While James Cameron may have his hands full with the upcoming release of Avatar: Fire and Ash, the 3x Oscar winner is already gearing up to tackle another project outside of the world of Pandora. The filmmaker is looking to the past for his next movie, telling the true story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a man who survived the devastating nuclear explosions at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with other Japanese WWII survivors. Cameron’s film will be based on Ghosts of Hiroshima, which is due for release in August. DiscussingFilm has exclusively received the second trailer for the upcoming non-fiction book, along with some new information about Cameron’s exciting and impassioned ideas for this adaptation.
Ghost of Hiroshima is written by Charles Pellegrino (New York Times bestselling author of Her Name, Titanic) and is said to be the next major theatrical film by James Cameron after Avatar: Fire and Ash. This has been a long-standing passion project for Cameron, but he has finally chosen to focus on this specific book. Here is a detailed description of the book from Amazon. You can check out the new trailer for the audiobook below, which is narrated by 3x Emmy-winner Martin Sheen and features original music from Hans Zimmer:
When the project was first announced, Jim Cameron told Deadline:
“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. 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.” While visiting Yamaguchi, Cameron and Pellegrino pledged to “pass on his unique and harrowing experience to future generations.”
Author Charles Pellegrino also served as a science consultant on both Titanic and Avatar. Cameron’s working relationship with the author has spanned decades, and Ghosts of Hiroshima is being served up as an ambitious and unflinching culmination of their past collaborations. With the book due for release soon, production on the Ghosts of Hiroshima adaptation is dependent on Cameron’s busy work schedule.
The book is coming out on August 5, the week of the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though there is no set production start date or release for Cameron’s film adaptation.
The book, published by Blackstone Publishing and The Story Factory, is available for order today at any bookstore. Cameron has said that he wants to be “unsparing” in his depiction and tell the real story of what happened. The filmmaker, in his usual unabashed fashion, has compared his plans for adapting the book to what Steven Spielberg did with Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List.
