James Cameron has acquired the rights to Charles Pellegrino‘s upcoming book Ghosts of Hiroshima along with Last Train From Hiroshima, and the filmmaker plans to direct the film as soon as he’s finished with his Avatar projects.
Cameron will use both books as the basis for a film he will develop, and it’s explained that this will be one “uncompromising theatrical film.”
The movie will be titled Last Train From Hiroshima and it marks Cameron’s first non-Avatar film since 1997’s Titanic.
The movie will focus on the true story of a Japanese man during World War II who survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, got on a train to Nagasaki, and then survived the nuclear explosion in that city.
This is a seriously incredible story! The first time I learned of it was while listening to a podcast that shared the story. It completely blew me away and I immediately wondered how this story had never been adapted into a movie.
Well, the movie is coming and Cameron is the perfect director to tell this story. He said in a statement: “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.
“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.”
While visiting Yamaguchi, Cameron and Pellegrino pledged to “pass on his unique and harrowing experience to future generations.”
Last Train from Hiroshima offers “a stunning ‘you are there’ time capsule, gracefully wrapped in elegant prose. Charles Pellegrino’s scientific authority and close relationship with the A-bomb’s survivors make his account the most gripping and authoritative ever written.
“At the narrative’s core are eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the atomic explosions firsthand—the Japanese civilians on the ground and the American flyers in the air.
“Thirty people are known to have fled Hiroshima for Nagasaki—where they arrived just in time to survive the second bomb. One of them, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, is the only person who experienced the full effects of the cataclysm at ground zero both times.
“The second time, the blast effects were diverted around the stairwell in which Yamaguchi had been standing, placing him and a few others in a shock coccoon that offered protection, while the entire building disappeared around them.”
Pellegrino’s Ghosts of Hiroshima is set to be published in August 2025. It will draw “on the voices of bomb survivors and the new science of forensic archaeology.”
Blackstone CEO Josh Stanton said everyone at the imprint “is thrilled and honored to be the publisher of Ghosts of Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino, which will serve as part of the source material for James Cameron’s epic motion picture.”
At the narrative core of both books are eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the atomic explosions firsthand — the Japanese civilians on the ground and the American flyers in the air. The bombs are estimated to have killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people.
Source: Deadline
