James Cameron: ‘Empathy Is Our Superpower’

Arriving on the 80th anniversary of America dropping atomic bombs on Japan, Ghosts of Hiroshima by author Charles Pellegrino is a stunning work of history. The book takes a deeply reported, humanistic, even archaeological approach to one of the most devastating and horrific military actions ever taken. Aug. 6, 1945, was humanity’s Rubicon. Everything changed in the aftermath. Pellegrino does not avoid the monumental nature of the events, but he focuses on the everyday people at the epicenter. Those souls who, through miracles, unlikely coincidences, or pure dumb luck somehow survived the nuclear holocaust and lived to tell their tales. The young husband looking for his wife in the ashes, the Mitsubishi engineer who survived both bombings, the Scottish POW, and many more. 

Director James Cameron, who has collaborated with Pellegrino on previous projects (the author was a tech advisor on Titanic and Avatar), has already announced he will make his first non-Avatar feature in 15 years based on the book. Cameron is well aware of the challenge he’s taking on in trying to get people to watch a movie where civilians get nuked. He has already declared that this film will probably be his least commercial. But he’s never been one to turn away from a challenge. 

“If I do my job perfectly, everybody will walk out of the theater [in horror] after the first 20 minutes,” Cameron says. “So that’s not the job. The task is to tell it in a way that’s heartfelt. The task is to tell it in a way that the book does it, which engages you, and you project yourself into that person’s reality for a moment, and you feel empathy for them.”

Cameron got on a Zoom with Rolling Stone to describe his boyhood obsession with the bomb, the current state of the doomsday clock, and why we must always remember the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Why turn this book into a film?
For me, it all started when I was eight years old, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and my dad had these pamphlets lying around for how to make a bomb shelter. I grew up in Niagara Falls, Canada, and he figured that since it was a major hydroelectric site, that it would be a target. He was probably not wrong. And so all of a sudden at the age of eight, I realized that the world was not what I thought the world was, and I just kept that with me. And then in high school, I read the John Hersey book, Hiroshima, and that book stuck with me. A lot of the imagery that I conjured in my head from reading that book found its way into The Terminator and Terminator 2. In the meantime, I had made myself kind of a lay expert in the actual effects of nuclear weapons. How did they work? What were the physics? What were the actual effects? So it’s just been a part of me for my whole life, and I just think it’s time to deal with it. Not in a fictional, science fiction way, but in a factual, historical way.

The book starts with these sci-fi writers of the early 1900s predicting so much horror. Did you know those stories?
I had known those stories. I’ve known Charlie Pellegrino for ages, and he’s very self-referential in all the books that he writes. And so I knew about the pulp writer that had anticipated almost all the major details of the sinking of Titanic. H.G. Wells anticipated a bomb that would emit radiation that was based on some kind of nuclear process. And that’s before the physicists even understood that such a thing was possible. That came 10 or 15 years later when they started to get atomic nuclear theory. There is an interesting dance between culture and reality and between science fiction’s predictive ability and what ultimately does happen. People make a little too much about me predicting artificial intelligence being a bad thing, especially when associated with nuclear weapons. But we exist in that world right now, and whether a superintelligence can help us or whether it gets weaponized and put in charge of our missile defense because it can react much faster than we can, who knows? We could be entering that world as we speak.

But what makes this book that you’re going to make into a film so special is the human element. You traveled to see an extraordinary man on his deathbed. Can you tell me about that trip?
So that was Tsutomu Yamaguchi. He was a double bomb survivor. He was in Hiroshima on work, but he lived in Nagasaki. 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 the entire city of Hiroshima was gone and that it vanished in a flash. And the supervisor said, “That’s not possible. You’re an engineer. You know that can’t happen.” And he said, “That’s what happened.” And he 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.” And the people in that room were the only people that survived out of hundreds of people at that Mitsubishi plant when the second bomb hit.

