Christian Petron celebrates his 80th birthday today. A celebration that invites us to delve back into his incredible journey as a diver-filmmaker, between documentaries for numerous television channels and filming alongside big names in cinema up to the exploration of the Titanic, discover or rediscover his work!
Although he grew up in Annecy, he discovered the underwater world as a teenager on the Mediterranean coast in the historic club that nurtured so many great names in diving: the GEPS in La Ciotat. Spearfishing while freediving opened the doors to this new universe and very quickly he transitioned to scuba diving. He decided that this passion would become his profession! At 18, he joined the Navy to become a mechanical engineer and entered the submariner school to then move towards the profession of a mine clearance diver. In 1969, he left the Navy and quickly embarked on a new adventure with Comex, which allowed him to explore great depths and participate in saturation missions.
Throughout these years, he practiced underwater photography whenever he had the opportunity. Photography increasingly took up space in his life, and in 1975 he created his company Photomarine, allowing him to publish photos for the magazine Oceans. In the early 80s, he made a decision that would change his life and decided to devote himself to underwater video, initially as a cameraman, then as a director and co-producer of numerous documentaries.
20,000 Shoots Under the Sea
This shift toward underwater video first opened the doors of television for him, where he filmed several documentaries, notably for the shows Animals of the World for TF1 and Adventure Diaries, broadcast on Antenne 2. His first steps into the film world took place in 1982 in the film The Under-Gifted on Holiday, directed by Claude Zidi. The diver/director crafted and modified his own equipment, his housings, and lighting to best adapt to shooting conditions and various formats (television, cinema). He thus became one of the pioneers in this field.
Filming underwater sequences multiplied, and in 1986, Christian Petron renamed his company Cinémarine! In 1987, he met Luc Besson and worked on the underwater scenes of a film that would become a legend: The Big Blue. This marked the beginning of a beautiful collaboration between the two men, who would notably reunite with Atlantis, 3 years later. For 30 years, he would participate in over fifty film productions while continuing the production of numerous documentaries, notably for Arte, Canal plus, Thalassa, etc. He would also collaborate several times with Discovery Channel, with which he would film at Scapa Flow, but above all, he would be the technical director of the exploration campaign launched by the channel on the wreck of the Titanic during which he filmed 4 movies and which led him to dive aboard the submersible Nautile to film the mythical ship.
Share his passion
Beyond his career, it’s an unwavering lover of the underwater world, with a contagious smile that almost never leaves him, whom we honor today! A diver who never stops wanting to illuminate the world he loves so much, to capture the subtleties and beauties of it to share and make it accessible to everyone! A first-hour supporter of our magazine, he is one of the most emblematic ambassadors of scuba diving, having notably sponsored the 19th edition of the Paris Diving Show and always being present at numerous festivals dedicated to the marine environment.
And even after retiring in 2016 and leaving cinema behind, he hasn’t abandoned his passion or his desire to share it, quite the contrary! This is evidenced by his involvement in the creation of the Barcelona Underwater Camera Museum (BUCaM) alongside Andrés Clarós, to which he donated a large part of his cameras, as well as recently becoming a co-organizer and co-creator of the Passion Méditerranée festival in Cavalaire-sur-Mer.
