EXCLUSIVE: When you have directed three of the four all-time top global grossing films as has James Cameron, you take his vow to try and stay on budget with a wink and a nod, because his cutting edge films always push the envelope and never miss. But there is one promise Cameron made on a movie that you can take to heart.
That was the deathbed vow he made to one of the last survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts, to direct a film based on the upcoming Charles Pellegrino book Ghosts of Hiroshima. The book comes August 15 from Blackstone Publishing, timed to the 80th anniversary of the moment the world entered the perilous nuclear age. Martin Sheen just signed up to narrate the audiobook.
Here, Cameron explains his passion for a dark project he’ll balance with his continuing Avatar franchise. That has resulted in two billion-dollar grossing entries, and which he says he will continue until the audience tells him they’ve had enough of the blue folks from Pandora. “We drop the next one December 19th, and we’ll take it from there,” Cameron tells Deadline. “I’ve got the scripts and we’ve done preliminary designs on four and five and we’re ready to roll into it. But audiences tastes shift, and maybe the movie won’t exactly be what they want it to be. Who knows? We’ll find out. We always find out the hard way.”
Cinematic interest in the atomic and nuclear age has also been sky high as evidenced by the Christopher Nolan-directed Oppenheimer, which grossed $975 million and won seven Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director for Nolan and Best Actor prizes for Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. Ghosts of Hiroshima tells the story from those on the business end of the unimaginably destructive blasts that turned Japan into a hell-scape and killed over 250,000, much more over time as the radiation ravaged the bodies of survivors. That’s the story Cameron has promised to tell. Here, he explains why.
DEADLINE: Ghosts of Hiroshima is the first book I’ve read in awhile where you had to put it down here and there to absorb the enormity of what author Charles Pellegrino happened to those unfortunate enough to be within the blast radius. Like the observation that those wandering around and trying to come to grips to what they’d just been through were likely breathing in the vaporized remains of their neighbors. Or radiation manifesting itself by turning some colors the author can only try to describe based on testimony from survivors. You created an indelible image in 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day of a normal day in a playground, wiped out by a nuclear blast. That was a dream sequence, but the images you have at your disposal when you make this movie are truly the stuff of nightmares.
JAMES CAMERON: That was Linda Hamilton’s character Sarah Connor at the playground, watching the bomb flash and the blast effects. I had made myself a bit of a lay expert on thermonuclear weapons. I’d become fascinated by it since high school when I read the John Hersey book Hiroshima. It was a slight book where he literally just reports what he saw and what was seen by those he interviewed. I don’t quite remember how he got there to do that, but it was about the only thing you could find on Hiroshima at the time. It just left such a deep impression on me as a kid, and from there I started to study the nuclear weapons. How do they work? What do they do? I really understood that you’ve got a blast effect and you’ve got a flash effect and you’ve got a prompt radiation effect. And then you’ve got obviously the fallout, the residual radiation that lingers for years. The half-life of the various nucleotide particles.
But they didn’t know any of that, when it happened. Even medical authorities and top engineering people in Japan, they didn’t know what they’d been hit with. They didn’t know how to triage people, medically, and they were completely overwhelmed. I made a decision around this. Charlie’s book explores a subject with tendrils that run in all directions and he sometimes finds the most amazing connections throughout society and throughout history. I want to keep it very focused on the day of the two bombs and the immediate aftermath. It’s two bombs, multiple witnesses and survivors.
DEADLINE: Pellegrino does get into the brutality of the Japanese forces. The treatment of neighboring Chinese, the beheading of American POWs…
CAMERON: 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, or any of that kind of moralizing and politicizing. I just want to deal in a sense with what happened, almost as if you could somehow be there and survive and see it.
DEADLINE: Why?
CAMERON: Because 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. Setting aside all the politics and the fact that I’m going to make a film about Japanese people…I don’t even speak Japanese, although I have a lot of friends there. I’ve been there a million times, and I may need to work with a Japanese writer, a Japanese producer, so that I am not a complete outsider to their cultural perspective. 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. They’ve only died in vain if we forget what that was like and we incur that a thousand fold upon ourselves and future generations.
