James Cameron has been exclusively working on his Avatar movies for over 16 years now.
As Avatar: Fire and Ash is set to release this Christmas, the Oscar-winning director behind Titanic hopes to helm Avatar 4 and 5, too.
Despite his busy schedule, the 70-year-old is also set to helm a new World War 2 epic based on a history book published today.
Ghosts of Hiroshima will follow the true story that took place 80 years ago this week, when a man who survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the US to force the Japanese surrender, got on a train to Nagasaki and survived that second nuclear explosion too.
Cameron met Tsutomu Yamaguchi just days before his death in 2010 and secured the rights to adapt his story.
Speaking with Discussing Film, Cameron confessed: “This might be the most challenging film I ever make… it’s going to be very challenging. I might not even be up to the task, but that never stopped me before.” The director shared that both Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan are inspirations for unsparingly capturing wartime tragedy. In the case of Ghost of Hiroshima, this was the deaths of between 150,000 and 246,000 people killed in the first and only two uses of nuclear weapons in war. Spielberg gave him some advice on depicting the true horrors of the conflict by making his two World War 2 movies “as intense” as possible.
Cameron added: “I want to show you what it was like. You’re just there. You’re a witness to history, you’re a witness to what really happened, and we can do that. I’m going to shoot it in 3D, if need be. I’m going to make it as real for you as I can. You know, I don’t know where it’s going to take me. I am actually afraid of this movie in a way.”