If you were like me and you were absolutely traumatized by the dream sequence in Terminator 2: Judgement Day where Sarah Connor witnesses a nuclear blast and gets blown to smithereens, it’s because James Cameron had this terrifying visual in his head since high school. Cameron explains in an interview with Deadline, “I had made myself a bit of a lay expert on thermonuclear weapons. I’d become fascinated by it since high school when I read the John Hersey book Hiroshima. It was a slight book where he literally just reports what he saw and what was seen by those he interviewed. […] I really understood that you’ve got a blast effect and you’ve got a flash effect and you’ve got a prompt radiation effect. And then you’ve got obviously the fallout, the residual radiation that lingers for years. The half-life of the various nucleotide particles.”
Cameron hopes to explore the horrifying reality more in his planned non-Avatar film, Ghosts of Hiroshima. The director just wants to show the nitty-gritty of the effects of such devastation, without getting into other factors, “I don’t want to get into the politics of, should it have been dropped, should they have done it, and all the bad things Japan did to warrant it, or any of that kind of moralizing and politicizing. I just want to deal in a sense with what happened, almost as if you could somehow be there and survive and see it.” He expounded, “Because I just think it’s so important right now for people to remember what these weapons do. This is the only case where they’ve been used against a human target. Setting aside all the politics and the fact that I’m going to make a film about Japanese people. […] I want to keep it as a kind of neutral witness to an event that actually happened to human beings, so that we can keep that flame alive, that memory. They’ve only died in vain if we forget what that was like and we incur that a thousand fold upon ourselves and future generations.”
In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, there’s a scene where the scientist is haunted by visions of what he had done with his accomplishment, but to Cameron, he finds it to be a cop out, as he says, “Yeah…it’s interesting what he stayed away from. Look, I love the filmmaking, but I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop out. 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.”
