James Cameron searches for lost city of Atlantis
Atlantis Rising Sunday, Discovery
James Cameron figures the search for Atlantis will continue ... for another 500 years.
This seems to contradict the sense of urgency one gets when watching the promos for Atlantis Rising, the one-hour National Geographic/Discovery Channel documentary Cameron executiveproduced and appears in, opposite investigative journalist and filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici. With a pulsing soundtrack, gripping underwater footage and Jacobovici’s infectious jubilance, it’s easy to get the impression the discovery of the mythical island is imminent.
“We have to investigate more,” says the Oscar-winning filmmaker, in a phone interview with Postmedia. “As western civilization, we’ve been intrigued by the Atlantis myth for the last 500 years or so, since Plato’s work resurfaced and was investigated again in the Renaissance. People have been talking about Atlantis ever since and putting forward hypotheses. I think we’re going to be looking for Atlantis for another 500 years. In the process we’ll fill in that picture of what was going on in the pre- Greek, pre-Egyptian, earlyMediterranean time. Was it one civilization? Was it a number of civilizations? ... Maybe we’ll find some clay tablets or something carved in rock that we can translate and we will start to get a sense of their literature and that sort of thing and the picture will fill in. But these things fill in very slowly.”
In Atlantis Rising, which airs March 12 on Discovery, Cameron first appears on the set of what is presumably an Avatar sequel, filming motion-capture sequences. Tied up with what he calls his “day job,” Cameron leaves the hands-on exploration to Jacobovici and his team. The Israeli-Canadian journalist sets off on a globe-trotting quest to investigate various locations that may hold evidence to prove Atlantis was not mythical, but based on a real civilization. The crew travels to the islands of the Azores, Santorini, Malta and Sardinia and into the Strait of Gibraltar. Throughout, Cameron mostly appears as a voice on a cellphone or on a computer screen during Skype calls from a giddy Jacobovici, often acting as a skeptic to counter his friend’s enthusiasm.
“I said ‘we’re going to be the Siskel and Ebert of archeologists. I’ll be the skeptic and you be the enthusiastic one. I’ll be the brakes and you be the throttle,’” Cameron says. “As a filmmaker ... you can also make sweeping claims that don’t require the kind of peer review that you need to publish a scientific paper. But sometimes that goads the science community to take a closer look at things.”
However skeptical he may be, Cameron doesn’t downplay the discoveries made in the documentary. The most compelling, and the one that has already made headlines, was of six bronze-age stone anchors the team found in the Strait of Gibraltar off the coast of Spain.
“What we uncovered points strongly to some kind of major trading civilization 4,000 years ago or so outside the Mediterranean on the Atlantic coast,” Cameron says. “There’s been a lot of thought in the archeological community that the city of Tartessos in Southern Spain — which is now buried under mud essentially by some kind of catastrophe that might have been, let’s say, a large tsunami — could have some basis in the Atlantean myth. So that would be a situation where you would want to go back with deep ground-penetrating radar and other modern tools and start looking under that mud and seeing how extensive those city ruins are and see if we can create a link to those bronze-age anchors.”
While Cameron has been interested in Atlantis since he was a child growing up in Ontario, he became even more intrigued after shooting his Oscar-winning epic Titanic in 1997. Charles Pellegrino was a consultant on the film and also wrote the book Unearthing Atlantis, which theorized that certain aspects of the bronze-age Minoan civilization on Crete and what is now Santorini fit the Atlantean myth. It was the first time that Cameron began to suspect that Plato’s Atlantis, long believed to be a fictional cautionary tale, may have been based in real history.
“Our joint goal, Simcha and I, is to use filmmaking and storytelling and media as a way to channel funding toward archeological investigation that is so dreadfully poorly funded,” he says.
“Our culture just doesn’t put enough emphasis on it. I think we collectively feel that everything is known, everything has been dug up, we’ve got a pretty good picture of the past when we really don’t. There was the golden age of archeology where people were uncovering the Egyptian tombs and the mummies and that sort of thing and that created a huge amount of public interest. But now it’s sort of tapered off and National Geographic is, I think, the last bastion of keeping our excitement and our curiosity alive for archeology.”
Our joint goal is to use filmmaking and storytelling as a way to channel funding toward archeological investigation.