James Cameron is finally making his long-awaited return to non-Avatar filmmaking, and he’s doing it with a haunting story about a man in Japan who survived both A-bomb blasts.
The director has hiredMartin Sheen to narrate the audiobook of Ghosts of Hiroshima, a new work by Charles Pellegrino, and Cameron plans to adapt the book into a feature film once Avatar production allows.
“Martin Sheen is my dream come true to read this book for audio,” Cameron said. “His voice-over narration for Apocalypse Now still haunts me, and for a subject this dark, he will give it the gravitas and humanity that it needs.”
The book, set to be released by Blackstone Publishing on August 5th, marking the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.
It tells the staggering true story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a man who survived both atomic bombings in Japan during WWII. He lived through Hiroshima, boarded a train to Nagasaki, and endured a second nuclear blast.
Ghosts of Hiroshima blends personal accounts from survivors with cutting-edge forensic archaeology to examine the aftermath in vivid, often painful detail.
“It’s a subject that I’ve wanted to do a film about, that I’ve been wrestling with how to do it, over the years,” Cameron explained. “I met Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just days before he died. He was in the hospital. He was handing the baton of his personal story to us, so I have to do it. I can’t turn away from it.”
Cameron and Pellegrino, who also collaborated on Titanic and Avatar, and whose scientific writings helped inspire Jurassic Park, pledged during that hospital visit to honor Yamaguchi’s wish: that the world remember and learn from what happened.
And if there’s a filmmaker who knows how to handle large-scale catastrophe stories with both spectacle and heart, it’s Cameron. He describes the upcoming film as an “uncompromising theatrical film,” one that won’t shy away from the subject’s emotional or historical weight.
The film will mark Cameron’s first non-Avatar feature since Titanic in 1997. The themes in the story aren’t exactly new territory for him either. His fear of nuclear devastation, planted at the age of 8 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, has long influenced his work from The Terminator films to Aliens .
Blackstone, which also released the bestselling audiobook of Oppenheimer, sees the Cameron-Sheen team-up as a landmark collaboration. “Everyone at the imprint is thrilled with this remarkable partnership of James Cameron and Martin Sheen on this epic book,” said Blackstone’s Josh Stanton and Anthony Goff.
I remember learning about this story years ago, and it’s one that has always stuck me. I’m looking forward to seeing Cameron bring it to life for the big screen.
Source: Deadline
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