The movie “Titanic” is one of the most famous movies ever made. It’s loved by millions of people all around the world. Bill Paxton, one of the actors in the movie, recently shared his real feelings about something related to the film. Keep reading to find out more about what he said about his experience.
Actor Bill Paxton, known for his role as Brock Lovett, the treasure hunter, in the movie “Titanic,” shared his true feelings about the submersible dive he did for the film. Sadly, Paxton passed away on February 25, 2017, because of a stroke.
In 2003, several years after “Titanic” was released, Paxton talked about his experience going on a submersible ride to see things firsthand. This interview happened before the release of the documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss.” The documentary, led by director James Cameron, explored the inspiration behind the film and took Paxton and others on unscripted dives to the Titanic’s site.
“In the 2003 interview, Paxton said, ‘Each dive, I had to kind of look myself in the mirror and go, ‘OK, are you ready for this?” He explained, ‘It’s one of those things where Jim [Cameron] asked me in passing to go, and…it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. I jumped at it.’
“But then you start thinking about physically what’s going to be required of you to get into a three-man, deep-sea Russian submersible for a 13-hour dive,’ he shared. ‘To go down two and a half miles to a place where the sun has never penetrated. And you’re starting to think, ‘OK, I’ve got young kids. I need to get them to an age where they can support themselves before I do something this crazy.”
“‘Jim is an infectious guy. And also, God, who wouldn’t go on this adventure?’”
He even talked about how comfortable the inside of the submersible he dived in was. He said it was “relatively comfortable,” but also mentioned that “certainly there are things that can go wrong.”
“If they do go wrong, it’s not going to matter anyway. And it’s going to happen so quickly that you’re not even gonna know it happened, probably,” he noted. “These are the thoughts you have going in.”
He also explained how to him, “the price of admission” seemed “kind of low” given the “great experience” you got in return.
“You approach the bow, and then you rise up over it. And you’re looking down on the ship, and you are a ghost of the abyss. And the images stay with you. The images, they really have an effect,” he said before talking about the “personal story” attached to the sunken ship.
“I think all of us at some time in our dreams or even our waking moments have pictured ourselves: What would it have been like to be on that deck? Knowing that the lifeboats had gone away. What were you gonna do? Contemplating your own fate. It’s this ultimate parable of, how would you measure up?” he questioned, calling the Titanic “a perfect tragedy.”
“You think about the people on the water. You think about the people on the boats looking back and seeing the stern of that ship come up out of the water like a city rising up out of the sea,” the actor said. “You think about the people in the water. I swam in the water out there, which was a very disconcerting experience because you think there’s that much ocean underneath you.”
It was clear that the actor knew of all the risks before going into the experience. As for the five men aboard the submersible that dominated headlines in the last week, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that they discovered “presumed human remains.”
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