"The audience will just freak because you are seeing the master super wide shots of the Titanic and we move up to the doorway, down the hall and around the corner and the set is so beautiful. Around the corner, you enter the first-class cabin, it is the core and fiber of the story. The fireplace, the wreckage, the safe that they eventually get to. All of these things are as if I was in a wreck swimming with scuba at night. It magically transported me to the real wreck. I wouldn’t really know the difference. So Cameron once again championed a whole new watermark and Titanic will carry a look and authentic fabric which has never been done before.How many directors do you know who would go to the Titanic itself and jump into a 23-foot long submarine with a seven foot diameter interior space, along with three guys then log 150-200 hours on the bottom two miles down? "
--Al Giddings, Fathoms Magazine

U.S. Signs Agreement to Protect RMS Titanic Wreck Site
June 18, 2004 - Today the United States signed an international agreement that will lead to increased protection of the RMS Titanic wreck site. The four nations most closely associated with the Titanic -- Canada, France, the United Kingdom and the U.S. -- negotiated the agreement, beginning in 1997. Concerted action by these countries would effectively foreclose financing for and the technical ability to conduct unregulated salvage and other potentially harmful activities.

Though it rests 12,000 feet deep, the Titanic continues to capture the attention of people around the globe. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) recently sponsored a scientific expedition to the wreck that included explorer Robert D. Ballard, the man who discovered it in 1985. He attributed newfound damage to the wreck to submarines landing on the deck for salvage operations, filming, and tourism.

The agreement does not apply to the existing collection of 6,000 Titanic artifacts that have been salvaged pursuant to admiralty court orders, but it is consistent with those orders and current scientific principles of historic and cultural resource conservation.