His movies have grossed over $6.3 billion, with the upcoming sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, sure to add to that figure.

Whilst he is an award-winning filmmaker, he’s also known for his excursions to the bottom of the ocean, which has bled back into his movies.

One rumor doing the rounds online suggests that Cameron was actually in a submarine, deep underwater on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center was struck by a terrorist-controled plane and collapsed in New York City.

Newsweek scratched at this piece of Hollywood trivia to see if there’s any truth behind it.

The Claim

Every time James Cameron comes back into the news cycle, a familiar story relating to his whereabouts on 9/11 starts to resurface online.

Countless Reddit threads are dedicated to this, as people find out his supposedly unexpected location on one of the darkest days in American history.

The claim that Cameron was deep under water on September 11 is in itself curious, but throw in another celebrity and it gets even stranger.

During an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience in August 2020, guest Rob Lowe claimed that it wasn’t just Cameron in the submarine.

He suggests the late actor Bill Paxton, who appeared in the 1997 movie Titanic, was also deep underwater on 9/11. “Bill Paxton was on the deck of the Titanic when 9/11 happened,” he told Rogan on his podcast.

Paxton died in 2017 at the age of 61 following complications from surgery.

The Facts

Cameron has documented many of his journeys to the bottom of the ocean in documentaries like Deepsea Challenge 3D. In the 2003 documentary movie Ghosts of the Abyss, he and Bill Paxton travel down together to the depths of the ocean together, just as Lowe had described.

Cameron himself has spoken about the experience of being underwater during the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. In 2012 he discussed his experience with the German news outlet Spiegel International.

“The day the 9/11 terrorists murdered 3,000 people in New York and Washington, I was just diving to the Titanic,” Cameron said. “Twelve hours later, I came back to our mothership. I was presumably the last man in the Western Hemisphere to learn about what had happened.”

Referring to Paxton’s experience that day, it appears Lowe muddled up some of the details, however.

As the New York Times, the Guardian and others wrote in 2002 and since, Paxton was “on a ship in the North Atlantic, directly above the wreck of the Titanic.”

An interview with one of the people on the submarine that day corroborates that Paxton wasn’t onboard the submarine, though Cameron was.

Official historian for the Titanic Historical Society, Don Lynch, explained his personal experience of the day during an interview for President Reagan’s Foundation. In the short clip, he explains how Paxton was the one who broke the news about 9/11 to them after they got back to the surface.

“It was the strangest feeling that I had left the surface, and I had left one world behind. When I came back, it was a new planet. It was a whole different world and there was no going back again,” Lynch said.

The movie Ghosts of the Abyss, also known as Titanic 3D: Ghosts of the Abyss, shows the scene where the filming crew finds out about the tragedy of 9/11, and they compare the moment with the tragedy of the Titanic sinking.

The scene occurs towards the end of the film, around the 1 hour 24 minutes mark.

The Ruling

True.

The story often repeated on social media and movie blogs is true: James Cameron was in a submarine, exploring the Titanic wreck the moment September 11 attacks took place.

Contrary to some versions of the story, actor Bill Paxton was not underwater with him, but was instead on the ship stationed above the wreck, and informed the director about the tragedy when he and his crew surfaced.

FACT CHECK BY NEWSWEEK