Alright, he’s most probably not going to be doing that, but Variety is reporting that James Cameron has just optioned the upcoming nonfiction novel “The Last Train From Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back“, paying for it out of his own pocket.
Set to release on January 19th, Charles Pellegrino’s book descibes the events and aftermath of our bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the survivors’ point of view. He has amassed eyewitness accounts of those who experienced it firsthand, both Japanese civilians on the ground and American pilots, and while the subject is hardly new his book is being billed as one of the finest to tackle it.
He even interviewed Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the unluckiest (or luckiest, depending on how you look at it) man ever to live. A Mitsubishi employee in Hiroshima on business when the city was leveled, he returned to Nagasaki despite his wounds the next day and decided to
go back to work on August 9th, when we dropped the bomb on that city
too. Yes, he’s the only man known to have survived two nuclear blasts.
Yamaguchi died of stomach cancer this Monday at the age of 93. Variety mentions that Cameron visited him during a promo tour in December for Avatar, asking Fox for a day off to talk to the man.
It’s going to be very interesting to see what Cameron does with this – the timing of it seems to have hit him too close to home, and it would be amazing to see him tackle a non-fiction film once again.
The survivors of the Chud messageboard called the war Judgment Day.