James Cameron has spoken further about his long-gestating project focused on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and in the process, taken a pointed swipe at Oppenheimer, the Oscar-winning historical epic from Christopher Nolan.
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Cameron on Oppenheimer: “A Bit of a Moral Cop-Out”
In a candid interview with Deadline, Cameron expressed admiration for Nolan’s filmmaking but criticised the film for not confronting the consequences of the atomic bomb directly enough.
“Yeah…it’s interesting what he stayed away from,” Cameron said. “Look, I love the filmmaking, but I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop out.”
“Because it’s not like Oppenheimer didn’t know the effects,” he continued. “He’s got one brief scene in the film where we see — and I don’t like to criticise another filmmaker’s film – but 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.”
Ghosts of Hiroshima: The Film Cameron Plans to Make
Cameron’s upcoming film will be based on Ghosts of Hiroshima, the novel by Charles R. Pellegrino due for release on August 5 — the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. The book chronicles the devastation and aftermath from the Japanese civilian perspective. Cameron revealed he’s been making notes for 15 years and still hasn’t written the script, but the intent is clear.
“I just think it’s so important right now for people to remember what these weapons do. This is the only case where they’ve been used against a human target,” he said. “Setting aside all the politics and the fact that I’m going to make a film about Japanese people… I want to keep it as a kind of neutral witness to an event that actually happened to human beings, so that we can keep that flame alive, that memory.”
Among the true stories he hopes to include is that of Kenshi Hirano — a Hiroshima survivor who, after finding his wife’s remains, boarded a train to deliver her ashes to her parents in Nagasaki, only to be caught in the second blast. “I want to go on his journey, what that must have meant to him and the loss that he was already feeling.”
Cameron also referenced Steven Spielberg’s approach in Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan as a benchmark for how he intends to depict real-world horror: “He showed it the way it happened… You’ve got to use everything at your cinematic disposal to show people what happened… This is true horror, because it happened.”
He said the goal is to make audiences feel the full weight of what occurred: “I want to make the movie so that people in a movie theater feel they’ve just been through this experience.” The film, he added, may end with a stark reminder: “The weapons currently deployed in the world today are from a thousand to 10,000 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb and the Nagasaki bomb.”
Cameron is currently in post-production on the third film in his Avatar franchise, Avatar: Fire and Ash, set for release in December this year. It’s not yet confirmed when Ghosts of Hiroshima will move into production.