Despite witnessing so much horror, he still had a belief in humanity, a willingness to forgive, and an all-for-one spirit. Did he talk to you about that?
I knew the whole story, but when I met him, I saw a man who was basically a living skeleton. There was something in him that was clinging to life for a reason. And if I look back on it now, that reason in my mind feels like he needed to pass the baton to somebody. He had been out on the road, he had been public speaking, he’d been trying to share his message of forgiveness. There was a saintliness he reached in his spirit toward the end of his life, of forgiveness and what he was trying … It wasn’t religious. There might’ve been a religious component to it, but it struck me as more, he just never wanted to see anyone else suffer the way he saw his family, his friends, the people in his community suffer. He couldn’t imagine that ever happening again. And he understood that you have to break the cycle of blame and hate and trauma.

No matter what somebody else has done to you, you have to see their humanity, because otherwise you’re just stockpiling justifications for killing them, nuking them, punishing them in some way. And it’s an evolutionary challenge, I think, for us. Just as I’m challenging myself as a filmmaker to try to evolve to a level that I can be a conduit for this story. And I don’t even know if I can pull it off yet, but I’m going to give it a try. You go into these things knowing how daunting they are, and you find stuff about yourself. But I think we have this evolutionary, spiritual challenge, where we’re not going to get out of this, no matter how smart we are.

It’s funny to hear you have that self-doubt about making a movie. You are the most successful living filmmaker of all time. You have said you’re not going to hold back showing the bomb and the violence onscreen. But how do you do that and not just terrify people to the point where they can’t watch?
I don’t know. That’s the challenge. If I do my job perfectly, everybody will walk out of the theater in the first 20 minutes. So that’s not the job. That’s not the task. The task is to tell it in a way that’s heartfelt. The task is to tell it in a way that the book does it, which engages you, and you project yourself into that person’s reality for a moment, and you feel empathy for them. Charlie Pellegrino, he’s been a friend of mine since Titanic because he was one of our advisors and we’ve done a bunch of projects together. He signs every email to me with the word omoiyari, which is 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.

Does that ideal suffuse your work?
I think so. Look, I mean, I’ve justified making Avatar movies to myself for the last 20 years, not based on how much money we made, but on the basis that hopefully it can do some good, it can help connect us, it can help connect us to our lost aspect of ourself that connects with nature and respects nature and all those things. So do I think that movies are the answer to our human problems? No, I think they’re limited because people sometimes just want entertainment and they don’t want to be challenged in that way. I think Avatar is a Trojan horse strategy that gets you into a piece of entertainment, but then works on your brain and your heart a little bit in a way. 

The threat of technology runs through so much of your work: Terminator, Avatar, and tech and corporate greed combining. But then you’re also one of the most tech-forward directors out there. So how do you square that to yourself? 
Well, we got two hemispheres up here [points to his head]. And they talk to each other, at least they’re supposed to, and they’re supposed to get along. So mentally healthy people use both. And one is a little bit more Euclidean and logical and technical and the other theoretic. A lot of this has been disproven, by the way, but I’m just using it as a metaphor, and the other side is more humanistic and empathetic and so on. And I try to merge both in my films. I try to merge both in my life. I love technology, but it’s a love-hate relationship. I’m leaning into teaching myself the tools of generative AI so that I can incorporate them into my future art, but I utterly reject the premise that AI can take the place of actors and take the place of filmmakers and all that sort of thing. So we always have to approach any technology as being potentially dangerous and potentially helpful. Nuclear energy was ballyhooed back in the 1930s as a way to feed the world. Unlimited energy. Who wouldn’t want that? And then of course, the first actual real-world manifestation of it was the incineration of two cities.

Do you think growing up in Canada, being adjacent to a nuclear superpower in the Cold War, informed your view of that?
Absolutely. Canadians are very apologetic. They’re very polite, except for hockey fights, which are institutionalized. They tend to be generally not so in-your-face and aggressive. Growing up on the other side of the glass, in a border town, looking across into America, I had a very jaundiced view of America. I knew a lot of draft dodgers that were coming over trying to keep out of Vietnam. It was all that. It was the Sixties, it was all that crazy stuff that was going on, civil rights, anti-war, pollution, all that stuff. And then I moved to the U.S. and I kind of fell in love with it. It took me a while, and I got involved in politics and I got involved in various campaigns, and now I’ve backlashed right back to where I was in the Sixties, thinking it’s all a big pile of bullshit and that human systems are incapable of dealing with the problems that we have in front of us unless we can fundamentally change in some way.

