In 2003, years after the Titanic film was released to the public, actor Bill Paxton opened up about how he went on a submersible ride to experience everything firsthand as well.
The interview was ahead of the documentary Ghosts of the Abyss release. The documentary showed director James Cameron discussing his inspiration for the film and taking several people, which included Paxton, on unscripted dives to the Titanic’s site.
“Each dive, I had to kind of look myself in the mirror and go ‘OK, are you ready for this?’” Paxton said in the 2003 interview. “It’s one of those things where Jim [Cameron] asked me in passing to go and…the opportunity of a lifetime. I jumped at it,” the actor explained.
“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 went on to even talk about how comfortable the inside of the submersible he dived in was. He said it was “relatively comfortable,” before noting 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 even 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 he talked about the “personal story” attached to the sunken ship.
Posted by R.I.P Bill Paxton on Sunday, June 13, 2021
“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.”
Never-before-seen pictures of Princess Diana
People all across the world fell in love with Princess Diana, the adored woman of her era.
We invite you to take a look down memory lane as we examine some uncommon and intriguing images that provide a deeper look into her remarkable life.
These are the kinds of moments that will make you smile and feel good.
Diana is pictured here on a skiing trip to Austria with her kids, Harry and William. This photograph was shot shortly after Harry turned nine years old. He’s adorable, and the whole family is stunning!
Diana and her children visited Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands in 1990, together with her sister’s children. The island was owned by Richard Branson of Virgin.
Diana knows how to have a good time. Look at this lovely photo of her and Harry visiting the amusement park Thorpe Park in 1992.
Diana was dubbed “The People’s Princess” by many. She was involved in numerous humanitarian endeavors, offering a good example of how a kind and loving person should act.
Princess Diana is shown here visiting an Orthopedic workshop in Luanda, Angola, and sitting with land mine victims.
We could go on and on about Diana’s wonderful photographs. This one was taken in 1971, while she was on vacation in Itchenor, West Sussex.
Meanwhile, this one was taken outside Diana’s flat in Coleherne Court, London, before to her engagement to Charles.
Harry is pictured here sticking out his tongue to the crowd gathering around Buckingham Palace. Diana seemed to be taken aback.
Barbour is still a popular royal apparel brand, although Princess Diana may have worn it best.
Diana adored Barbour, and her journey to the Outer Hebrides in Scotland in 985 was the ideal occasion to wear her Barbour-style waxed cotton jacket.
Jayne Fincher, a royal photographer who captured some of Princess Diana’s most memorable images, trailed the royal couple everywhere they went. She’d rented a jet to travel to the Outer Hebrides, where Charles and Diana were on official business.
“When I caught up,” says Fincher, “Charles said, ‘Where have you been?’”
The Outer Hebrides are subject to extremes of wind and rain, which Princess Diana experienced during her visit there in 1985.But she looks great in the images from the trip, and photographer Jayne noticed something after going over the negatives.
“You don’t see Diana dressed like that very often. She looked so happy. It was pouring rain, but her makeup was perfect and un-smudged. I looked a mess, as usual,” she said.
The photo below was taken during Diana’s last summer alive. She is seen with her boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed on a boat in St. Tropez, France, jumping into the water.
Diana will be remembered as a truly great and loving human being.
Please share this post with your friends and family on Facebook to commemorate her!
Leave a Reply