Titanic: 20 Years Later with James Cameron

We released Titanic 20 years ago.

Seems like a lifetime.

But I remember everything like it was yesterday,

from the first dive to the wreck,

to our last day of production.

We were creating a living history,

so I needed every detail

as accurate as we could make it.

We owed the truth to the hundreds of souls

lost that night in 1912.

Even now I feel a responsibility

to the living and the dead.

Did we get it right?

After decades of exploration and scientific analysis,

we know a lot more than we did when we made the film.

So I've gathered a team of experts,

Parks Stephenson, Ken Marschall, and Don Lynch,

to reopen the case file on Titanic

and look at what we've discovered

over the last 20 years.

We'll investigate whether more lifeboats onboard

could have saved more lives.

I think I probably would cut faster

if my life depended on it.

Hear the surprising story

of how the long-lost ship was found.

-Did you get spooked? It was spooky.

And learn how the film affected the families

of some of Titanic's famous passengers.

Molly Brown sounds like a real pistol.

I would have loved to have met her.

She was larger than life.

We'll step back in time

to see how our sets match up

against what we found at the wreck site.

And we'll mount tests that may answer questions

about the sinking that have bothered me

for almost two decades.

Yes!

We'll see where we were right, and where we got it wrong.

Background and action.

When we made Titanic,

we tried to do a film that was as if

we had gone back in a time machine to that night.

We tried to be as accurate as it was humanly possible to be.

You could walk out of Rose's cabin,

down the corridor, down the grand staircase,

through the reception room and into the dining room.

It was every photograph I had ever seen.

It was perfect.

And action.

That feeling that you had, no longer was Titanic

just a story in a book or a picture.

You were there.

James not only made this movie, he embraced the subject.

And the success of the movie

made it possible to deploy new technologies

to explore the wreck

in ways that had never been done before.

JAMES (off screen): Who would have thought that stuff would still be there?

It's a dream come true for me.

To me, it just opened the door to so many mysteries

and unanswered questions,

and then that snowballed into a real lasting interest

in the forensic work

that kind of marine archaeology of the wreck site.

And a lasting interest in the history of Titanic

and the impact that it had on society.

The wreck is the last surviving witness

to the disaster.

It still has stories to tell

for anybody willing to pay attention

and listen to what the wreck has to tell us.

Are you ready to go back to Titanic?

On April 14th, 1912, at 11:40 p.m.,

the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg during its maiden voyage

from Southampton, England to New York City.

Two hours and 40 minutes later,

it sank to bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Of the more than 2,200 passengers and crew onboard,

just over 700 survived that night.

The wreck remained lost at sea until 1985,

when oceanographer, Robert Ballard, discovered it

while on a secret mission for the US Navy.

His expedition changed the way we explore the deep,

and it changed my life.

Bob and I recently met at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

to take a look at their exhibit on Titanic.

This is the story I could never tell.

Bob Ballard is one of the nation's top oceanographers.

But of course, what he's best known for

is discovering the Titanic.

And that's an amazing story

because it turns out that that was just a cover story

for a mission that he was doing for the US Navy at the time.

In the 1960s, the US Navy lost two nuclear submarines,

the Thresher and the Scorpion,

under mysterious circumstances.

In the 1980s, Dr. Robert Ballard

was brought in to explore the wreck sites

and find out if the Soviet Union

had gotten there first.

My mission was to go out

to both the Thresher and the Scorpion,

and completely document 100% of the wreckage.

As it turns out, Ballard found the missing subs

and completed his mission so quickly

that he still had 12 days left to search for Titanic.

It was actually mapping the wreckage

that told me how to find the Titanic.

When the Thresher and the Scorpion imploded,

all these pieces came falling down

to the ocean floor.

So as it was falling down,

the currents carried it for over a mile.

It was a comet of debris.

So instead of looking for Titanic,

I looked for its debris.

When the Carpathia got the distress call,

-it was down here. Yeah.

Headed to the reported position.

Ran into them early. Yeah. Ahead of schedule.

So I said,

"What's the error of celestial navigation back then?" Five miles.

So I said, "Let's go another five."

It has to be to the north.

JAMES (off screen): Yeah, right. So then you just run straight north?

ROBERT (off screen): So I then, I run east-west lines across...

The intersect... Across, across the...

the intersect, but space them 0.9 miles.

And if I don't get it, interspace 'em at half.

But you already knew that at that depth

the debris field would be more than a mile.

Roughly a mile. Yeah.

So I cheated a little, I said, "Let's do 0.9."

That's pretty smart.

And then if I don't get it, I'll just interlace.

Yeah, right.

ROBERT (off screen): So we began running lines back and forth

and on the ninth line, hit the debris.

-Well-- Did you know...

You didn't know it was Titanic until you saw the boiler.

No. We didn't... Correct.

Wreckage.

Bingo! Yeah!

"Somebody ought to go get Bob..."

For some reason that night, I just wasn't sleeping.

And a knock on the door,

this is now at 2:00 in the morning,

and the cook stuck his head in,

and he said, "The guys think you might want..."

He didn't even finish the sentence and I was past him.

And I got into the command center

and just as I entered the command center,

they went over the boiler.

Boiler alert! I got boiler!

Yes, yes.

We knew it wasn't any wreck, it was the Titanic.

And it was like scoring the winning goal at the buzzer.

So our reaction was jubilant,

jumping up and down, celebrating.

And then someone said, "She sinks in 20 minutes."

And that innocent comment

was devastating

'cause what were we doing celebrating anything?

We were embarrassed

that we were dancing on someone's grave.

So I just said, "Stop the ship, I'm going outside."

We went out on the fantail and we had a private memorial.

And that was it.

Everybody that dives Titanic

has their own story of seeing it for the first time.

And probably the most frequently asked question

to me is,

"What was it like seeing the wreck for the first time?"

I get asked, "Hey, what was it like?"

And I always wanna tell them the story

they want to hear, which was,

there she was in, you know,

this beautiful, stately ruin coming out of the darkness.

-That's not what happened. No.

It's like a cliff. Oh, I remember when we...

This was where we came in, we landed here and...

It's a cliff.

The, you know, the Wall of China...

I mean, it's just a wall.

And the first thing I recognized

was the anti-fouling paint.

Yeah, the red, the red paint, right? It was pink.

It was still pink.

And I said, "Too bad they didn't paint the whole ship

with that stuff."

And the bilge keel was sitting on top of the sand. Exactly.

Back, back here. It was right, right there.

And then, the pilot, he said, "We gotta go."

Yeah.

So he dropped his weights and then we began our ascent.

But then these eyes...

Yeah, which is your lights kicking back.

Your lights, all the eyes of the Ti...