James Cameron Going Nuclear for Next Movie?

The "Avatar" and "Titanic" director promises a startling re-creation of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books and now writer/director of award-winning films aired via PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up” and “Memorial Day Massacre.” Now watch trailer for acclaimed 2025 film “The Atomic Bowl” coming to PBS in July. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for FREE. Sustain this newsletter by ordering one of his books.

Last week, in exploring major new pieces at The Atlantic and The New Yorker, I observed that coverage related to the 80th anniversary of the dawn of the nuclear era seems to be picking up. Let me briefly mention an update re: my own contribution before we get to Mr. Cameron.

I’ve mentioned previously that my new award-winning film will start streaming, and screening on TV, from PBS on July 12. Today, the companion e-book with the same title has been published: “The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today.” It’s just $5.79 and includes previously unpublished stills and material from the film and much more. Read more here. If you are a writer on film, TV, nuclear issues, or books, you can request a link to view the film now or possibly a copy of the book, via: gregmitch34@gmail.com Or leave a Comment here. Thanks.

I’ve always found it amusing that James Cameron grew up just across the river from me near Niagara Falls, Ontario. He even mentions it in the interview I am covering today (no, he does not refer to me). I’ve never been a major fan of most of his films, but took notice, given my personal interests, when he declared a dozen or so years ago that his next movie would tackle Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He had optioned a book by Charles Pellegrino about several victims of the Hiroshima bombing who took the “last train” to Nagasaki and ended up meeting the bomb there once again. As it happens, I had interviewed at length one of those “double hibakusha” back in 1984 in Nagasaki, Kenshi Hirata. (An excerpt is included in my new e--book.) I had posed the question: Was Hirata doubly unlucky—or doubly lucky, since he survived?

Anyway: Cameron decided to do another “Avatar” and then another. He kept mentioning every so often his intense plan to make his atomic bomb film, still linked to Pellegrino’s writing, but never made much if any progress.

He still hasn’t, in tangible form, and in the new interview for the popular Deadline entertainment site, he admits he hasn’t written a single word of the script yet. But he has continued to think deeply about it, and Pellegrino has a related book, “Ghosts of Hiroshima,” coming around August 1. In the new interview, Cameron continues to promise a big movie that will focus on re-creating the days of the two bombings in Japan and the immediate aftermath, meaning the victims and survivors will stand at the center, more than in any previous drama, I will add, made outside Japan.

In the interviews, he points—as I often have—to Christopher Nolan almost ignoring this in his “Oppenheimer.”

Yeah…it’s interesting what he [Nolan] stayed away from. Look, I love the filmmaking, but I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop out… 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.

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.

Well, let me leave it at that for now and simply point to this link for the lengthy interview and posta few excerpts from it. Photo below of Cameron a few years back, between Pellegrino and one of the “double survivors.”

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.

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….

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’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.