From our studios in new york, this is charlie rose. James cameron is here. One of hollywoods most interesting directors, films like titanic and avatar. He once said that his purpose is make enough money so he can dive. He is taking on a new passion, diving to the bottom of the marina trench. Here is the trailer for the film, James Camerons deep sea challenge 3d. He is on a mission to dive to the deepest part of the sea. 36,000 feet down to the bottom. A new record for a so low man dive. He is the first to ever reach the bottom of the marina trench. What lurks beneath captures the imagination. This is James Camerons most ambitious project yet. I have seen astonishing things in the depths, things that fill your soul with wonder. Cousteau said it best, if we knew what was there we wouldnt have to go. Seven miles straight down. The last great frontier of our world. It is my dream to build a machine to take us there. We are going to do things the governments of the world cannot do. Something nobody else can do. When you dive to the bottom of the ocean you have to face the fact that there are a hundred terrible waste to die. The water will bus through. I get churned into a meat cloud in seconds. We have to put ourselves against the elements. We have to dive. Here we go. Moment of truth. We have a problem. Pretty soon, you realize you are in this metal coffin. It is getting weaker and weaker. May be risks shouldnt be taken. Maybe the consequences to our families are too great. Expedition comes with the rest. But it is a risk that is worth something. It is the need to see what is there beyond the edge of your legs, to see it for yourself. This is a story of a mans great obsession to go to the bottom of the ocean. We were doing it. It was like being in a spaceship. It was like being launched into space. I want to talk about how you prepared. Take me to the beginning. Was this idea of being an explorer deep inside of you as a young boy . It emerged with my fascination with the Natural World. I was surrounded by woods. I would be out there catching frogs and snakes. They got me a microscope for christmas when i was 10 years old. I started looking at pond water and seeing the microorganisms that live there. To me it was endlessly fascinating. That leads to, they say exploration is curiosity acted upon. You want to go and look with your own eyes. You were sidelined by movies. In college i couldnt decide between science, studying physics and astronomy, and the arts. I became a lit major and started telling stories. The narrative drive was there. That took over. You wrote something called the abyss. What was the story . Interestingly it was about scientists leaving a submerged base, similar to what i made into the movie, and they are going down a wall and they dont come back. The ones that are left behind wonder what happened and go after them. They keep going into the darkness and they dont return. Last man goes down to find out what happens to his buddies. He gets the point of no return. His curiosity overwhelms his caution and he keeps going. That is how the story ends. Were there moments where curiosity may have overwhelmed caution . Absolutely. That is the danger. Selfknowledge is a beautiful thing when you are down there by yourself. The astronauts call it go fever. We want to keep going. The engineer side says lets not do anything that is unsafe. Lets minimize risk. Then titanic came along. That was fueled by your desire to go explore sunken vessels. Exactly. I got to have the privilege to dive to the real titanic wreck in 1995 as part of the movie project. It is not an exaggeration to say i made that film so that i could make those dives. When you make a movie like titanic, using the same going to make it as real as i can possibly make it. Which calls on your engineering skills. Mikes absolutely. We always creating new technology to realize the vision, to give something to the audience they have not seen before. Then that lead naturally to creating new technology to go to places that people had never been before. Whether it is inside the titanic or inside the bismarck wreck, studying that wreckage, or ultimately going deeper than anybody has gone. Compare Ocean Exploration with me with exploration of space. And where we are. Well, i think we are much better funded in space. Because, it is good pork appropriations for a lot of Big Aerospace companies. Not putting down in space exploration. I have been involved with it a long time. The oceans are underfunded. Desperately underfunded. Especially now after the discretionary funding was cut back. The oceans are our live support system. Here on spaceship earth. We need to understand them before we kill the life in the oceans or disrupt it. What im trying to do is get people interested in next will exploration here on earth. And realize the ocean is this significant mud down there we need to understand. This morning there was a story on the bbc about this commet, raising the question of finding out how scientifically life may have begun on this planet. And maybe looking for answers in the ocean. Space provides a Great Laboratory for figuring out the early solar system. Most people think life didnt come here from somewhere else. So, where . Was it in a shallow pond hit by lightning . That has been discredited as an idea. People like the idea of hydrothermal. There is a new idea that down in these deep trenches, that could have provided energy for early life on earth. It would have been stable, quiet. Like a big bang moment. It could be, in biology. It is not a widely accepted theory. We were able to find evidence to support it. Im going to come back to that. So, you mentioned titanic and avatar. When was the dream to go to the Mariana Trench . To be the explorer and the first person ever to do it . I think there is a moment where you step on that path, we were going down 16,000 feet on the bismarck wreck. We were almost all the way. Were at the limit of our equipment. And, i just posed the question to the engineer sitting around one day, what would it take to go all the way . To go to 36,000 feet . It didnt exist. Then the conversation got started. One thing leads to another. Before you know it you are going beyond just a napkin drawing to technical drawings. All things begin with a question. An unanswered question. You were out there