Titanic film director James Cameron has criticised the organisers of the submersible trip to see the wreckage of the ocean liner and the "prolonged and nightmarish" search for survivors, which he called a charade.
The 68-year-old said he predicted the implosion days before debris from the missing vessel was found and said families of the five passengers on-board have been given 'false hope' during the search.
Referring to the organisation of the trip, Mr Cameron compared this week's tragedy to the actual Titanic disaster, where the captain repeatedly ignored warnings about an incoming iceberg and decided to carry on at high speed, leading to thousands of people losing their lives in the water.
Read more: Implosion happened just hours after Titan lost contact
On board the Titanic sub were the British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding as well as UK-based businessman Shahzada Dawood, his son Suleman Dawood, and OceanGate's chief executive and founder Stockton Rush, reportedly with French submersible pilot Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
On Thursday, following a five day search for the Titan which went missing on Sunday, the US Coast Guard announced that the five passengers on board were killed instantly when the submersible suffered a 'catastrophic implosion'. A remote operated submarine from a Canadian ship found debris on the ocean floor, confirming the implosion.
Following the devastating announcement, Mr Cameron told BBC News that the Coast Guard search 'felt like a prolonged and nightmarish charade where people are running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and all this other stuff'.
"I knew that sub was sitting exactly underneath its last known depth and position. That's exactly where they found it," he said. Mr Cameron - who has visited the Titanic's shipwreck over 30 times - went on to share that he had deep concerns about the exploration, The Mirror reports.
"A number of the top players in the deep-submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that needed to be certified and so on," he said.
James said the heartbreaking ordeal reminds him of the actual Titanic sinking in 1912. "I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result," he said.
The famous director explained how he spent "more time on the ship than the captain did back on the day" before explaining how people within the community "were very concerned" about the OceanGate sub. Hours before James spoke out about the disaster, a submarine from a Canadian ship found debris from the OceanGate vessel on the ocean floor, which soon led to the company confirming that they believe the five men onboard had 'sadly been lost'.
The co-founder of OceanGate, the company which designed the missing submarine, Guillermo Sohnlein, responded to the criticism denying that the trip was a joyride.
He told Times Radio: “That would be a great question for Mr (James) Cameron as he’s been down there 30 times and I’m sure, not to put words in his mouth, he would probably say the same thing that I would and what Stockton (Rush) would, is that the intent of all of these missions is not to conduct joyrides down to this wreck.
"Everyone who goes down there has extreme reverence for the wreck as a grave site and, if anything, everyone who goes down there is going there to preserve the memories and to document the grave site itself."
He continued: "The ocean’s a massive, massive environment. Stockton and I used to commiserate about the fact as explorers it provides a fertile ground for exploration because you could drop a sub almost anywhere in the ocean and you’re almost assured of being the first humans to ever set eyes on it.
"The Titanic itself has a kind of mystical kind of draw to it because of the reverence with which everyone has viewed that wreck over the last century since it sank."
OceanGate's statement read: "We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost.
"These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans. Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time. We grieve the loss of life and joy they brought to everyone they knew."