DEADLINE: You and Pellegrino are photographed with Tsutomo Yamaguchi on his deathbed just before he passed away at nearly a century old. He survived both blasts…
CAMERON: He was in his mid-90s when he died, within a week of our visit. He was dying of stomach cancer. The vast majority of the survivors died of cancer, the long-term legacy of the radiation exposure. But he made it to his mid-nineties. He is probably the most improbable statistic in history, having survived two nuclear bomb explosions at close range. He was flash burned and had blast effects and was injured in both of them, and he survived the radiation effects. Charlie was able to track him down with the help of some investigators in Japan and some people who worked to commemorate the survivors in Japan. He was able to track down a number of still living survivors and interview them, starting about 15 or 20 years ago. So he has a unique kind of treasure trove of living history, of personal accounts that he weaves together in this book and in his precursor book that I bought many years ago. I’ve had my eye on doing this project for a very long time.
DEADLINE: It must be difficult for you to make plans…
CAMERON: Avatar has taken over my life as a filmmaker and I’m now starting to dig my way through that and figure out a future that embraces not only completing the Avatar saga, but also being able to do some of these other projects that are near and dear to me.
DEADLINE: When you were at Yamaguchi’s bedside, how emotional was that for you?
CAMERON: In that picture is my good friend Charlie Pellegrino, and a painting Yamaguchi gifted me. He became an artist later in life and it’s something I hold dear. I think he had been led to believe that we were already basically making this film, and it moved him to essentially bless us with the task of continuing to tell the story. He wasn’t a literary guy, even though he became an artist later. He was an engineer by training.
But they kept their heads down, the survivors, the Hibakusha as they were called. 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 hand up. They weren’t famous in Japan. It took a lot of investigation to find them.
Only later on when did he realize that he had a box he could stand on to get people’s attention. He traveled often at his own expense all over the world to say one simple thing. He wasn’t a great orator but he would speak and his message was very simple. He said, 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. Peace starts with forgiveness, with breaking the cycle of outrage and grief, and setting aside blame and moving forward to be peaceful humans and look at what’s going on around us
DEADLINE: The 80th anniversary is fast approaching, and the whole world is on pins and needles with the U.S. and Israel attacking Iran to destroy its progress toward being able to launch a nuclear bomb…
CAMERON: Right now, look at the lingering enmity that’s gone on for half a century between Israel and Palestine. Look at the enmity that’s gone on between the US and Iran over time. Look at what’s happening in the world with Russia. The doomsday clock just keeps ticking closer and closer and closer to midnight. Nuclear war is not on our display screen right now, it’s not on our dashboard. We tend to not be able to grasp it, we tend to be in denial about it. I want to make a film that just reminds people what these weapons do to people, and how absolutely unacceptable it is to even contemplate using them. I think Trump is the first president who has bandied around the idea of, ‘My button’s bigger than your button.’ That’s something he says to Kim Jong Un. I’m like, what? Are you nuts?
You can’t say that! You can’t say that. There’s been this delicate equipoise between Russia and the US for the majority of the Cold War, even though the number of weapons has come down a lot from its peak in the eighties. The instability factor around there being multiple players now…it’s not just two monoliths in opposition that could talk to each other, study each other and live in that equipoise of mutual assured destruction. We’ve got rogue states; you’ve got Korea, you’ve got Iran coming up. I want to get down that rabbit hole. I do think it’s going to take the outrage of the citizens of the world to get the attention of their governments, to do what’s necessary to deescalate wherever possible, and not escalate. And not say, my dick’s bigger than your dick. You know what I mean? Not do all the stupid human chimp tricks that we do.
DEADLINE: That is a tall order for a narrative film…
CAMERON: You’re dealing with something that’s on a whole other level. Look, this may be a movie that I make that makes the least of any movie I’ve ever made, because I’m not going to be sparing, I’m not going to be circumspect. I want to do for what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what Steven Spielberg did with the Holocaust and D-Day with Saving Private Ryan. He showed it the way it happened. He and I talked about this, and he shared this with me. When he was making that film, notwithstanding whatever the studio wanted from it, he said, I’m going to make it as intense as I can make it, because my limitation as any filmmaker — and he’s the best out there — is that I can’t make it as intense as it really was. That was an object lesson. You’ve got to use everything at your cinematic disposal to show people what happened. We all love our horror movies, and horror movies love to outdo each other. This is true horror, because it happened.
DEADLINE: You said you are determined to make an uncompromising movie. In Titanic, you showed exactly the horrific way that unsinkable ship went down…
CAMERON: Technology horror, but there was always a majesty, a majestic quality to the tragedy of that event. We sort of look at it through that lens. I’ll try to find those points of human connection that give it some poetry and in a crazy way, even some beauty.
