By Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron has bought the screen rights to Charles Pellegrino’s 2015 novel “Last Train From Hiroshima” and its forthcoming follow-up “Ghosts of Hiroshima” reports Deadline.
The project will reportedly serve as the basis for a film titled “Last Train From Hiroshima” that he will direct as soon as production timeline of his “Avatar” sequel permits him.
He says the plan is to create one “uncompromising theatrical film” from the two books in what will be his first non-“Avatar” directed film since “Titanic” in 1997.
The film focuses in part 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.
In a statement to the trade, Cameron says:
“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.”
Both books draw on eyewitness accounts of bomb survivors – from Japanese civilians on the ground to American flyers in the air – and uses forensic archaeology to go into detail about the event and aftermath of two days in August 1945.
Pellegrino previously served as a science consultant to Cameron on both “Titanic” and “Avatar”.
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