Martin Sheen is preparing to talk ghosts… 

James Cameron has tapped the 84-year-old half-Spanish actor to narrate the audio book of Ghosts of Hiroshima, the Charles Pellegrino book set for publication by Blackstone on August 5.

Cameron plans to use the book as the basis for a film of the same name, which the filmmaker will direct as his first non-Avatar film since 1997’s Titanic.

The project has been a labor of love for Cameron for 15 years, and the three-time Emmy winner Sheen was part of that dream.

“Martin Sheen is my dream come true to read this book for audio,” Cameron told 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 purchased the rights to Pellegrino‘s forthcoming book and will shoot the film as soon as Avatar production permits. Cameron plans an “uncompromising theatrical film.”

The book is timed to mark the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb in 1945. The film focuses in part on the true story of a Japanese man during World War II who survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, got on a train to Nagasaki, and then survived the nuclear explosion in that city. Pellegrino’s book draws on the voices of bomb survivors and the 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 told 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 fear of nuclear war, featured in several of his iconic films including The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, has been on his mind since watching the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold when he was 8 years old.

Pellegrino served as a science consultant to Cameron on Titanic and Avatar and his scientific writings also directly inspired Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.

Blackstone’s Josh Stanton and Anthony Goff said everyone at the imprint “is thrilled with this remarkable partnership of James Cameron and Martin Sheen on this epic book.”