James Cameron & LAST TRAIN TO HIROSHIMA Author visit Atomic Bomb Survivor to research film

 

With James Cameron's near decade spent developing and filming Avatar, and with the well deserved billion dollar success a sure comfort, it looks like Cameron is wasting no time in getting back to work! Seeing Cameron get his feature film appetite back in full stride would be great, but the three documentaries he directed in between Titanic and Avatar have me pumping the brakes on jumping to either conclusion.

Back on December 22nd, Cameron took a trip to Nagasaki, Japan accompanied by Charles Pellegrino -- author of The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back. The two went to a hospital to visit atomic bomb survivor Tsutomi Yamaguchi, the only official survivor of both atomic bombs in Japan in the second World War. Sadly Yamaguchi, who was being treated for stomach cancer, has since passed away.

Yamaguchi, then an engineer for the shipbuilder Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was in Hiroshima on a business trip on 6 August 1945 when an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the city, killing 80,000 people instantly and another 60,000 in the months that followed. The badly burned Yamaguchi, who was less than two miles from the blast, spent the night in an air raid shelter before returning home to Nagasaki, 180 miles away, two days later.

While visiting the survivor of the atrocities as research for “a film about nuclear weapons,” Cameron made a pledge to Yauguchi to “pass on his rare and harrowing experience to future generations”.

Yamaguchi is quoted as saying it is “Cameron’s and Pellegrino’s destiny” to make such a film. But perhaps things might have been lost in translation, which might have read that they are planning to make a such a film. So the question still stands on whether or not the film will be a fictional take on the events, or a documentary. But with Pellegrino there, it's very possible that Cameron may be adapting his book. Either way, it's said that Cameron's take on the material would be “uncompromising”. 

Cameron has somewhat tackled the kind of mass destruction within the Terminator mythology. But a film about Hiroshima would be drastically more serious and dramatic.

What do you think of James Cameron possibly making a film about nuclear weapons and/or Hiroshima?