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In a recent interview, director James Cameron described Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer as a ‘moral cop-out’ for not showing the true extent of the damage caused by the atom bombs that were dropped on Japan. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II, and served as the climactic moment of Nolan’s film, which presented the world-changing incident entirely from its subject’s point of view. The decision attracted controversy, which Nolan addressed in an interview with Variety, “It was always my intention to rigidly stick to that,” he said, adding, “Oppenheimer heard about the bombing at the same time that the rest of the world did. I wanted to show somebody who is starting to gain a clearer picture of the unintended consequences of his actions. It was as much about what I don’t show as what I show.”
Now, Cameron intends to revisit the tragic event which left hundreds of thousands affected in 1945, and millions in the decades that followed. Based on a true story that forms the subject of the recently released book Ghosts of Hiroshima, written by Charles Pellegrino, Cameron’s movie is being set up as his next project – a break between the upcoming third Avatar movie, and the fourth and fifth instalments that are written and ready to go. In an interview with Deadline, the world’s highest-grossing filmmaker opened up about his opinion on Nolan’s movie, and said, “It’s interesting what he stayed away from. Look, I love the film-making, but I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop-out. It’s not like Oppenheimer didn’t know the effects. I don’t like to criticise another film-maker’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.”
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Cameron’s adaptation of Ghosts of Hiroshima will reportedly focus mainly on the aftermath of the bombings, through the incredible story of Tsutomo Yamaguchi. An engineer by profession, Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima when the Americans dropped the first bomb. He survived by hiding in a shelter, and took the first train out of the city to make it to his job. His destination: Nagasaki. Incredibly, Yamaguchi survived the second blast as well. He died in 2010 at the age of 93, slightly deaf in one ear.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Cameron reflected on Yamaguchi’s story. “He was a double bomb survivor. He was in Hiroshima on work, but he lived in Nagasaki. He had blast effects; he had burns. He went back to Nagasaki to report to his work at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and he was in the process of telling his supervisor that the entire city of Hiroshima was gone and that it vanished in a flash. And the supervisor said, ‘That’s not possible. You’re an engineer. You know that can’t happen.’ And he said, ‘That’s what happened.’ And he turned to the other workers in the room and said, ‘If you see a bright silent flash, get down. Don’t stand up to see what happened. Get down on the floor.’ And the people in that room were the only people that survived out of hundreds of people at that Mitsubishi plant when the second bomb hit.”
After witnessing the first bombing, Yamaguchi was sure that he’d never seen anything like it. Burned and scarred, he spent the night in a bomb shelter and took the train to Nagasaki the next day. He was reportedly questioned about his sanity by his boss, who wouldn’t believe what he was describing. He remains the only known survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Despite witnessing the unspeakable horror, Yamaguchi retained his faith in the goodness of humanity, and that’s what Cameron intends to focus on. “I knew the whole story, but when I met him, I saw a man who was basically a living skeleton. There was something in him that was clinging to life for a reason. And if I look back on it now, that reason in my mind feels like he needed to pass the baton to somebody. He had been out on the road, he had been public speaking, he’d been trying to share his message of forgiveness. There was a saintliness he reached in his spirit toward the end of his life, of forgiveness and what he was trying… It wasn’t religious. There might’ve been a religious component to it, but it struck me as more; he just never wanted to see anyone else suffer the way he saw his family, his friends, the people in his community suffer. He couldn’t imagine that ever happening again. And he understood that you have to break the cycle of blame and hate and trauma.”
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Cameron said that if he does his job ‘perfectly’ in the film, the audience will walk out in the first 20 minutes. Ghosts of Hiroshima is poised to be his first non-Avatar film in nearly 20 years. The Avatar movies have so far grossed over $5 billion worldwide; the third film is expected to be one of the year’s biggest hits as well. He supposes that Ghosts of Hiroshima will be his lowest-grossing film. “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,” Cameron told Deadline. “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.’” Cameron said that he wants the film to be ‘utterly apolitical’.
He added, “I don’t want to give away the ending, but I think the film ends with a card that says the weapons currently deployed in the world today are from a thousand to 10,000 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb and the Nagasaki bomb. Get your mind around that for a second. Everybody thought it was a great idea in the late forties and early fifties to build the thermonuclear bomb. Well, if they’re going to do it, we’ve got to do it.”
Taking a shot at Elon Musk, Cameron concluded, “Ronald Reagan listened. He saw The Day After [a 1983 ABC TV movie depicting a NATO-incited nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union], and it disturbed him. He couldn’t sleep, and he put certain things into motion that actually made a difference. I think you have to reach the humanity of the people in charge. The question is, do the people in charge have the necessary empathy and humanity? When you have Elon Musk saying, ‘Empathy is like a disability, it holds us back.’ It’s like, no, that’s our superpower. Empathy is our superpower. We have to recognize that and embrace it.”
Click for more updates and latest Hollywood News along with Bollywood and Entertainment updates. Also get latest news and top headlines from India and around the World at The Indian Express.
