Andrew Revkin of the Times interviewed Cameron about his team of experts and the BP spill. An excerpt:
In a 20-minute phone conversation on Friday, the film director described the meeting of deep-sea minds, which took place on Tuesday and has resulted in a memo, signed by the participants, that he provided to the Coast Guard and other agencies overseeing BP’s efforts to stanch the seabed gusher. He told me he’ll make the document public once the agencies have had time to review it.
Cameron also defended his involvement on the issue and clarified his views of BP, which he said were distorted by media coverage of his talk midweek at a digital media conference. Here are a few of his thoughts:
On his statement that he initially reacted in horror to the sequence of failed efforts at stopping the oil by “thinking those morons don’t know what they’re doing”:
That was taken out of context in a way that sounded like I was slamming BP. In a roundabout way, I was explaining that while I started out the way everyone did on this, I’d revolved to the point where I respect the engineering work that’s been under way.
But he added that this didn’t mean BP should be trusted, on its own, to provide a full picture of what was going on on the sea floor. He said it would not be difficult to coordinate independent remotely-piloted vehicles safely monitoring the situation:
Sure, thev’ve got lot of cameras down there, but do we want BP choosing where they’re pointed? It’s easy to coordinate multiple cameras on the seabed. It’s nothing more dire than combat. Reporters and the media are allowed in combat situations. Why not when a foreign corporation working in the U.S. economic zone has created the biggest hit to the environment ever and a huge hit to the economy of the southern states?