What do you think that change would look like?
First of all, I think we’re going to have to take some hard hits in the face, hopefully not a nuclear war. We will go one of two ways. We’ll either fragment and be at each other’s throats, fighting over the scraps of what’s left, or we’ll evolve to the next level. And the next level, music plays a part, a huge part. Film, culture, books, these all play a part. They connect us to the other guy, to the other way of viewing the world. We get inside through art. We get inside the heads of other people in a way that we just don’t do in our normal daily lives. And I think that that’s where hope lies. Hope lies in us evolving. And I’m not some like woo-woo crystal energy kind of spiritual thing, but I do think there’s a spiritual evolution that does need to happen, and that if we’re going to get rid of these nuclear weapons, it’s only going to come from people saying, “Enough, we’ve got to stop this madness.”

That would get me back to AI and when you take humanity out of the equation — that’s where I also started thinking, reading the book, this could be really bad….
Look, I mean, I do think there’s still a danger of a Terminator-style apocalypse where you put AI together with weapons systems, even up to the level of nuclear weapon systems, nuclear defense counterstrike, all that stuff. Because the theater of operations is so rapid, the decision windows are so fast, it would take a superintelligence to be able to process it, and maybe we’ll be smart and keep a human in the loop. But humans are fallible, and there have been a lot of mistakes made that have put us right on the brink of international incidents that could have led to nuclear war. So I don’t know. I feel like we’re at this cusp in human development where you’ve got the three existential threats: climate and our overall degradation of the natural world, nuclear weapons, and superintelligence. They’re all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time. Maybe the superintelligence is the answer. I don’t know. I’m not predicting that, but it might be.

You could see AI helping with climate, for sure. But AI could also accelerate some sort of conflict in a way that we can’t foresee.
Yeah, I think what could happen is if you task it with keeping us alive, it’s going to take … We’re like the 80-year-old guy that you take the car keys away from. You know what I mean? It’s like, OK, I can keep you alive. No problem. [AI] got this. Just, I’m in charge. And we’ll get rid of all those nuclear weapons, because by the way, I don’t like electromagnetic pulses. They mess with my data networks. So let’s get that out of the way, and then we can talk about climate and all that stuff. I could imagine an AI saying, guess what’s the best technology on the planet? DNA, and nature does it better than I could do it for 1,000 years from now, and so we’re going to focus on getting nature back where it used to be. I could imagine, AI could write that story compellingly.

The environmental effects of the bombs described in the book are particularly scary. The glowing light, the people turning to ash, the radiation poisoning: Is that the stuff that kept you up as a kid?Yeah. I think it was. I was such a science fiction fan, and I had such a good imagination for good and bad. I could imagine horrific, nightmarish scenarios so vividly that they would wake me up. But I could also imagine in my dreams, beautiful phantasmagorical scenarios. At the age of 19, I had a dream that was so compelling, I had to wake up and paint it. I had to draw it and paint it, and that became Avatar. But I also had horrific dreams that became The Terminator. So it’s just all in there getting processed. It’s all the same inputs that we all have.

Left and right hemispheres again talking.
Yeah. Right, exactly.

What is your Doomsday Clock set to right now?
I agree with the Doomsday Clock people. They keep advancing it. We don’t go the other direction. I mean, I think we went the other direction briefly in the Eighties with the start of nuclear disarmament initiatives, and the number of warheads came down from 70,000 to 12,000. So now we only have 12,000 bombs that are active and pointed at each other that are each one 100 to 1,000 times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb. So that’s technically progress, but not quite enough.

