3 days ago
James Cameron wants to put you in the middle of a nuclear bomb blast
'This might be the most challenging film I ever make.' So says James Cameron of his latest project, Ghosts of Hiroshima, a planned movie based on a book of the same name, which is published today to mark the 80th anniversary of the first atom bomb attack in history.
The book, by Cameron's long-time friend and colleague Charles Pellegrino, draws on more than 200 interviews with survivors of both the Hiroshima blast and that in Nagasaki three days later. Cameron faces two main questions in the transition from page to screen: how best to film something that is almost unfilmably horrific, and how many people will have the appetite to go and see it?
If anyone has the capacity to do justice to the first of these questions, it's Cameron. His movies combine cutting-edge technology and vast-scale spectacle like no other director, and he will need to draw on both. 'I'm going to shoot it in 3D, if need be,' he told the DiscussingFilm website. 'I want to show you what it was like. I'm going to make it as real for you as I can.'
3D is a technique on which filmmakers and audiences alike are divided, but Cameron's Avatar films are widely held up as examples of the technology done well. Avatar 3: Fire and Ash is due out in December, and Cameron hopes to film Ghosts of Hiroshima before the fourth instalment in the series is released in 2029. 'If I do my job perfectly [on Ghosts], everybody will walk out of the theatre [in horror] after the first 20 minutes,' Cameron told Rolling Stone. 'So that's not the job. The task is to tell it in a way that's heartfelt, in a way that the book does it, which engages you, and you project yourself into that person's reality for a moment.'
But equally he has told Deadline: 'I'm not going to be sparing, I'm not going to be circumspect. I want to do for Hiroshima and Nagasaki what Steven Spielberg did for the Holocaust and D-Day [with Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan respectively]. He said, I'm going to make it as intense as I can make it. You've got to use everything at your cinematic disposal to show people what happened.'
Cameron's interest in nuclear warfare goes back to childhood. As a boy growing up on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in the 1960s, he knew that the huge hydroelectric power plant there was a target for Soviet missiles. 'It was my first glimpse that the world was much more complex and much less safe than the little happy family nest I had grown up in.'
In college, he saw a French documentary about Hiroshima. 'I remember a trolley, a burnt-out trolley, its floor filled with a pile of skulls. That image became a primal image in [1984's] The Terminator. It's actually one of the first images of the movie, and then again later in [the protagonist] Kyle Reese's memory: this idea that there's this trauma you can't escape. And then, of course, we played it all out in Terminator 2 [1991], actually showing the effects of the nuclear weapons.'
That Terminator 2 scene is indelible: the heroine, Sarah Connor, dreaming of witnessing a nuclear blast at a playground before being incinerated herself. In the film, Linda Hamilton's character bursts into flame and then turns to ash, before the blast burns the tissue off her skeleton. It was so accurate that Cameron got a letter from researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, who wanted to congratulate him for 'getting it right'.
All this, of course, happened for real twice in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both cities experienced the unimaginable: survivors wandering around, numb, dazed and blinded, while breathing in the vaporised remains of their neighbours; medical authorities completely overwhelmed and unable to triage correctly, not just because there were so many casualties but also because they literally didn't know what they were dealing with.
The book focuses on those who survived both blasts, though they were initially not so easy to track down. 'They kept their heads down, the survivors,' Cameron has said. 'There was almost a shame associated with Japan's defeat and the abdication of the emperor, and the nuclear weapons were pivotal in that. People didn't tell for years and years afterwards that they were survivors. To be a double survivor? Well, these guys didn't put their hands up. They weren't famous in Japan. It took a lot of investigation to find them.'
There was Kenshi Hirano, a newlywed in 1945 who found only fragments of his wife's bones, still warm from the blast, in the ruins of their house in Hiroshima. Feeling duty-bound to take them to her parents, he boarded a train to Nagasaki, the bones in a ceramic bowl that her parents had given them, and arrived in time to be hit by the second bomb.
And there was Tsutomu Yamaguchi. 'He was in Hiroshima on work, but he lived in Nagasaki,' Cameron told Rolling Stone. 'He had blast effects, he had burns. He went back to Nagasaki to report to his work at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and he was in the process of telling his supervisor that Hiroshima was gone, vanished in a flash. The supervisor said, 'That's not possible. You're an engineer. You know that can't happen.''
Yamaguchi then turned to the other workers in the room and said, 'If you see a bright, silent flash, get down. Don't stand up to see what happened. Get down on the floor.' The people in that room survived when the second bomb hit; everyone else in the Mitsubishi plant died.
Cameron and Pellegrino visited Yamaguchi in hospital in 2010, only a week or so before he died in his mid-90s – 'probably the most improbable statistic in history, having survived two nuclear blasts at close range'. Standing at his bedside, Cameron says that he and Pellegrino 'both felt that we were being challenged to accept a duty, to take a baton'.
Having spent decades after the attacks keeping his story secret, Yamaguchi had begun in later life to spread the word. 'He wasn't a great orator, but his message was very simple. 'I was bombed twice by nuclear weapons and I survived. Maybe I survived for a reason, to do this. I'm able to forgive the people that dropped those bombs. And I'm able to forgive it happening to me and to my family and to my city and to my nation. If I can forgive that, you can forgive anything.''
What's going on around us, of course, brings nuclear weapons to the front and centre of our consciousness right now. The US and Israel attacked Iran in June in order to derail its progress towards becoming a nuclear power, and Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. The success of Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer – seven Oscars and $975m (£732m) at the box office – reflects this fascination, though Cameron has professed himself disappointed with that movie's reluctance to focus on the victims of the bombs.
'It was a bit of a moral cop-out,' he has said. 'Because it's not like Oppenheimer didn't know the effects. There's only one brief moment where he sees some charred bodies in the audience and then the film goes on to show how it deeply moved him. But I felt that it dodged the subject. I don't know whether the studio or Chris felt that that was a third rail that they didn't want to touch, but I want to go straight at the third rail. I'm just stupid that way.'
This taps into the second main question around Cameron's proposed movie: how many people will have the stomach to go and see it? Would Oppenheimer have been so successful if it had shown more of the horrors? Cameron says that Ghosts of Hiroshima will be a resolutely and deliberately apolitical film. 'I don't want to get into the politics of 'Should it have been dropped? Should they have done it?' and all the bad things Japan did to warrant it – the atrocities in the prison camps and in Nanking – or any of that kind of moralising and politicising,' he told Deadline.
But a man who's directed three of the four highest-grossing movies of all time in Titanic and the two Avatar films can clearly afford a modest box-office performance, especially since he clearly sees this project's value as more than just commercial. 'It's so important right now for people to remember what these weapons do,' he explains.
Cameron has always had his finger on the pulse. The Terminator franchise concerns AI overreach and sentience, Avatar is a paean to environmentalism, and Ghosts of Hiroshima confronts the nuclear question – the three areas that affect the positioning of the doomsday clock, which is now standing closer to midnight than at any time in history.
But he finds hope in the détente of the 1980s. 'Ronald Reagan listened. He saw The Day After [a 1983 ABC television film depicting nuclear war between the US and the USSR] and it disturbed him. He couldn't sleep, and he put certain things into motion that actually made a difference. I think you have to reach the humanity of the people in charge.'
He adds that Pellegrino signs every email to him with the word omoiyari, a Japanese principle of empathy in action. 'It's not just feeling empathetic or sympathetic. It's you must take the challenge. You must stand up. You must do something.'
