Friends at the abyss: James Cameron, Joe MacInnis and a voyage to the bottom of the sea

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Long before James Cameron was directing Hollywood spectacles such as Titantic and Avatar, he was growing up in Ontario and dreaming of deep-sea adventures. Among his heroes was Joe MacInnis, Canadian physician-explorer and expert on leadership in life-threatening environments, who encouraged and later supported Cameron’s underwater expeditions, including his 2012 journey to Challenger Deep at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. This summer, Deepsea Challenger, the submersible that Cameron used to descend 11 kilometres to the world’s deepest place, is on display at the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s headquarters in Ottawa. On the eve of the exhibit’s opening, Cameron and MacInnis reflected on their long friendship and their mutual attraction to the ocean’s depths.

James, is it true that you first met Joe in 1968 when you were just 14?

CAMERON: We didn’t actually meet, but we had this correspondence. My mom used to take me to the Royal Ontario Museum so I could sketch on Saturdays. I lived down in Chippewa, which is now part of Greater Niagara Falls, and I used to love to go to the museum and just sketch. So Joe had developed this habitat for his lake research – Sublimnos – am I pronouncing it right?

MACINNIS: Yep!

CAMERON: It was on display at the museum. That was an amazing moment for me. I just walked around it and it made total sense to me. I saw how you could exit and enter through the hatch at the bottom and how air at ambient pressure would keep the water out. So I got out my sketch pad and did a couple of sketches of it. I don’t remember how I got your address, Joe, but I sent you a letter and I said, how do you build one of these things?

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And Joe, what were you doing at that point?

MACINNIS: I was 32 and I was the medical director of an undersea engineering company called Ocean Systems. We were trying to figure out how deep could we go, how long could we stay and what kind of decompression schedules did we need to get divers back. So I get this letter and there’s something about the passion and the enthusiasm that caught my attention. I wrote back and tried to encourage Jim with his project.

CAMERON: The next step was, I asked you, how do I do the windows? And you sent me a contact who I wrote to and said, Dr. Joe MacInnis says I can get an acrylic sample from you. And I’ll be damned if they didn’t send me a one-inch thick piece of acrylic. And I thought, wow, I’ve got the window! I’m halfway there. Then I built a model out of a mayonnaise jar. I put my pet mouse in it and lowered him down 25 feet into the middle of Chippewa Creek.

What happened to the mouse?

CAMERON: He got his feet wet – my seal technology was not so great. But other than probably a little emotional stress, he was fine.

That’s good to hear! What do you think was driving your mutual enthusiasm back then?

MACINNIS: It was a hugely inspiring time for all of us. Astronauts were aiming toward the moon, Jacques Cousteau was building Conshelf, the U.S. Navy had Sealab underway. The human family was reaching out in both directions, going up and going down.

CAMERON: That’s what lit up my febrile teenage brain.

How did the two of you finally meet?

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CAMERON: The deep-sea community is fairly small and ultimately anybody who’s done anything, or wants to do anything ... eventually they all converge.

MACINNIS: You invited me to The Abyss [1989]. But it seems to me the key time was in 1992. I had co-produced the first IMAX Titanic film ...

CAMERON: You were out there at the Titanic site with [deep-sea explorer] Anatoly Sagalevich and with [underwater cinemetographer] Al Giddings. So then it was obvious in my mind that if I was going to put together a team around going to Titanic, then I definitely wanted to talk to you ...

MACINNIS: Remember, we got you to come to the opening of the Titanica world premiere in Ottawa. Then, the next thing I know you’re heading off to make your first 12 dives on the Titanic.

CAMERON: Well, I had time off for good behaviour to do True Lies [1994]. After that, I was looking at a number of other projects and Titanic was one of them. There was no script. I just had a general idea of what I wanted to do and I had a commitment from the Russians to use their subs. It was intriguing but it didn’t have much momentum compared to a couple of other projects we’d been developing. Avatar was in the mix. So I was literally sitting there one day thinking about what am I going to do when a fax came in from Anatoly. This was in the days of faxes. In the second line – I later highlighted it in yellow so in my memory I always see this with a golden glow around it – he said: “Sometimes it is necessary in the life to do something extraordinary.” And I just sat there and I thought, you’re doing Titanic.

As a filmmaker how does your dramatic storytelling side complement your explorer side, why not just go out and see what’s there and gather data?

CAMERON: Obviously, it’s critical, any time we go out there, to gather as much data as we can. I’ve always tried to fund my expedition projects in such a way that I can host researchers on board. But I think the storytelling is a critical part of it because you’ve got to inspire young minds by the example of exploration – people whose curiosity makes them want to do the thing that they see in a film. People know me first and foremost as a filmmaker and so I’m trying to give back in the same way that I was inspired by what Joe was doing, by all the people that inspired me.

Joe, you were among the first people to dive at the Titanic and also the first scientist to dive at the North Pole. What motivates you to have those personal experiences and to put yourself into those places as part of the way you do your research?

MACINNIS: It’s a very complex question. Exploration is a combination of physical and mental challenges that you set for yourself – to go and do something and make it meaningful, make the science meaningful. For the North Pole, I was working on our National Ocean Policy at the time. This was 1974, and we were doing a series of expeditions to try to learn how we could swim safely under a fathom of ice in freezing-cold water. And then an opportunity came to go north with the Canadian forces who were doing a simulated search and rescue operation. And they said to us, we’d like to drop you at the North Pole for three days. We’ll come back and rescue you if we can find you. And in the meantime, make some dives. So it was a perfect combination of things coming together. But it was, in the end, as Jim says – a story. A scientific story and a human story. And this is also the beauty of working with Jim. I’ve had the good fortune to be on his last three deep-sea expeditions. It’s a leadership lab at sea and a wonderful opportunity to learn.

