EXCLUSIVE: Martin Sheen has been tapped by James Cameron to relate the audio ebook of Ghosts of Hiroshima, the Charles Pellegrino ebook set for publication by Blackstone on August 5. Cameron plans to make use of the ebook as the idea for Ghost of Hiroshima, which the filmmaker will direct as his first non-Avatar movie since 1997’s Titanic.
The undertaking has been a labor of affection for Cameron for fifteen years, and the three time Emmy winner Sheen was a part of that dream. “Martin Sheen is my dream come true to read this book for audio,” Cameron instructed Deadline. “His voice-over narration for Apocalypse Now still haunts me, and for a subject this dark, he will give it the gravitas and humanity that it needs.”
Cameron bought the rights to Pellegrino‘s forthcoming ebook and can shoot the movie as quickly as Avatar manufacturing permits. Cameron plans an “uncompromising theatrical film.”
The ebook is timed to mark the eightieth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb in 1945. The movie focuses partly on the true story of a Japanese man throughout World War II who survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, received on a prepare to Nagasaki, after which survived the nuclear explosion in that metropolis. Pellegrino’s ebook attracts on the voices of bomb survivors and the brand new science of forensic archaeology.
“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,” Cameron instructed Deadline. “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.” While visiting Yamaguchi, Cameron and Pellegrino pledged to “pass on his unique and harrowing experience to future generations.”
Cameron’s concern of nuclear battle, featured in a number of of his iconic movies together with The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, has been on his thoughts since watching the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold when he was 8 years outdated.
Pellegrino served as a science marketing consultant to Cameron on Titanic and Avatar and his scientific writings additionally straight impressed Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.
Blackstone’s Josh Stanton and Anthony Goff stated everybody on the imprint “is thrilled with this remarkable partnership of James Cameron and Martin Sheen on this epic book.” Blackstone printed the audio ebook of Oppenheimer, which grew to become a No. 1 New York Times bestseller.
Bryan Barney negotiated for Blackstone. Pellegrino is repped by Shane Salerno’s The Story Factory.
