When the King of the World calls you out, you know you screwed up royally.
After BP rejected his offer to help with what is now the worst oil spill in U.S. history, James Cameron publicly ripped the company's brain trust as a bunch of "morons" for failing to stem the gusher a mile below the Gulf of Mexico.
"Over the last few weeks I've watched as we all have with growing sort of horror and heartache watching what's happening in the Gulf and thinking those morons don't know what they're doing," Cameron said at the D8 tech conference Wednesday night.
Tell us how you really feel, Jimbo.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker is no slouch in the deep-sea department, developing new underwater technologies to shoot The Abyss, Titanic and a pair of Imax documentaries while pursuing his passion for ocean exploration.
"For 22 years, I've been working with a number if not most of the top people in the very small deep submergence community...I'm really involved in deep ocean archaeology," he said. "I thought I know a lot of smart people in deep submergence...they know the engineering that's required to get something done at that depth so I thought why don't I get all those people together for a brainstorming session."
Cameron called BP and pitched some outside-the-box ideas. But after receiving a polite brush-off, he went ahead anyway and gathered together 23 people (a "who's-who" of submersible experts) for a private meeting Wednesday at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. The EPA hosted but did not participate in.
"It's a very very complex problem and it starts 18,000 feet down," Cameron said. "It's not a plumbing problem. If they make a mistake they can blow out down below. I can come up in 30 places and then you'll never contain it."
Based on his observations, Cameron said the government needs to have independent ability to "image the site, survey the site and do its own investigation," otherwise "you're asking the perpetrator to give you the video of the crime scene."