Director James Cameron will be taking a break from the world of “Avatar” for a little bit. The Oscar-winning filmmaker has bought the rights to adapt Charles Pellegrino‘s upcoming book “Ghosts of Hiroshima.” He plans to adapt that and Pellegrino’s 2015 book “Last Train From Hiroshima.”
Both books use the voices of bomb survivors and the new science of forensic archaeology to write a detailed account of the bombing of Hiroshima. Along with the horrific aftermath for two days in August 1945, that changed humanity forever. Pellegrino uses eyewitness accounts from people who experienced the explosions firsthand, Japanese civilians on the ground, and American flyers in the air. It’s estimated that the bombing killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people.
“Last Train From Hiroshima”
The upcoming film will be called “Last Train From Hiroshima,” and tells the true story of a Japanese man during World War II. A man who survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, got on a train to Nagasaki, and then survived another nuclear explosion there
“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,” Cameron told Deadline. “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.”
It seems production on the film will start once production on his various “Avatar” films wraps. Cameron says the two nonfiction books will be adapted into one “uncompromising theatrical film.” Making this the first non-”Avatar” film that the director has done since the 1997 cultural phenomenon that was “Titanic.”
Pellegrino’s book “Ghosts of Hiroshima” will hit shelves in August 2025, marking the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb.
We’ll keep you posted on updates about Camron’s “Last Train From Hiroshima,” as it develops.