But there’s so much conflict right now. American nuclear subs just were moved into position to threaten Russia. I think this book is important, and this film will be important, but will the powers that be listen? I mean, how do you grab the people in power by the collars and get them to listen?
Ronald Reagan listened. He saw The Day After [a 1983 ABC TV-movie depicting a NATO-incited nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union] 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. The question is, do the people in charge have the necessary empathy and humanity? When you have Elon Musk saying, “Empathy is like a disability, it holds us back.” It’s like, no, that’s our superpower. Empathy is our superpower. We have to recognize that and embrace it.

I’m glad you brought up The Day After. I was in grade school when that came out, and it scared the bejesus out of us kids, the same way the missile crisis must have scared you. Maybe Marshall McLuhan was right, “The message is the medium,” but everybody watched that movie on network TV in the Eighties. Is that your goal with this film?
I think art in the broadest sense — meaning writing, film, music, culture — is part of the hope, part of the positive side of the equation. You never hear a musician singing about, “Let’s have more nuclear weapons.” When I was writing, imagining the story for Terminator 2, a song kept going through my head, which was Sting’s [“Russians,” where he sings] “I hope the Russians love their children, too.” And my original title for that film was actually The Children’s Crusade. When Sarah sees the children in the playground incinerated, that was the core image for that film, and then she gets incinerated herself. So it was really about mothers, children. She was highly dehumanized at the beginning of that story. She finds her empathy, she breaks through that wall, and so I was dealing with all those themes back then. I can only hope that I’m just maybe a better, more experienced filmmaker now, and I can deal with this subject respectfully and correctly.

Is Yamaguchi going to be the center of the film? He has such an incredible story. Or are you going to weave so many of these human narratives from the book together?
You can’t. Yeah, you got to pick a lane. But I think Kenshi Hirata’s story is very good. He’s the young man that went back and found his wife’s incinerated bones and put them in the bowl, took them to the parents, then got bombed again. But there were also so many stories of people that just helped each other. They were probably dying. They probably knew they were dying, but they just helped each other, which is probably a very Japanese thing. I mean, there are cultural aspects of this that I have to really immerse myself in because I’m not Japanese. It feels almost a little invasive to be telling the story from their perspective, but what the hell? Somebody’s got to tell the story, and I’m not going to tell it from a jingoistic, nationalistic American perspective, because I don’t want to deal with all the sociopolitical aspects of, should it have been dropped, all that stuff. I don’t want to deal with that.

That’s been chewed over many times. But these human stories I hadn’t read before.
Exactly. The funny thing is that all the other stories that have been told around it all take it that everybody knows what actually happens in a nuclear bomb, and they really don’t. It’s never really been done.

I didn’t know about all the windows bursting creating deadly shotgun blasts of glass everywhere. I just thought most people were incinerated or died of radiation poisoning.
These people were riddled with glass. Of the few that survived that type of exposure to the flying glass, they had glass coming out of their bodies the rest of their lives. It would just sort of slowly work its way out.

Arguably, this is just the worst thing humanity has ever done. But as a filmmaker, if you show it, how do you not point fingers? Isn’t there some inherent judgment involved in depicting the dropping of the bomb?
No, I think I’ve got to be very careful about that. I’ve got to be very careful about it not being an indictment of the people who dropped the bomb. I think the message needs to be, this thing happened. It happened to real people. Let’s not go into why it happened and who was to blame and all that sort of thing. But let’s just take that as a moment in history frozen in amber that we need to learn from. We need to cherish that memory, because that memory might just keep us alive.

That’s going to be a challenge for you as a filmmaker, I think.
Yeah, I know. I feel that challenge. I approached this with trepidation as an artist, but that’s OK. I don’t mind. I mean, I’ve dived to the deepest place on the planet. I’ve explored the Titanic wreck 33 times. I’ve made these gigantic movies. I’m not really afraid of anything other than screwing up. But fear of screwing up is the thing that makes you good as an artist. I used to have a razor blade on my AVID monitor, when I was making Titanic deep in postproduction, I taped up a razor blade that had on a little handwritten note that said, “Use in case film sucks.”