OceanGate's co-founder says James Cameron — who's criticized the company's now-imploded Titan sub — 'knows nothing' about company's vessel

• OceanGate's co-founder said that filmmaker James Cameron "knows nothing" about the company's sub.
• Guillermo Söhnlein called Cameron an "experienced ocean explorer," but said he doesn't know about OceanGate.

Hollywood filmmaker and underwater explorer James Cameron — who has publicly criticized the design of OceanGate's ill-fated Titan submersible — "knows nothing" about the deep-sea vessel, a co-founder of the ocean exploration company said Thursday.

OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein told Insider that a handful of people, including Cameron, have cast a negative shadow over Söhnlein's former company and its Titan submersible that imploded last month, killing all five people on board.

"The media's whole spin on how unsafe this was is based on Dave Lockridge [OceanGate's former director of marine operations], Will Kohnen from Marine Technology Society, Jim Cameron, who knows nothing about any of this stuff … and [submersible expert] Karl Stanley — four people," Söhnlein said.

Söhnlein called Cameron "a very experienced ocean explorer and a sub guy himself, but knows nothing about OceanGate and that stuff."

In the aftermath of the Titan sub disaster, Cameron has spoken out about OceanGate and said that he and several engineers had warned the company that the vessel could lead to "catastrophic failure."

The "Titanic" movie director is a highly experienced ocean explorer and has voyaged to the Titanic wreck site in the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean 33 times.

Cameron, a principal in the Florida-based company Triton Submarines, co-designed and co-engineered the Deepsea Challenger submersible that he piloted in 2012 to the ocean's deepest point in the Mariana Trench.

After the Titan went missing while on an expedition to the Titanic and was determined to have imploded, it emerged that industry experts had flagged warnings and safety concerns about the sub and its carbon fiber and titanium hull.

"Over the course of 15 years that [OceanGate's] probably employed like 200 and has dived dozens of people," Söhnlein told Insider. "And you're only hearing from four people."

He added, "Common sense seems to indicate these must be the vocal minority because there are a lot of other people that aren't speaking up who disagree with those four."

Söhnlein founded OceanGate with CEO Stockton Rush — the mastermind behind the Titan and one of the five passengers who was killed in the tragedy.

"The world only had one foremost expert on using carbon fiber to go in the deep oceans and he's gone now," said Söhnlein, referring to Rush.