James Cameron estimates he's spent more time with the Titanic than the ship's actual captain after 33 voyages to the wreckage

• James Cameron spoke about his trips to the Titanic in the wake of a submersible imploding near the wreckage.
• US Coast Guard on Thursday determined the Titan suffered "catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber."

James Cameron has an interesting way to drive home the point that he's visited the Titanic wreckage on multiple occasions.

"I have been down there many times," he told ABC News on Thursday. "I've made 33 dives, I've actually calculated that I've spent more time on the ship than the captain did back in the day."

Along with directing the Oscar-winning movie "Titanic," Cameron is also a submersible designer.

Earlier this week, a submersible owned by the private-diving company OceanGate, called Titan, carried five people to see the Titanic shipwreck at around 13,000 feet under the surface. It soon lost contact with its mother ship on Sunday afternoon.

On Thursday, the US Coast Guard confirmed that debris from the Titan was discovered and was "consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber" and then a "catastrophic implosion," according to US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger, who led the search. All five passengers are believed to be dead.

After reports surfaced that experts, including OceanGate's director of marine operations, raised concerns about the safety of the vessel years ago, Cameron told ABC: "A number of the top players in the deep-submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers and that needed to be certified and so on."

"I'm struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night, and many people died as a result," Cameron added.

"It's a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded — to take place at the same exact site with all the diving that's going around all around the world. I think it's just astonishing, it's really quite surreal."