Uh oh! James Cameron — the self-professed "King of the World" after snagging those Titanic trophies at 1998's Oscars — is doing another shipwreck movie. Instead of an "unsinkable" ocean liner, though, he'll tell the tale of the doomed German WWII destroyer, Bismarck, in his Discovery Channel special due out this fall.
Note that James Cameron's Expedition: Bismarck is a documentary, not a scripted drama. "I think that in the wake of the Titanic movie, it would be well advised not to do another motion picture about a sinking ship maybe for a little while," he joked to reporters at the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, Calif. "So let's just call it... a temporary moratorium on that concept."
Cameron — who has traveled to the bottom of the Atlantic to film the Bismarck — says the battleship is quite a sight. "It looks like it's sitting there ready to do battle 15,000 feet down," he marveled. "It's still as aggressive and angry and mighty as it ever was. So it's really a visually stunning wreck. It was very exciting to explore and figure out how to image it."
The director knows TV viewers may yawn at the prospect of seeing yet another "rusted steel tomb." But he's lined up interviews with still-living Bismarck sailors, promising we'll "see these men confront a demon that they had probably not had to... since they were very young men. And that added a really powerful dimension to it."