because on the return, you couldnt land for 10 days. You held off. On the russian trip. They needed a port permit. We were slow rolling. We had time to look at our footage and time to think. It became a sequestered Engineering Group session. Once you have the idea of why not what do you do . For me, once i can visualize the machine, whatever it is, how it would work, how it would feel to be in it, i have to realize that. I will be patient about it. It took seven years from the time we actually started. We started in 2005. I want to find the Development Fund the development of this vehicle. Lets make it happen. So titanic and avatar our parents to this journey. The money enabled you. I make money so i can dive. They were my rich parents. A let me go do my childhood fantasy. How do you start out . Do you assemble a group . It is a small community. I started with a guy i had worked with for a few years named ron. He is one of these polymath genius guys. He quietly figured out many of the breakthrough technologies. Just pay ron and assistance for a few years and work out the hard problems before i get a big team running. That is when the cash starts flying out the door. He figured it out. There was a moment where we went to the next stage, from this moment not it is going to be costing us money. I decided the milestone was when ron completed the sphere. Why a sphere is important . You see a bubble floating through water like champagne, nature loves a sphere. It forms a sphere naturally. That is the best shape to take extreme pressure on the outside. A cylinder wont work. A cube wont work at all. You deal with a sphere. He designed a sphere that might have the possibility to withstand the pressure. He and i designed it together. He did the hard yards. It was an exotic material. We used a gun breech a steal that was developed in the second world war. Called the m26. We knew it was reliable. Meaning . The breach of a big gun. It had to withstand enormous force. Think of the energy and how when the shell goes off, that is the pressure we are talking about. What else . We pressure tested the sphere and a chamber. We realized it works. We tell the Science Community we are doing this. They have to believe us. Now we have to wrap the rest of the sub around that spirit to get it where it is supposed to go. Every moment in this journey, it was james cameeron inside the sphere. Absolutely. It wouldnt be any fun. I knew i was going to be at least one of the pilots. It had to be solo because of the demands of the trip. It was based on the size of the sphere. The vehicle gets bigger around the sphere. So you reach a certain threshold where you cant lift it on and off of the ship anymore. You are into a class of vehicles that you have to tow. [indiscernible] two guys on board. The famous oceanographic pioneers. Don walter became a friend of mine. He is in the arctic. [laughter] here is the interesting thing. To go down, you have these things look like balloons holding it on the surface. It has so much weight that as soon as you release them it goes like a rock. To come back up you have weights in there. Had you not been able to throw them off youd still be on the bottom of the sea. We wouldnt be having this conversation. Little things like that. All of them have to work. Yeah. Typically when things go wrong it is not one thing that fails. It is several in a sequence. We thought of one thing. We may be thought of two things in combination. Fire, flooding. Exactly. I call it healthy paranoia. You think for seven years building this thing all the things that can go wrong and you cant prevent everything and think of everything. There is always some small risk. You drive the risk down to that x factor. You are not going to take risks on the things you could have prevented. Somebody said that if something goes wrong, of certain dimension, and you can fix it, you know it is ok because you would have been crushed to death. Exactly. We are talking about pressure to it would implode at hypersonic speed. Faster than the speed of sound. I wouldnt feel anything. I visualize it as a cut to black. Then it is everybody elses problem. This is exciting stuff. Its exploration. Its the future. Something i have always been fascinated by. This is the man that went to the bottom of the earth. And came back to tell about it and make a movie about it. Not only is it the wonder of exploration, it shows you that to explore you have to practice, practice, practice. Take a look. Im going to do a final check. 18 o2. Co2 is 0. 3 . Fan is running. Looking good. Compass is working. Ok. Ready for descent. Here we go. Release. Release. Release. See ya. My heart rate is up at the moment i tell them to release the sub. I start to drop. Right away, there are so many things to do. Establishing communications and all that. Do you copy . Deep sea challenger. How do you copy . I copy you loud and clear. Copy that. It is like im talking to my grandma. Do you want a biscuit . Those people on top are in a boat on the surface. I am so reliant on the surface team. My life is in their hands. Who are the men . The divers, nick and dave. They became great friends. What is their purpose . They are disconnecting me from those lines as i come off the ship. To get me out of the water they are connecting me. That was a calm launch. Sometimes we are in big seascapes. They were just good divers. I knew i was in safe hands with them. You said about the fear, it is the night before. It is not when you are launched into the capsule. Then it is all thinking about what i have to do. And excitement. Anticipation. The apprehension is when you have nothing to do. The night before. Ive written up my checklist and gone through the dive. On the day you get go fever. Are you this way about all of life . Is this simply this journey a metaphor for the way you have lived . Probably. I think if you like challenges, you put yourself in situations that test you. But, you prepare. I prepared carefully so that the test is not going to be a failure. There is always the moment of apprehension, thinking why did i do this . I know why. I want to have pride in that group that we have done something nobody has done yet. People hearing this interview as it is broadcast, what about religion . Do you have sense of some other being . Im not religious in the traditional