Oscar-winning director James Cameron has opened his deep-sea exhibition in Dunedin and made an appearance on Saturday night.
Cameron’s Challenging the Deep exhibition showcases his lifelong career of combining filmmaking and ocean exploration. Visitors can view the artefacts and stories from the director’s own underwater adventures, including memoirs from his films The Abyss and Titanic.
The 65-year-old genius explained that the film Titanic’s original focus was to present the remains of the famous ship. Cameron said the storyline of Rose and Jack was more of an afterthought.
“Making Titanic for me was about going to the wreck, imaging the real wreck, exploring it, describing it forensically, understanding the event… and then putting it into a Hollywood film,” he said.
Following the success of the film, Cameron spent the next eight years discovering as much as he could about the ocean.
“You can send cameras and satellites into the air and take photos from orbit but you can’t do that here on planet Earth. If you want to know what’s there you actually have to go look,” he said.
Currently, Cameron is working on Avatar 2, with the majority of the film’s production based in New Zealand.
The Challenging the Deep exhibition will be on display at Otago museum until February.
