James Cameron has been chatting about Christopher Nolan’s all-conquering 2023 biopic Oppenheimer. Turns out, he’s not impressed.
James Cameron hasn’t been shy to admit over the years that he can be more than a little… contrary when it comes to his thoughts and opinions on all sorts of matters. As such, while chatting to Deadline about his planned take on the Hiroshima tragedy, when talk turned to Christopher Nolan’s feted adaptation of the events that led to the US dropping an atomic bomb on the city, it’s no surprise that Cameron wasn’t as effusive with his praise as others have been.
For Cameron, it’s Nolan’s choice of narrative perspective that blights the film’s impact, given that the British filmmaker chooses to veer away almost completely from the human impact that the attack had upon the people of Japan. He doesn’t mince his words either:
“Yeah…it’s interesting what he [Nolan] stayed away from,” says Cameron.
“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 criticise another filmmaker’s film” – a sure sign that he’s about to criticise 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.”
For Cameron, any re-telling of the events of Hiroshima would have to reckon with the human cost of Oppenheimer’s actions but as Cameron adds, “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.”
Christopher Nolan and James Cameron are certainly very different filmmakers and while he is often rightly garlanded for his films, Nolan has sometimes been criticised for his films possessing a distanced feeling, something Cameron clearly feels is inappropriate in this case given the subject matter.
Cameron does soften his criticism slightly by adding that his own position to critique is perhaps slightly weakened by the fact that he hasn’t yet begun to pen his own script for Ghosts Of Hiroshima, adding: “I can’t tell you today what’s going to be in the movie. I’ve been making notes for 15 years and I haven’t written a word of the script yet because there’s a point where it’s all there, and then you start to write.”
However, by the sounds of it, we can expect it to be a very different film from Nolan’s.
When Cameron does stop messing around designing popcorn buckets and promoting the same AI he once predicted would wipe us all out, he might get around to writing the script for the project and perhaps will be willing to share just a littler more. When that finally does happen, we’ll be covering it right here.
