Last Train from Hiroshima: James Cameron is finally making a non-Avatar movie

James Cameron has spent so much time in Pandora we were pretty sure he had become a permanent resident.

In actuality, the Canadian filmmaker lives in New Zealand but, more to the point, Cameron is emerging from his immersive obsession to commit to a movie that has no blue people.

Cameron has nabbed the screen rights to the forthcoming book, Ghosts of Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino, which will be published in 2025. Pellegrino also wrote the 2015 tome Last Train from Hiroshima and together, the two books will form the spine of Cameron’s film.

The movie will be named after the first book and will be focused in part on Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a real-life Japanese man who survived both the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans during World War II.

Yamaguchi was 29 years old on the morning of August 6, 1945. He worked for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and was on a business trip to Hiroshima when the “Little Boy” bomb was dropped overhead, three kilometres from where he was standing just as he stepped off a tram.

He suffered a ruptured left eardrum and serious radiation burns. After two nights in air-raid shelters he boarded a train back home to Nagasaki. The following day, on August 9, still covered in bandages, Yamaguchi went to work. Three kilometres from his office, the Enola Gay bomber dropped “Fat Man” over Nagasaki.

Decades later in 2009, Yamaguchi was recognised by the Japanese government as a double-hibakusha, a designation for someone who survived both atomic attacks.

It wasn’t until later in life that Yamaguchi become an outspoken critic of nuclear weaponry. Speaking through his daughter acting as translator, he told The Independent in 2009, “I can’t understand why the world cannot understand the agony of the nuclear bombs. How can they keep developing these weapons?”

Yamaguchi died in 2010 from stomach cancer but the month before his death, he met Cameron and Pellegrino from his hospital bed. The survivor said at the time, “I think it’s Cameron and Pellegrino’s destiny to make a film about nuclear weapons”.

This week, Cameron told Deadline, “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.”

The Last Train From Hiroshima will be the first non-Avatar scripted feature Cameron will make since Titanic in 1997.

Since the disaster movie, Cameron has made two Avatar movies and started production on three more. He has also been into deep sea exploration, the journeys of which he has charted in documentaries including Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep.

Cameron said he will start shooting Last Train From Hiroshima as soon as Avatar’s production schedule allows it.

He is working on the third Avatar film, Fire and Ash, which is due for release at the end of 2025. There are two more sequels to follow after that, taking the total to five with the fifth scheduled for a 2031 release. Cameron has flagged he has plans for a sixth and seventh instalment if there is demand but would likely step back from directing those.

Not adjusted for inflation, six movies have crossed the global $US2 billion threshold and Cameron is responsible for three of them, Titanic, Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water.