DEADLINE: Beauty?
CAMERON: Within the bomb events, there was some beauty about the human experience, about us all sharing the same planet. We’re all sharing the same human experience. The individual’s experiences vary, but there are certain things we have in common. We all want love. We all breathe the air. We all need something to eat. There’s certain things that are absolutely universal human experiences. As filmmakers, that’s the only qualification ultimately I think that we need. Charlie Pellegrino is a detail guy, and I’ve got all the detail I need here.
I’ll have him there as an advisor. As I get into the production on the film, I’ll be dealing with true experts on the Japanese side, the families of some of the survivors that Charlie has interviewed, because the survivors themselves are all gone now. That chapter of living history has closed. I’ll try to be accurate and again, utterly apolitical. I want to follow these two disparate events that happen three days apart. What do they have in common? Both involved nuclear weapons launched against human targets. There’s this guy who was there for both explosions, who rigged the altimeter on the two bombs and had to be in both planes. I think it’s interesting to follow his story as well because he went through an evolution as well. His name was Jacob Beser, an engineer from Los Alamos who actually rigged the altimeter that armed and detonated the weapons. He was on both flights. So there’s a slightly American perspective on this as well. Once again, I’m not going to politicize it. He was just there to do a job, but he was a witness and these other people were witnesses. I don’t want to do a follow 50 stories; I want to follow a few handful of stories that you can invest in.
DEADLINE: When Robert Oppenheimer met with President Truman, the president who authorized dropping the bombs Oppenheimer created greeted his misgivings with a callous attitude that amounted to, “man up.” Oppenheimer had all these misgivings and guilt about what he had been wrought. You mention Beser being there to ensure both bombs detonated. Was he wracked with that guilt, flying away from that unprecedented destruction?
CAMERON: I think he was. But if you read the book — and I just throw in a quick plug here that the book’s going to drop August 5, which is the 80th anniversary in the US – I think some people will get their backs all up and they’re going to say, hey, what about all the Japanese atrocities in the prison camps and in Nanking, and all that stuff? But that’s not what the book’s about.
The book puts you there a kind of a time window. Charlie has reconstructed the event. I think everybody should read it, whether you’re American, European, whatever. And I strongly believe in the importance of it. If there are other books out there on the subject, people should read those as well. But this one I think is kind of unique. It’s a 15-year journey for Charlie, taking everything that he learned, even from writing an earlier book on the subject, and putting it together and making it a very, very human telling of a very complex event.
DEADLINE: You grounded the technical sinking of the Titanic with a fictional love story between Kate Winslet’s Rose and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack characters. Is there a requirement, because there is quite a story in Kenshi Hirano, a newlywed who has a premonition from his wife of 10 days to take cover. When he returns to their Hiroshima home, he finds only fragments of her bones and feels duty bound to carry them to her parents. So he boards a train to Nagasaki to be walloped by the second A bomb.
CAMERON: And becomes another survivor of double blasts. He finds her still hot bones, they were newlyweds. I don’t know how much of that story I’m going to tell, but I definitely want to tell that story. Her parents had given them a ceramic bowl, which somehow survived, and he picked up her still warm bones from the burned ruins of their house. These neighborhoods were just obliterated and I don’t even know how he found his house. He goes to an aid station, gets his injuries patched up, and he gets on a train to take the bowl with his wife’s remains to her parents in Nagasaki, just in time for the second blast. I want to tell that story. I want to go on his journey, what that must have meant to him and the loss that he was already feeling. There are things that are so touching and so heart wrenching about the way Charlie frames it.
Charlie’s met with real headwinds in the past around acceptance of some of his writing on this subject. There are so many negative forces, mostly in the U.S., trying to dismantle this same way that the people are trying to dismantle memory of the Holocaust and other bits of history.
If we’re not going to be living in a 1984 world where the past can be vaporized, we’ve got to fight this stuff. And so I’ve been a strong ally for Charlie over the last 15 years since he’s been met with this. He’s just a humble guy trying to seek the truth. We knew there’d be pushback because people either ignore the idea or they fight back against the idea that these weapons were used and what they did. If you’re a reader, and you want to know what happened, this is your book. It’s not a political book. It’s historical obviously, but it’s not political. It doesn’t try to find the place in history for what Hiroshima and Nagasaki were. It just says, guys, this is what happened.
