James Cameron, left, with late Australian screenwriter Andrew Wight.
Garry Maddox, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
The Australian filmmaker Andrew Wight led an adventurous life.
With James Cameron of Titanic and Avatar fame as executive producer, he co-wrote and produced the 3D cave diving thriller Sanctum, which took more than $100 million around the world last year.
The film was inspired by a caving expedition led by Wight in which 15 divers were trapped by floodwater beneath the Nullarbor Plain for two days before being rescued in 1988.
"It was a harrowing experience," he said at the time of the film's release. "I was on a small ledge about the size of a dining room table with the roof just at head [level] and it was inching ever closer down as the cave was collapsing.
"There was a point where I thought it was all over."
Preparing to shoot an even more adventurous film with Cameron, Wight, 52, and American cinematographer Mike deGruy, 60, were killed in a helicopter crash near Berry on the south coast on Saturday.
Announcing that Wight would head the Australian office of his 3D company last month, Cameron revealed they had started filming the feature-length documentary Deep Challenge.
They were planning sea trials for a new submersible that Cameron and a co-pilot would take to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the world's oceans, north of Papua New Guinea.
It is believed Wight and deGruy were taking off to film in the Jervis Bay area when the helicopter crashed.
Wight, an Australian Adventurer of the Year medal winner and Emmy nominee, was Cameron's producing partner on such documentaries as Ghosts of the Abyss, Aliens of the Deep, Expedition: Bismarck, and Last Mysteries of Titanic.
Cameron said both men were world-renowned documentary filmmakers specialising in ocean exploration and conservation.
"They were my deep-sea brothers and both were true explorers, who did extraordinary things and went places no human being has been," he said. "They died doing exactly what they loved most, heading out to sea on a new and personally challenging expedition."
Cameron said Wight was so safety conscious that it was "cruelly ironic" he died piloting a helicopter.
Talking about his new appoinment last month, Wight was enthusiastic about the new 3D documentary.
"Whereas Sanctum was fiction, this one is the real deal and it's going to have Jim in it," he said.
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