Best known as the director of some of the highest-grossing films of all time, James Cameron is also a huge fan of the deep sea. So much so that the filmmaker responsible for “Titanic” (1997) has already dived 33 times to visit the wreckage of the ship – and even released a documentary about it in 2003, “Ghosts of the Abyss”.

But in 2012 he told The New York Times about his expedition to the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the ocean nearly 11,000 meters below the surface. “You’re going to one of the most unforgiving places on the planet,” he said. “It’s not like I can call a tow truck to pick you up.”

Cameron’s love of the sea and the Titanic goes back to his childhood. So much so that the director declared to “Playboy” magazine in 1999 that the film with Leonardo DiCaprio was never his initial objective.

“I did ‘Titanic’ because I wanted to dive into the wreckage, not because I particularly wanted to do the movie,” he said.

“When I heard that some guys had dived on the Titanic to make a movie for Imax, I said, ‘I’m going to make a Hollywood movie to pay shipping and do the same thing.’

The plan worked. Excluding inflation, “Titanic” has the fourth highest-grossing worldwide box office of all time (the first “Avatar,” also by Cameron, is No. 1).

So much so that he gave birth to the 2003 documentary. In “Ghosts of the Abyss”, the director invited his friend Bill Paxton, who is part of the cast of “Titanic”, to visit and tell about the expeditions to the wreck, which obtained the most detailed images of the sunken ship ever recorded.