James Cameron Expects ‘Ghosts of Hiroshima’ to Be His Lowest Grossing Film Ever

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James Cameron has become synonymous with blockbusters after making history at the box office with “Avatar” and “Titanic.” However, the filmmaker is anticipating his next project, “Ghosts of Hiroshima,” to be significantly less of a draw to audiences. Cameron is adapting Charles Pellegrino’s historical bookof the same name (out August 15) for the screen; the feature’s release is timed to the 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb.

“I’ve had my eye on doing this project for a very long time,” Cameron told Deadline. “‘Avatar’ has taken over my life as a filmmaker and I’m now starting to dig my way through that and figure out a future that embraces not only completing the ‘Avatar’ saga, but also being able to do some of these other projects that are near and dear to me.”

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Cameron is determined to recreate the WWII bombing of Japan with as much accuracy as possible. He added that the film will be “utterly apolitical” and include the testimonies of the families of Japanese survivors that were interviewed for the book.

“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 said. “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 continued, “He showed it the way it happened. He and I talked about this, and he shared this with me. When he was making that film, notwithstanding whatever the studio wanted from it, he said, ‘I’m going to make it as intense as I can make it, because my limitation as any filmmaker’ — and he’s the best out there — ‘is that I can’t make it as intense as it really was.’ That was an object lesson. You’ve got to use everything at your cinematic disposal to show people what happened. We all love our horror movies, and horror movies love to outdo each other. This is true horror, because it happened.”

“Ghosts of Hiroshima” will chart the “tendrils” of the nuclear bombing, with the focus on the “day of the two bombs and the immediate aftermath.”

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Cameron said, ”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. […] I want to make the movie so that people in a movie theater feel they’ve just been through this experience. And then I think the film, 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.”

He added, “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.”

He concluded, “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.”

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