Sometimes it’s fun to take an alternate route through history and swap directors or actors for now famous films. Take, for instance, James Cameron, the visionary director of the top two highest grossing films of all time. Once upon a time, Cameron wanted to film Jurassic Park, but someone named Steven Spielberg beat him to the adaptation rights. The Jaws director bested Cameron by a mere few hours. So how would Cameron’s adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel differed?

In speaking to the Huffington Post at the Titanic Museum in Belfast, Cameron confessed to trying to win the director’s chair for Jurassic Park. Although Spielberg beat Cameron to the rights by only a few hours, the Titanic director holds no grudges, saying:

“But when I saw the film, I realised that I was not the right person to make the film, he was. Because he made a dinosaur movie for kids, and mine would have been aliens with dinosaurs, and that wouldn’t have been fair. “Dinosaurs are for 8-year-olds. We can all enjoy it, too, but kids get dinosaurs and they should not have been excluded for that. His sensibility was right for that film, I’d have gone further, nastier, much nastier.”

While a nasty version of Jurassic Park only exists in a parallel universe, Titanic fans will be happy to know that Cameron still has a place in his heart for the infamous vessel and the film he crafted around it. The director talked about how he’s still moved by the numerous stories of heroism that survived that fateful night. Here, he speaks candidly about the engineers about the Titanic and how they helped to save lives: