“Avatar” filmmaker James Cameron says that his upcoming film adaptation of the book “Ghosts of Hiroshima” is going to be an apolitical affair.
Cameron plans to use Charles Pellegrino’s just-released non-fiction book as the basis for a film of the same name and will mark his first non-Avatar directorial effort since 1997’s “Titanic”.
The work focuses on Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a Japanese man who survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, got on a train to Nagasaki, and then survived the bombing of that city.
Speaking with Discussing Film, he indicates the aim of the film won’t be on the large-scale politics of dropping the bomb or not, but rather the personal stories on the ground:
“Sure, there’s a Western bias against Hiroshima. It remains a hot-button issue for people years later. It triggers all these nationalistic and patriotic notions that put people into a state of denial.
I’m sure my film will re-invoke all of those controversies, but I don’t care about any of that. Rather than even having an argument, I want to show you what it was like. You’re just there. You’re a witness to history, you’re a witness to what happened.
My film must ultimately succeed on the basis of evoking that anyone you target, anyone you think you can justify using a weapon against, is a human being. They are on this earth playing by the same rules we are; the need for love, the need for family, the need to be cared for.
Also, their flaws and aggressions, whatever they may be, at the end of the day, they are people just like us. Hopefully, this film can make that statement and show people the horrors of what it is to use these weapons.”
Cameron has been talking about the book of late, and in a separate interview with Rolling Stone, he says the fictional future of “The Terminator” franchise could potentially become a reality:
“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.
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.”
Cameron is expected to work on his “Ghosts of Hiroshima” film after “Avatar: Fire and Ash” opens in cinemas this December.