DEADLINE: You say this could be your lowest grossing film because of the subject matter. How surprised were you that Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer grossed almost $1 billion and won seven Oscars? Clearly people are interested in that whole splitting of the atom.
CAMERON: Yeah…it’s interesting what he stayed away from. 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’s got one brief scene in the film where we see — and I don’t like to criticize 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.
DEADLINE: Nolan answered that criticism by basically saying, “I hope somebody tells that story, but to me, this wasn’t that story.” It might take another heavyweight like James Cameron to do that…
CAMERON: Okay, I’ll put up my hand. I’ll do it, Chris. No problem. You come to my premiere and say nice things…I can’t tell you today what’s going to be in the movie. I’ve been making notes for 15 years and I haven’t written a word of the script yet because there’s a point where it’s all there and then you start to write. That’s how I always work. I explore around, I remember the things that impact me. I start to assemble ’em into a narrative. And then there’s a moment where you’re ready to write. And I’m not in that head space right now.
DEADLINE: The imagery of the carnage is unforgettable. People who turned exotic colors as radiation ravaged their bodies; what the sky looked like after the bombs blew up. One victim whose fingers fused together.
CAMERON: Those were people who survived initially. They didn’t know that they were about to die within a few days from radiation effects. They were flash burnt, they were blinded by grievous injuries. You wonder what could possibly be beautiful about that, and it is the fact that they helped each other. That was their first impulse, even though they were wounded; to help other people. It was just…everybody wasn’t fighting for themselves. They were trying to help each other. You take the human animal and reduce it down to almost the most primal survival moment…those people cared more about other people than about themselves. I think that that’s an amazing thing, if I could capture that.
DEADLINE: The chaos is almost unimaginable…
CAMERON: It was just too overwhelming. When these people flooded into what was left of the hospitals, they promptly set up aid stations, but they had no pain relievers. They had nothing left, and they also didn’t know what they were treating. How much hell can an audience absorb and go on to absorb more? I think you’ve got to do it in glimpses, and you’ve got to contextualize it with people that you care about. There are a lot of challenges in telling this story. You can say, be uncompromising, but I don’t want to be so uncompromising that people walk out of the theater after 15 minutes. You’ve got to maintain a narrative flow that keeps it in a context. But like I said, I’m following Steven’s lead, which is to show what happened.
DEADLINE: There you are, by the bedside of the survivor Yamaguchi. And then he dies. Why do I feel you might’ve made some promise to him about this movie that has steeled your resolve here?
CAMERON: You’re absolutely right. I think Charlie and I both felt in that moment that we were being challenged to accept a duty, to take a baton. I don’t think I went there with that in mind, although I did go there to pay my respects, thank him for the work that he had done, and tell him that we were planning to make a film about all this. He knew who I was as a filmmaker, but it became personal, I think, and that stayed with me since that meeting. Somehow, I have to make this happen. I don’t see it as a massively budgeted film. I don’t think it’ll be one that’ll be quick to make, but I don’t see it as a massively budgeted film. It will have to involve some VFX because the scope of the destruction is not something you can do practically in any way, I don’t think.
DEADLINE: Your two Terminator films were very prescient in the areas the dangers of nuclear weapons, and ceding control to the AI technology that could become sentient. Avatar is very much a look at environmentalism, and ravaging natural resources for greed and corruption. This fixation took root in you as a boy observing the tense moments of the Cuban Missile crisis. What do you recall?
CAMERON: I was eight years old, and we lived in Niagara Falls, Canada. Big power station right there that served all of Southern Ontario and much of upstate New York. The Falls was a hydro generating site, and the thinking was, okay, they’re going to take out the power sites. And so there were pamphlets for how you put sandbags up against you, make a lean to shelter in your basement, and all this stuff. And I’m like, what the hell is going on? 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. That was a revelation for me, and it stayed with me through my teens and my twenties. And I read the Hersey book, and then I just happened to be in a film class at the time, at the junior college in Fullerton/ There was a teacher there who showed us all different types of films.
