James Cameron has debunked the rumors that he is working on a film about the recent implosion of the OceanGate submersible, an accident that took the lives of all five people on board, and called the claims “offensive”. The director and noted deep-sea expert tweeted an impassioned note to followers on Saturday after the Sun published a report titled: “DIVE DEEP Titanic director James Cameron in talks with major streaming network to create drama series on doomed Titan sub.” The piece claimed that an “insider” told the publication that Cameron “is first choice for director” of a film about the events on the Titan submersible. “He told the story of the Titanic so compassionately it feels like a natural step for him to take this on. Retracing the steps of those on board the Titan is a massive undertaking but there would be a lot of time, money and resources dedicated to it,” the so-called insider said. In his response, Cameron said he doesn’t “respond to offensive rumors in the media usually, but I need to now.” “I’m NOT in talks about an OceanGate film, nor will I ever be,” he concluded in the brief missive. In June, the OceanGate Expeditions founder, Stockton Rush, descended into the Atlantic Ocean, alongside four others, in a submersible called the Titan with the goal of viewing the wreck of the Titanic. Tragically, the submersible lost contact with the surface during their descent, prompting an international search and rescue effort. Several days later, the US Coast Guard confirmed that they had found pieces of the submersible on the ocean floor and concluded that the five crew members onboard were likely killed instantly in a “catastrophic implosion”. After news broke of the implosion, many looked to Cameron for a response as he is not only a deep-sea and Titanic expert – he has made 33 dives himself to the wreck and alleges to have spent “more time on the ship than the captain did back in the day” – but was also a friend of the Titan dive pilot, Paul-Henri Nargeolet. In an interview with ABC News after the confirmation that the sub had imploded, Cameron said that “many 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 and so on,” he continued. “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. For us, a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site with all the diving that’s going on all around the world, I think it’s just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal.” Cameron went on to talk more about the sub’s myriad issues in subsequent interviews and even drew parallels between the Titan catastrophe and the 1912 one on the Titanic. “Titanic fascinates us because it seems like such a colossal failure of some kind of system back then, and 1,500 people paid the price for it,” Cameron told Good Morning America in late June. “The warnings were not heeded. They were warned about the ice, they had radio, Marconigrams, the Titanic captain was handed multiple warnings of ice ahead [yet] he steamed full ahead into a known ice field on a pitch dark night with no moon. If that isn’t a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is.” The Sun did not immediately respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.