CAMERON: I think it’s fascinating, Joe, that you began your career around the effects of physical pressure on the human body. But you’ve shifted over time toward the effects of psychological pressure on the mind of the explorer. And I want to say that Joe was a full-on mentor to me in that area. By the time we did Challenger Deep, you were a critical member of the team.

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What do you think people will take away from seeing Deepsea Challenger on display?

CAMERON: People always respond to things that they can be in the same space with. So I think they will be struck by how unusual the sub is, how it doesn’t fit their mental model of what a submarine should look like. It’s a physical manifestation of thinking outside the box – which our whole team did to come up with this idea of a vertical torpedo.

When you went down in 2012 to Challenger Deep you were only the third person in history to reach that depth, after a two man crew aboard the Trieste did it in 1960. Why was there such a long gap in between?

CAMERON: In 1960 it was very much a Cold War kind of psychology. The Russians had orbited Sputnik and America was looking for records that it could set. The brief then was just go to the bottom and come back – not to do science, not to do imaging. We wanted something that was less than 10 per cent of the weight of the Trieste that could be offloaded from a ship and that was bristling with lights, 3-D cameras and manipulator arms to take science samples. And it was a non-governmental, non-institutional paradigm. It was a pure, backyard mechanic kind of approach. Lean, mean and cheap.

What was it like when you were going down?

CAMERON: It was what the astronauts call “go fever.” I had my whole checklist and I was excited. Then I get to five miles and my checklist kind of runs out. I’m dropping the last two miles in absolute silence with way too much time to think about it. I wasn’t afraid, but it was very abstract – almost out of body.

How did you know when you had made it?

CAMERON: I had video feeds tilted down. It’s almost a sacred moment, when you’re looking at blackness, blackness, blackness and then there’s something in your lights, just a diffuse glow, and you realize you’re seeing the bottom. It was a nice, gentle touchdown. I took a look around then I got on the coms and told the control room.

MACINNIS: We were holding our breath because the pressure on your pilot sphere was eight tons per square inch. But there was this wonderful closed circuit between you down there and us in that control room.

CAMERON: I’ve seen the footage since and everybody went nuts. My wife, Susie, was there too and she promptly commandeered the mic and sent me her thoughts and blessings from above, which was also kind of neat – to be simultaneously at the most remote place you could be on Earth and yet have this beautiful communications link.

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What came next?

CAMERON: I had things to do pretty quickly because you never know when there could be a system failure and you have to abort. I followed our game plan which was to set a course south because we felt that I was going to land north of the midline of a pond of sediment at the bottom of the East Basin. And from acoustic signals it looked like there was a geological feature down the center, like a bit of a ridge. It turned out, it didn’t exist. It was sub-bottom so I never found it. After I’d gone about a kilometre I turned around and I went north because the next goal was to find the shoreline, meaning where the the edge of the of the trench wall comes down and hits that flat of pond sediment. Then I started working my way up the trench wall, taking samples

It’s sometimes said we know the surface of the moon better than we know the bottom of the ocean. But it amazes me how much your experience literally sounds like landing on another world.

CAMERON: And the taxi meter’s always running. There’s a limit to how long you can dwell there. But I wrote into my mission profile to look out the viewport and just take it in – take a moment to be there and realize what’s been accomplished by the team.

Joe, I’m trying to imagine your thoughts about the 14-year-old boy who went to the museum and was inspired by your underwater habitat all those years ago.

MACINNIS: I think that while Deepsea Challenger is on display in Ottawa, young people are going to come in and look at it and be inspired too. They’re going to dream about science and engineering and art and discovery and storytelling and some of them will go to hard places and do tough things and some of them will shift the shoreline between the known and the unknown. This is what Jim has done. I call it carrying the fire. He lit his own fire seven miles down in the Mariana Trench – a brief moment where the lights were on and curiosity was at play in that alien environment – and now it can be shared.

Both of you have spend a lot of time in ocean environments during your careers. What else do you want people to know about what’s happening out there?

MACINNIS: I’ve been diving for 70 years and the changes I have seen are really for me breathtaking. The ocean is a place that excites the imagination but is a place that is wounded. In fact, if she was a patient, she would be in the intensive care unit. And we all know the reasons why. From chemicals to plastics to long lines and nets. We’ve declared war on the creatures in the sea. But there are some good things happening. In the last few weeks the High Seas Treaty was signed. [More than] 190 nations came together after 15 years to say, look, we’ve got to set aside at least 30 per cent of the ocean. So that’s a step in the right direction.

CAMERON: I’ve spent the better part of my adult life thinking a lot about the oceans. I always thought if I go out there, if I explore, if I show how wonderful it is – always with a focus on aiding ocean conservation, coral reef conservation, helping cetacean populations, things like that. It was all based on going out there. And my epiphany lately is we’re not going to save the oceans by going out onto the oceans and bringing back some story, or bringing back more data. We have all the data we need right now to know what’s going wrong. We’re going to save the oceans by how we change our behaviour patterns on land.

The exhibition Pressure: James Cameron into the Abyss is on display in Ottawa until Sept. 1.