Avatar director James Cameron has said Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was “a bit of a moral cop out,” while revealing his plans for his own movie, Ghosts of Hiroshima.
Last year it emerged that Cameron, the second-highest-grossing film director of all time, will take a break from making Avatar movies to direct a film based on Charles Pellegrino’s book Ghosts of Hiroshima.
The 70-year-old Terminator creator has called his adaptation an “uncompromising theatrical film” that focuses on the true story of a man who survived both bombs that dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.
The Ghosts of Hiroshima book is due out August 5, and there’s no release window yet for the adaptation. But Cameron detailed the project in an interview with Deadline, where he was asked about Ghosts of Hiroshima’s potential in the context of Oppenheimer’s $1 billion box office and seven-Oscar haul.
“Yeah… it’s interesting what he stayed away from,” Cameron replied, before suggesting Ghosts of Hiroshima may not have the kind of mainstream breakthrough appeal Oppenheimer managed. “Look, I love the filmmaking, but I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop out.”
Cameron continued: “Because it’s not like Oppenheimer didn’t know the effects. He’s got one brief scene in the film where we see — and I don’t like to criticize another filmmaker’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. But I felt that it dodged the subject. I don’t know whether the studio or Chris felt that that was a third rail that they didn’t want to touch, but I want to go straight at the third rail. I’m just stupid that way.”
Nolan has responded to this criticism of Oppenheimer before, specifically that the biopic does not meaningfully depict the true horror unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Director Spike Lee said in October 2023: “If it’s three hours, I would like to add some more minutes about what happened to the Japanese people. People got vaporized. Many years later, people are radioactive. It’s not like he didn’t have power. He tells studios what to do. I would have loved to have the end of the film maybe show what it did, dropping those two nuclear bombs on Japan.”
Nolan has countered to insist Oppenheimer is about Oppenheimer himself, and so focuses on his reactions to the events.
“The film presents Oppenheimer’s experience subjectively,” Nolan told Variety in November 2023. “It was always my intention to rigidly stick to that. 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.”
Deadline suggested Nolan hopes someone tells that sort of story one day, and Cameron responded to say he’s the director to do it.
“Okay, I’ll put up my hand,” he said. “I’ll do it, Chris. No problem. You come to my premiere and say nice things…”
Ghosts of Hiroshima sounds like it will be a very different movie than Oppenheimer, then, and it also sounds like it will be some time before it’s made. Cameron clarified he has yet to write a word of the script, saying: “I’m not in that head space right now.”
But he did reveal his consideration for the audience in his thinking. “How much hell can an audience absorb and go on to absorb more?” he wondered.
“I think you’ve got to do it in glimpses, and you’ve got to contextualize it with people that you care about. There are a lot of challenges in telling this story. You can say, be uncompromising, but I don’t want to be so uncompromising that people walk out of the theater after 15 minutes. You’ve got to maintain a narrative flow that keeps it in a context. But like I said, I’m following Steven’s lead, which is to show what happened.”
That’s a nod to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, which Cameron is taking inspiration from: “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. He showed it the way it happened.”
Cameron added: “Look, 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.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
