Titanic movie director James Cameron, who himself visited the Titanic wreckage site over 30 times, has made a statement about the tragedy on the OceanGate Titan submersible that is getting attention.

He shared in a new interview that the 5 passengers aboard the vessel might have known there was an emergency happening in the moments leading up to the “catasrophic event” that claimed their lives. James said that the pilot of the sub “dropped their ascent weights” to try and come back up to the surface, meaning they may have had an idea that they could be compromised. The vessel was about 10,000 feet under the surface when they lost contact.

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“This OceanGate sub had sensors on the inside of a hull to give them a warning when it was starting to crack,” James said during an interview with ABC (via the LA Times). “And I think if that’s your idea of safety, then you’re doing it wrong. They probably had warning that their hull was starting to delaminate, starting to crack. … [W]e understand from inside the community that they had dropped their ascent weights and they were coming up, trying to manage an emergency.”

James added, “People in the community were very concerned about this sub. 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 it needed to be certified. 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.”

The families of the 5 victims all released statements about the tragedy. Our continued thoughts are with them during this time.