Hollywood director James Cameron's offer to help BP with the oil spill may have been rejected, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have something to contribute. The Titanic auteur explains at the All Things Digital D8 conference that "the press spun it in some weird way--that the government was going to Hollywood now they were so desperate. But this had nothing to do with Hollywood. For twenty-two years," he continues, "I've been working with a number if not most of the top people in the very small deep-submurgence communities. They build the subs and I go with them or I build a robotic vehicle take it down ... do exploration, do forensic wreck surveys--I'm really involved in deep-ocean archaeology and wreck forensics and things like that."

In a headline-making sentence, he also calls the BP folks "morons":

Over the last few weeks I've watched--as we all have--with growing, sort of, horror and heaertache, watching what's happening in the Gulf and thinking "those morons don't know what they're doing," (of course, as we all do, watching on the media), and I thought "wait a minute, I know a lot of smart people in deep submergence." Yes, they don't drill for oil, but they  operate all kinds of vehicles, all kinds of electronic optical fiber systems ... and most importantly they know the engineering that it requires to get something done at that depth. I thought why don't I just get all these people that I know together for a brainstorming session. And pretty soon we had 23 people at this meeting.

Have a look:

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Heather Horn