James Cameron didn’t hold back in a new interview with Deadline, where he called Oppenheimer a “moral cop-out” for not depicting the devastating impact of the atomic bombs on Japan.
Cameron, who’s currently working on a film centered around Hiroshima, shared his thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s creative choices. “Look, I love the filmmaking, but I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop-out,” he said. “Because it’s not like Oppenheimer didn’t know the effects. There’s one brief scene where he sees some charred bodies in the audience, and then the film moves on to show how it deeply affected him.”
“But I felt that it dodged the subject,” Cameron added. “I don’t know whether the studio or Chris felt that was a third rail they didn’t want to touch, but I want to go straight at the third rail.”
Back in 2023, Nolan addressed the choice not to show the aftermath, telling journalist Brent Lang, “The film presents Oppenheimer’s experience subjectively. It was always my intention to rigidly stick to that… I wanted to show somebody who is starting to gain a clearer picture of the unintended consequences of his actions.”
Cameron’s upcoming project will explore those consequences head-on. He’s adapting Ghosts of Hiroshima, an upcoming book by Charles Pellegrino that documents the real-life stories of atomic bomb survivors, backed by forensic archaeology and hundreds of interviews with victims and their families. Cameron reportedly promised one of the last remaining survivors that he would bring their story to the screen.