He said, films can be about anything. And he showed us a short documentary that was made by a French film crew that went into Hiroshima. I don’t remember the title of the film that went into Hiroshima right after the blast. I guess because they were French and that was how they got access. I remember a trolley, a burned out trolley, its floor was filled with a pile of skulls. So you can imagine a Japanese trolley, as crowded as that was, it burned and there were just skulls and bones just filling the floor. That image became a primal image in Terminator. It’s actually one of the first images of the movie, and then again later in Kyle Reese [Michael Biehn]’s memory. So this idea that there is this trauma that you cannot escape, that was the Reese character in the Terminator. And then of course, we played it all out in Terminator 2, and we actually showed the effects of the nuclear weapons in progress.
I got a letter from a number of researchers at Sandia Labs, one of the foremost nuclear laboratories in the U.S. They had a group that studied effects flash and blast effects, and they formally called them the blast gurus. I got a letter from those men and women. They said, we want to congratulate you for getting it right. This is what actually happens. And I thought, man, do I frame that or do I burn it? It’s a compliment, but man, I don’t want to be that. You see when Sarah bursts into flame, turns to ash. The blast effects which are sequential, they arrive later, seconds later, and blows the ashy tissue right off her skeleton. That’s what happens. And they said, okay, the way you show the shockwave propagating, knocking buildings down, knocking trees over, et cetera, et cetera, everything bursts into flame. You’ve got the radiant effect of the bomb, and then you’ve got the blast effects, which follow it. The bigger the bomb, the longer that interregnum In Hiroshima…it was probably two seconds..but a big thermonuclear bomb like we have now, the big hydrogen bombs are anywhere from a thousand to 10,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. It could be 10, 15 seconds that you’re sitting there on fire before you get essentially blasted into smithereens.
I think it’s important for people to be aware. I want to make the movie so that people in a movie theater feel they’ve just been through this experience. And then I think the film, I don’t want to give away the ending, but I think the film ends with a card that says 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. Get your mind around that for a second. Everybody thought it was a great idea in the late forties and early fifties to build the thermonuclear bomb. Well, if they’re going to do it, we’ve got to do it.
DEADLINE: We mentioned AI; how does that danger compare to a rogue nation like Iran securing a nuke and following an extreme ideology?
CAMERON: Look, Terminator actually sat at this weird nexus between artificial general intelligence, which was I think first done well in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Forbin: The Colossus Project. Let’s not forget that. And in The Terminator, it’s all backstory. You never actually see the machine or the nuclear weapons. At the time, I had made the cognitive leap that at some point when you’re fighting a nuclear war, because it all takes place in minutes, it’s too complex. The theater of battle is too complex and too rapidly evolving to be able to be managed by humans. At some point, when you get artificial intelligence, you’re going to put that in charge to fight the battle for you, whether it’s firing interceptors, whether it’s deciding what the counterstrike would be, whatever it is. I actually think that could happen, and that we’re on the verge of something like that beginning to happen.
One of the strengths of the nuclear response forces is that they have humans in the loop, and it’s largely analog in a digital age. It just struck me as, hey, if nuclear weapons were the existential threat and a AI was some distant thing…but right now, we’re sitting in a world that I confess this, I’ve got a deal to make more Terminator films. I’m having a hard time getting the exact story I want to tell because I don’t want to be obsolete in a year but we’re actually sitting in a world where your two greatest existential threats are artificial general intelligence and nuclear weapons. Now, personally, I don’t believe that it’s going to happen the way I showed in Terminator.
DEADLINE: How would you see doomsday unfolding?
CAMERON: I think if you’ve got a good sense of the world and your place in it, last thing you want to do is unleash nuclear hell. Because of the effects are going to be too disruptive to any kind of electronic infrastructure, which is where you live. You destroy yourself first in a way, but it would be dead easy for an AI. They’re already figuring out how proteins fold, hypothetically at rates that are 10 a thousand times faster than humans can do it. It’s going to be that easy for an AI that really wants to take us out to create a biological weapon to do it. So now this goes back to this theme of alignment that exists amongst the researchers and the developers of AI. Well, we have to make sure that it’s aligned to human purpose and human good, and that’s a whole thorny subject in and of itself. But to me, the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger, just like the weaponization of nuclear power. Back in the thirties, people thought nuclear power was going to revolutionize the world in a good way.
Unlimited energy, to grow crops, to pump water to the deserts. It was just going to be a utopian world. Of course, that’s not what happened. We weaponized it. And so the optimism of those atomic scientists in the thirties, I now hear the same kind of rationalization from these proponents of how artificial intelligence is going to usher in this utopian age for humanity. It’s like, no.
