Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron Page #3

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And I said,

"Let's do a real expedition to the Titanic:

"to shoot scenes for the movie."

And this was all new territory,

nobody had ever really done this before.

But looking into the darkness here

and wondering what was beyond,

what's down there, you know,

is what led me to want to go back and

explore it thoroughly with new technology.

So, of course,

as soon as the movie was done,

I was immediately planning

my next expedition.

Okay, dive one.

It's gonna be JB and Bill in Mir ll,

and me and Vince in Mir I.

Come in here, explore these rooms.

Up until our 2001 expedition,

no one had attempted an extensive survey

of the interior of the wreck.

So, when we went back for

the 3D documentary Ghosts oi the Abyss,

we developed remotely operated vehicles,

or ROVs.

We call them "bots."

Built to withstand the incredible pressure

at that depth,

they could maneuver through

small holes in the wreckage

and explore up to 600 meters

from the manned sub.

Previous ROVs had been leashed

to the sub by a short, bulky tether.

Our state-of-the-art mini ROVs,

affectionately nicknamed Jake and Elwood,

had an on board power supply

and just needed a spool

of hair-thin fiber-optic cable

to receive directions and send

the live video feed back to my sub.

As I guided them through the wreck,

they unwound this cable behind them,

like Theseus unwinding the bail of twine

as he explored the labyrinth.

This made it possible, for the first time,

to film interior areas of the wreck

that hadn't been seen

since the night Titanic sank.

The bots are finally going to Titanic.

Three years in the making.

See you on the bottom.

Since my first expedition,

I've gone back twice.

Sight enabled.

Comm link, camera power.

All right. I think we're ready to fly.

Elwood's coming out.

Pretty cool.

Looking good, Elwood.

Tell him to go ahead, we'll meet

in the center of the grand staircase.

I've shot hundreds of hours

of archeological survey footage

inside the wreck.

Now they're where I wanted to be.

Those are the lead stained-glass windows.

Look at that. Unbelievable.

And another thing

that's absolutely fascinating is

this idea of telepresence.

When you fly an ROV,

after the first few minutes,

and really for subsequent hours at a time,

you completely forget

your physical human existence.

(CAMERON LAUGHING)

MAN:
What's going on?

And you become that vehicle.

It's almost like you can feel

what it's feeling.

This is what you get

when you get the lighting in the right place.

You get a good sense

of the depth of the space.

That's right in front of the elevators,

lbeheve.

There's a well-preserved brass bed here.

I'd be in the other sub outside, navigating...

I think on this dive, you were.

Yeah. We could see Jim inside.

Every now and then,

you could see the little light in there.

And you knew, "Okay, Jim, we need

to move a little bit farther aft, because..."

"Yes, yes, all right."

Then he flips it up and moves back,

and then you got to

get in the current just right.

And then, "Okay, Jim, we're coming,

"but we are kind of caught in current here."

Then we'd do a pass.

"Jim, how did that look?"

And there'd be a pause.

"Love it, love it, love it. Do it again!"

Something like that.

So, they were maneuvering 18 tons

out there

to get one light through a porthole.

Rising up and aiming the light downward.

There's... Turn.

That's good!

I made 33 dives to Titanic.

Laying eyes on the site is

one of the most important forensic tools.

The power of observation.

Some of the damage is self-evident,

easy to understand.

Other aspects are baffling.

Like cops at a crime scene,

we're inventorying all the evidence.

Now we can begin to rewind the clock

and start to put these pieces back together

to tell the story of Titanic's final moments.

You've got to get to the night

the ship hit the bottom.

What happened when it hit the bottom?

Then you've got to be able to separate out

all the bottom impact damage

from what might have happened

as it descended through the water column.

It's important to know that

things that people have identified as

possibly iceberg damage probably aren't.

A good example of this is

the so-called "big opening,"

a hole blasted in the starboard side

of Titanic's bow.

We now know it isn't iceberg damage.

But how do we explain it,

and the other destruction to the bow?

It hit first here,

pushed forward as it settled.

It hit first here,

pushed forward as it settled.

So, the question is,

what did it do when it hit?

It hits, crushes like that, momentarily.

This stops moving at that point,

other than to slide forward.

And then it's got a mound of debris

underneath it,

and it bends the other way when it lands.

And I'll show you

what that looks like in animation,

because we thought about this a lot

when we animated it.

Take me a second to find it here.

Okay, we made this in '95, for the movie.

I still think it's a useful reference

for the bow's impact,

even though

some of the other details aren't right.

This is arrival.

There is the initial deformation,

which actually puts the forward well deck

in compression,

probably buckled in compression,

at that point.

And that's the point

at which the big opening starts.

'Cause it's actually getting exercised

in two directions.

And then the back end now is falling,

falling down,

and is hitting and compressing.

GALLO:
Is that the cover I saw?

The hatch cover flying off, there.

Right, exactly. We animated that.

The hatch, it's the farthest piece of the ship

from the breakup.

How did this thing get out there?

Jim, those forces, to snap bolts...

I mean, that's something

I can't get my mind around.

CAMERON:
So either at the moment

of initial impact,

or at the moment that the ship slams down,

the hydraulic forces inside the ship

are enough to blow this hatch off.

So you've got some internal over-pressure

here, that's hydraulic.

And over the large area

of that number one hatch,

it just breaks every bolt at the same time.

The hatch doesn't peel off sequentially,

it's an evenly distributed over-pressure.

It just breaks

every bolt head simultaneously.

Hydraulic outburst accounts

for the mysterious placement

of the number one hatch.

The damage we see to the bow

is more extensive

than simply the force of impact

at the bottom.

What could have possibly happened

as the bow plummeted four kilometers,

down to the ocean floor?

BODINE:
She hits the berg

on the starboard side.

She kind of bumps along, punching holes

like Morse code...

CAMERON:
in a scene from the movie

Titanic, we used animation

to illustrate for Rose's character

what we thought had happened

as the ship sank.

So now as the bow goes down,

the stern rises up...

Since then, we've come a long way

in our CG modeling and 3D animation,

but most importantly

in our understanding of the disaster.

So, what happens? (CLICKING TONGUE)

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