sense. When i am in these places, i call it my church. This is where i feel connected to a greater order. When i see things that nobody has seen before, but they are incredible and detailed and perfect organisms, i think there is a higher set of principles that guide this somehow. That is when i feel the mystic takeover in my mind. Here is a clip of you talking about that. It is chasing me. You are a mighty warrior. Each one of these chance encounters is a gift from the ocean. I am grateful. This is my church. Down here, alone, i feel a power of natures imagination. It is greater than our own. A couple of things, there was a tragic moment in this. A helicopter taking aerials went down. You lost two friends, two colleagues, two comrades. They were not just my friends. They were mentors and role models. They represent the value system that as an explorer i strove for. These were guys who had fearlessly gone to the face of great whites, diving in subs, their whole careers. And they brought such enthusiasm as filmmakers, both of them, they were such incredible representatives of the ocean and exploration. It called everything into question. You had to bring everybody together. Do we go forward . We were doing this potentially risky operation. It called into question do we take these risks . We sat as a group and we face risks, all of us. As a group we said this is what these guys stood for. They believed the risks are worth it to expand the circle of human knowledge. This is what exploration is. We dont honor them by stopping. We honor them by fulfilling the task. It wasnt arrived at lightly. It is one thing to decide to go forward. It is another thing to find the will to do it after you have been through it. This did not come from an accident in terms of the work going down. This came from a helicopter. The great irony, here are these guys wouldve been these incredibly risky situations, have done the risk evaluation, and this was the equivalent of getting in their car in the morning and driving to work. It was a helicopter and you had flown many times. I had flown in it with him. It was just one of those freak accidents. When i asked about whether it is a metaphor for how you approach life in terms of risk and being able to reduce risk, do you drive fast . I used to. Do you test the elements . Are you a pilot . I used to. I think earlier in my life when i was a teenager, a young adult, i was an adrenaline junkie. I put that behind me. Probably being a father and having kids, you are responsible not only for your life and others. You think of your life differently. Being a director, doing big stunts and all that, you have to change. You have to embrace a culture of safety and rigor to keep people alive. That translated. I didnt find it a strange experience on my First Expedition when i had to deal with those disciplines. If youre keeping people alive as an action filmmaker, now im out at sea, and there are real hazards. I apply the same rules. When did you make the decision that we are Going Forward . Did everything, tried everything. We are as perfect as we believe we can being. I dont think there was a threshold where we would have stopped had it not been for andrews crash. We were racing to meet the deadline to get the sub together. We busted a few deadlines. We pulled it together in a couple of months. I think there was a moment where we first put it in the water that it was a milestone. I said to everybody, right now it is a piece of sculpture. We put in the water and it becomes a submarine. That will be a threshold. We wont go back. We drag it down to the pier, stuck it in sydney harbour, and put it down one meter. You had partners in this. Rolex joined you in what purpose . I brought rolex in. They had been involved in supporting the initial dive to the challenger in 1960. It survived the 16,000 pounds of pressure and came back ticking. I said do you want to do that again . It reflected the dna of their brand, the initial dive watch. They jumped in. We could not have done it without them. It is expensive. The building of the sub, the cost, the fuel. We had National Geographic and we had rolex. They built a watch for me to take down. The watch you have on . It was similar. This is a special commemorative watch they did for the expedition. They built one to withstand the pressure. National geographic is the place it is going to be seen. What was their contribution . They funded the film. The film funded the expedition. That is the cousteau model. That is what he initiated. He said im going to film this and put it on tv. But im going to take scientists. I always engage the Science Community. I tell them, you can come, but you must publish something. Weve already had a couple of papers go out on this. I was thinking about this. You never met jacques cousteau. The one thing you wanted. But he was for you an icon. A lot of kids these days dont know who he is. Why 3d . 3d immerses you in this situation. For action movies it is great. You feel like you are right there with the characters. It is especially great for documentaries. As an audience member it draws you in the frame. You become part of the journey. You watch the film. I should point this out. You could not stand up inside. You had to be lowered in there. Your table is bigger than the sphere was. The inside is 43 inches. It is packed full of electronic equipment. The trip total was six hours. How do you prepare for that . It is a mental discipline. I did a lot of diving where i was cramped in. I did a fair bit of yoga. I did running. You dont want to get deep vein thrombosis. The expedition doctor was concerned about that. We did biomedical testing in the simulator. Trying to reduce the risk. How do you photograph when you are down there . You had two cameras. You took selfies to the next level. You had four cameras on the inside, two inside so people could see you. Those created the 3d. And one red epic camera. It is a 3d image on me. Outside we put a 3d camera on the end of a 6. 5 foot boom so i could turn it around. So i could shoot making contact with the bottom and look up. Theres nobody else down there to do it. I want to talk about what you saw and what you felt. Here is another clip. 1. 3 knots. Im going to get some speed here. 35,200 feet. 488 feet to go. All lights facing down. Lets get the spotlighting do