Explorers: From The Titanic To The Moon

Jules Verne.

His novels, the Extraordinary Voyages,

thrilled the imagination of the public across the world.

His visionary books took exploration and technology to new frontiers.

Jules Verne dreamt of the underwater world and of space exploration.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon

became his most famous novels.

Here is the odyssey of two men who have reached Jules Verne's dreams and beyond.

They embody the new extraordinary voyages

from the abyss to the stars.

I just really enjoy being underwater.

I enjoy the physical experience of it.

I like the personal challenge of it.

When you're scuba diving you're really on your own.

If you make a mistake, you'll die.

Some people, they either like being underwater or they don't,

and it's a difficult set of experiences

to describe to somebody that hasn't done it.

All right, let's try a rehearsal, please.

And action!

- Hi. - Hi.

It's a little quiet up here.

You bet.

You're about the last of the Mohicans.

Not as quiet as it is down there.

You know, I've been fascinated by ocean exploration

since before I ever saw an ocean.

When I was a kid in Canada, I lived, I think, 600 miles from the sea.

But I watched the Jacques Cousteau specials on TV,

and I thought they were absolutely incredible.

"The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence."

"Here, I am free."

As a child, I lived in a fantasy world of science fiction and fantasy,

and, you know, heroes and villains and all that sort of thing.

And the thing that appealed to me most about science fiction and fantasy

was the idea that you could go to a different place, an exotic place.

...we're going backwards.

As I got older I realized, "I'm not going to another planet in my life, really."

But there's another planet right here, under the ocean.

And so, at the age of 16 I said I want to learn to scuba dive.

I was wanting to go to another world, very specifically.

Not even a pioneer. I just wanted to see it.

I didn't care if I was going someplace other people had already been before.

That came later.

Maybe you just switched off.

You never switched back on.

Rover-1 and Mir-1 would be advised,

we have lost our starboard horizontal thruster.

We have lost a/c, and we have lost pan and tilt.

So we're probably gonna have to abort.

I really feel privileged that I've gotten to do work with the filmmaking,

films like The Abyss and Titanic,

where we got to do, you know, a lot of underwater work, which I really enjoy.

First recorded dialogue underwater on film

for a theatrical motion picture in history of the world.

That's what I love about filmmaking:

you can make a film about anything.

You know, if it's coming from the heart...

doesn't matter what the subject is.

You just have to believe in the subject.

Okay, here we go, and action.

And action.

There was no territory in which it was released

that it was not the number-one film.

You can't predict that sort of thing.

If I tried to go out and do it tomorrow, it wouldn't work.

Do I go left, or do I go right?.

I better get this right.

And then I just took it a step further with the documentary films.

So it's a combination of things for me,

you know, the work I've been doing recently.

It's filmmaking. We're telling a story.

It's a unique kind of filmmaking which is documentary filmmaking,

which I have a great deal more respect for now

than I did probably before I started it.

'Cause I realize how difficult it is to be out there without a script,

making a film without actors,

making a film where you don't get to do things twice,

do another take to improve things.

You are really, you know, shooting from the hip all the time.

And I enjoy that.

I find it really liberating, but it's also very difficult.

Where I seem to fit best is the highly technical, highly coordinated type of work

that's necessary to work in the deep ocean,

which is a very unforgiving environment,

and it requires, you know, some pretty advanced engineering

to able to do anything in that environment.

And there's something about the engineering challenge that I also like.

You know, a lot of the fun and personal interest for me is in the preparation.

You have to go prepared.

On a given dive, I may see things that I've never seen before.

I will always see things I've never seen before.

Often I'll be seeing something that no human being has ever seen before

and filming it in 3-D at the same time.

Oh, my God, look at that squid!

So if it crosses my field of view,

it gets immortalized on 3-D, which can be blown up to lMAX if necessary.

So if nothing else, we're creating an amazing archive of deep-ocean images

that I think is probably, you know, gonna have some value over time.

You're on a space mission almost.

You know, you're using absolute cutting-edge,

state-of-the-art robotics and, you know, electronics

and technology that takes years to develop.

'Cause that's a way for me to go to another planet.

That's a way for me to go and be like I'm in a science-fiction story.

That's just a huge colony of microbes.

This is just acres and acres

of this bacterial mass.

Look at that.

This could be like a little glimpse back in time.

Yeah, couple billion years ago.

Hydrothermal events have been on planet Earth

since the oceans were formed.

It may have been sites like these

around which life itself began.

We can just sort of scoop up the top area,

then maybe a little bit of the sediment below.

Excellent. Nice sample.

You can see all the stringy little filaments

that make up the mat.

So I'm even comfortable going to things

that have already been seen, already been discovered,

and imaging them in the way that we can do it, you know.

I think I have a special relationship with Titanic.

For me it's a relationship with a piece of history

and an environment that I now understand very well.

It exists in my mind as an edifice that I can go to.

And I think, you know, I think that's where it has meaning.

When you see Ghost of the Abyss or when you see the movie,

we present the shipwreck the way it is in our romanticized imagination.

You approach from the bow,

and you see this magnificent prow coming out of the eternal darkness.

That was not my experience.

On my first dive to Titanic, we had a hard time finding the wreck.

When we finally found it, we came upon it in such a way

that it suddenly materialized, this wall of rusty riveted steel.

We almost ran into it.

The pilot kind of overreacted,

rose up in a big cloud of dust and sediment.

We came over, and then we landed on top of the ship.

... Ianded right on the grand staircase.

You guys set to launch?.

And he set down, and there was this moment of "Are we okay??"'

I name this ship Titanic.

May God bless her

and all who sail in her.

Our consciousness projects meaning onto this big piece of metal.

And we, you know, because we're emotional creatures,

we can imagine what it was like

to have been one of the people on board.

We can imagine what those final minutes,

what the fear, the separation from loved ones,

all those things.

When I flew the robot through the inside of the ship,

nobody had ever done that,

and so there was no way to know what was there.

There was absolutely no way to know.

From the time the ship was last photographed,

as it--you know, when it left port,

to the time our robot went inside,

there was no way to know what was inside that ship.

Iceberg dead ahead, sir.

We do have to think about our own mortality.

We have to think about our own death.

We have to think about what that means

in terms of our relationships with the people that we love.

We have to think about their potential deaths as well.

It's something that as human beings we've got to deal with.

But we need to have a way of dealing with it that's not too in our face, you know?.

And I think that's part of the power of the Titanic story.

'Cause Titanic is just about death. That's what it's about.

Okay, Mir-1 0, get in position.

Delay the black.

Getting into position too late.

The 1,500 souls lost here still speak,

reminding us always that the unthinkable can happen

but for our vigilance, humility, and compassion.

Good-bye.

It's a very powerful place,

and, you know, in some future time I might go back

and do more exploration there just for myself,

not even because I think a film about it would be that important.

But it's just a very fascinating process.

There's something about the overlay of the history,

the elegance, the story, the tragedy and the technology required.

You're not going to an alien world.

You're going to something that seems very alien, very bizarre,

but it's because it's so surreal and tremendously exciting,

you know, just as a, I don't know, as a filmmaker,

as an explorer, just as a fan of the Titanic story.

A hundred and fifty years ago,

you could walk around the Americas and just walk.

And you'd be exploring, you'd be seeing something new

that certainly Europeans had not seen.

You can't do that anymore, you know, not on planet Earth.

A few places maybe, Papua New Guinea,

you can walk someplace that nobody's really seen.

But that type of exploration is kind of over.

So it's all about technology now to go to the more remote places.

Because obviously the things on Earth that haven't been explored