James Cameron imagines the ‘horrifying’ sound heard by the Titan sub passengers in their final moments

James Cameron, the director of 1997’s “Titanic,” is probably accustomed to thinking of events in narrative, cinematic terms, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he would apply his expertise in both filmmaking and deep-sea exploration to vividly describe what could have happened to the doomed Titan submersible and its five passengers.

In a series of interviews with media outlets Thursday, Cameron expressed sadness over the similarities between the Titanic disaster in 1912 and the Titan submersible, which imploded in the North Atlantic and killed five people aboard, the Coast Guard reported Thursday. Cameron also said he had correctly guessed as early as Monday that the vessel had imploded, according to the Daily Beast and the Washington Post. He told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that his contacts among deep sea explorers told him the vessel had reportedly lost communication and tracking simultaneously on Sunday, about an hour and 45 minutes into its 12,000-foot descent to explore the wreckage of the Titanic.

“I couldn’t think of any other scenario in which a sub would be lost where it lost comms and navigation at the same time, and stayed out of touch, and did not surface,” said Cameron, who has made 33 dives to the Titanic wreckage and who in 2012 rode in a 24-foot submersible to the Mariana Trench, considered one of the deepest spots in the Pacific Ocean, at almost 7 miles below the surface.

On CNN, Cameron also described a terrifying scenario for the passengers in their final moments. The five people killed were Stockton Rush, whose OceanGate Expeditions company built the doomed submersible, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood, British billionaire Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a Titanic expert and veteran deep-sea explorer.

Cameron told Cooper that the passengers probably “had some warning” of the implosion. “They heard some acoustic signature of the hull beginning to delaminate,” he said. He explained that delamination is the process wherein water would have started to force apart the layers of the hull, which were made of carbon fiber composite.

“Theoretically you can hear it,” Cameron said. “I actually believe they heard it with their ears, not through the sensor system in the last moments of their lives. And that’s quite a horrifying prospect.”

Cameron’s comments add to the tragedy of Suleman Dawood. The 19-year-old’s aunt told NBC News that he was “terrified” about taking the trip — but decided to go along to please his father, who was “absolutely obsessed” with the famed shipwreck, the New York Post reported. He told a relative he “wasn’t very up for it,” but also agreed to go because the voyage fell on Father’s Day weekend, said Azmeh Dawood, Shahzada Dawood’s older sister.

“I am thinking of Suleman, who is 19, in there, just perhaps gasping for breath … It’s been crippling, to be honest,” Azmeh Dawood said, according to the Post. She also cried about the news that the Titan had suffered what was described as a “catastrophic implosion.” She said she had been glued to the TV over the days when it was thought that the passengers could still be alive in an intact vessel but that they were running out of breathable oxygen.

“I feel like I’ve been caught in a really bad film, with a countdown, but you didn’t know what you’re counting down to,” Azmeh Dawood said. “I personally have found it kind of difficult to breathe thinking of them,” she told the outlet.