'He wanted fame, first and foremost, to fuel his ego'

A new documentary tells the story of 2023’s OceanGate Titanic submarine disaster, and the mistakes and hubris of CEO Stockton Rush. Tom Murray speaks to its director

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It’s the popping that sends shivers down your spine in Netflix’s new documentary about the doomed Titan submarine. Pop… pop, pop. This is the sound of the vessel’s hull disintegrating, individual strands of carbon fibre snapping apart as the unbearable weight of the Atlantic Ocean heaves in on all sides. As Titan: The OceanGate Disaster shows, these audible omens of catastrophe were repeatedly and unforgivably ignored, until finally the submersible imploded on 18 June 2023, killing all five passengers on board.

When news first broke that the tourist expedition to view the wreck of the Titanic had gone missing off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, the story quickly spiralled into a roundthe-clock media frenzy. One channel (NewsNation) even had a ticking countdown to the moment the vessel would run out of oxygen. Over the four days the submersible was missing, the tragedy transformed into a spectacle, with endless memes, conspiracy theories, and glib commentary overshadowing the real human cost.

For documentary filmmaker Mark Monroe, the viral nature of the coverage was as unsettling as the tragedy itself. “I was, just as a casual observer of news, kind of horrified at the whole idea,” he tells me. “I don’t subscribe to any aspect of social media. I think it’s a bad thing. So it became this kind of focal point for some of my anger over social media, in the way that the story became so swept up in everyone’s reaction to it.”

Monroe, the writer behind Oscar winners The Cove (2009) and Icarus (2018), and nicknamed Hollywood’s “documentary whisperer”, joined the Netflix project when he heard the producers had secured a key figure: David Lochridge. Lochridge is an ex-Royal Navy diver and became OceanGate’s chief pilot and director of marine operations until he was sacked in 2018. “He’s the reason I’m here,” says Monroe. “He was front and centre in terms of the building of this company.”