammoth search being conducted over the course of the next few days, on June 23 it was confirmed that all five passengers - OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, Hamish Harding, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood, and Suleman Dawood - were dead.
During the search and in the aftermath of wreckage discovery, Cameron has spoken of the disaster. However, when rumors began to circulate about his involvement in a potential film about the voyage, the director was quick to put a blunt end to reports.
Taking to Twitter, the Canadian filmmaker said, "I don't respond to offensive rumors in the media usually, but I need to now. I'm NOT in talks about an OceanGate film, nor will I ever be."
Speaking to ABC News, via Insider, Cameron had recently made comparisons between OceanGate CEO Rush and Titanic captain Edward Smith with regards to their attitudes towards safety concerns aboard their respective vessels.
"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 needed to be certified and so on," Cameron said of OceanGate, who recently wiped all of their social media accounts and website from the internet and suspended operations of their expeditions.
Cameron added, "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.
"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 around all around the world. I think it's just astonishing, it's really quite surreal."
Cameron also revealed that he had designed and built a submersible himself that was capable of reaching sea levels three times deeper than the Titanic wreckage's site, which is roughly 12,500 feet underwater.
"Deep submergence diving is a mature art," Cameron said in regards to OceanGate's approach to deep sea exploration, adding that all other deep submergence vehicles in operation around the world follow the "gold standard" when it comes to safety protocols, whereas the Titan did not.
