The Making Of The Terminator - A Retrospective

in the 21st century a weapon will be invented like no other this weapon will be powerful versatile and indestructible it can't be reasoned with it can't be bought it will feel no pity no remorse no pain the future this weapon will be called the Terminator you're dead honey what day is it the date 12 May first day what year I'm here to help you I'm reached dn-3 eight four one six decided to protect you you've been targeted for termination what is it Ruby boy be arnold schwarzenegger the terminator your future is in its hands terminator was was an idea that I had when I was in in Rome I was just sitting around basically in my hotel room I was in fact a sick at the time I had a real high fever and and I just laying on the bed thinking and came up with all this bizarre imagery I think also the idea that you know because I was in a foreign city by myself and I felt very sort of dissociated from from humanity in general it was very easy to project myself into the entities these two characters from the future who who were out of sync out of time out of place you know that sort of thing I'd always wanted to do some sort of really definitive robot a story because it really you know I'd really never been done what did you think when you first got the script 441 I mean because they they wanted you to read for the other guy right so you read it thinking about the other guy or what you know about Reese do you remember what you were thinking when you read it the more I I read the script the more I remember I got fascinated by the Terminator that guy the bad guy which I thought was the real cool guy you close give them to me what he loved was the story and what he especially loved was everything that Terminator did we were talking about the longer lines of me playing the heroic character right because that's what I thought you were coming in for and the funny thing was when I went to that lunch I didn't see that as well as you know in the back of my mind I was thinking The Terminator you were thinking the Terminator but we sit and we have this polite lunch because we've never met each other and neither one of us mentions it right and then we both go back to our guys and say Terminator you know you you you then did something really smart you sent over to my office you're painting that you did off Terminator right your but we've actually made my face on it right and with the hoarding the 45:4 like this across the chin like this and I looked at this painting and I said I am The Terminator I'm gonna make this call now right and they called blue right my agent right away and they called you and I said I want to play the Terminator and then the two was made what changed was that the original concept as written and this and the script didn't change at all not a single line of dialogue was changed but the visual concept was that the terminator was this anonymous character who could walk out of a crowd just one face in the crowd could walk up and kill you for no apparent reason except for what your life would mean in some future time and and that concept change because honor doesn't vanish into a crowd it took on a slightly more hyperbolic visual style which is a little more a little larger than life it still played and sort of realistically as but but it became more nightmarish and you always knew he wasn't quite human obviously in order to get the intensity on the face to make you a killer there's a fine line which with having you be completely blank so you know you know there's there was a some sense of emotion isn't really the right word but in but intention I think the fact that you were a killer I don't want to say predator but you know predatory creature in a way and very focused on your on your goal Sara Oksana yes we really narrowed it down to just if this would be a robot what movement would there be going on and it would literally only be the arm coming across pouring out cocking shooting no shoulder movement no head movement right it was back and then the whole body would turn exactly away but with a smoothness oh yeah it was like very positive and very smooth right not jerky either because jerkiness waste waste energy right I was like you know the ultimate efficiency you know to get you know that the the shortest path between two points what I found to be effective certainly on Terminator was to do a slow-motion build up or to subtly segue into slow motion where you almost don't realize it it becomes almost a dreamlike pace or or or that dilation of time that you experience when you're in a traffic accident and it's happening and you can't stop it and the time seems for stretch for me the fun in that scene was build up the the the latent tension of what is going to happen knowing that one guy's arm the other guy's arm they're lurking around through the crowd so all hell's going to break loose come with me if you want to live remember the first day we shot the scene where you're driving through the parking garage in the police car you've stolen and you're looking for them and on that first day we got together and we talked a little bit and we worked out some physical behavior like like a shark you know kind of the way it moves back and forth looking for prey and then you came up with the idea of moving your eyes then moving your head to follow the eyes and moving the eyes back and moving the head back so that became almost like a surveillance camera and the funny thing was it didn't it didn't really get real to me until the next morning in dailies and I saw that close-up but I went this is working great but nobody has ever seen this before I'll be back when writing I'll be back I didn't think that that line would play funny at all because you almost have to see the movie to know that he's coming through the door with the car I figured that that would be a line for people who were seeing the film again which obviously Terminator is one of those movies that people see over and over so it works like that but you know what it worked even when people hadn't seen the movie before because they could just guess what your version of coming back was gonna be you know I mean at that point they were in sync with the picture and the picture was working in the first picture you were so enthusiastic about the character and about the work I mean as you are in all in all your films but I hadn't worked with you before so I wasn't I wasn't ready for this that you just jumped in I mean there was stuff where we had you tied to the top of a car holding on while the car raced backward down the alley with your arm on fire I think the worst moments were not really when I had to do something physically like you know running through a window or falling through a window landing on glass or something like that of being on top of a car it was more the the asset that was poured on me to make me smoke there's no way that we can just put some smoke in this I'm going to close that I can smoke rather than having acid being poured on weed fire and acid and those kind of things you never know when that stuff starts to get around the face exactly too much or any eyes I think that there was there was one major decision that was made that everything else sort of devolved from which which was made jointly between between myself and Stan Winston when I approached him to do the you know the makeup and and prosthetic effects on the film and that decision was to not do a man in a suit we had to sell the idea that this was the suit that was inside the man all I remember was that they walked into the induced and Winston's office and his building where he designed all the the everything you know the Terminator look after you got through prepping him what it just looked like notice he started making drawings and the makeup and design all this stuff I remember walking in one time and he said to me this is what you're gonna look like and I looked at this and I did not thank you we possible to create this activate on sticking out I mean it was all mechanism around the leaf yeah the hydraulic mechanism underneath the cheek spread and when the media stripped off and when the teeth is sticking out and aside when Tamara's gone when the other facial I I mean that lens is exposed and lights up red in all this stuff when I saw that I said of myself that's impossible to do and he looked at me and when I told him that he said to me it's possible Arnold but it would take hours and hours and hours and a lot of your patients get out I tried to structure a script in such a way that it was not too highfalutin budget wise the executive producer begged us to write more the scenes as daytime because of the perceived cost difference but you know I plunged madly on it was it seems so important stylistically to keep to keep the film a night the night film as much as possible and so we kept it that way and I don't think it really impacted the cost all that much the first one was with his drug especially when he came to make it lady sing because there wasn't that much time available and that much money available right exactly in fact probably toward the end we didn't even have anybody to put it on it was here I'll put this off we stole shots at the end remember we got a crew of like three people together and went out and did some close-ups of you the camera yeah I had to put through this special thing on it and take on like laughs put my clothes and was no one from wardrobe there right I had my clothes in the back in the trunk of the car without it put on the jacket of Terminator and you say quickly quickly before the police comes walk across this to just punch in the window and then I say okay we're looking left and right I put on the glove quickly you know that the great jacket on and all this stuff and then they you said you went like this and it was saying you're the camera behind the car right I went out with there you know says okay let's move on to the next locations it worked well as funny is that all of that you know it's kind of scrambling around to do that it didn't occur to you to ask me what do you mean punch in the finder and the other thing that's really real important to me in a film is subjectivity getting the audience to see what's happening the way the character sees it as opposed to the void sort of sitting outside and I like to try to you know force you to see it feel it more the way they do within the friend you can't step in there with them but but you know hopefully and the next best thing it was primarily an aesthetic decision in the writing which was to show these nightmarish glimpses as they were perceived subjectively by this character Reese and then to take that and and juxtapose it back and forth with though with you know Sarah Connor and her sort of very normal almost name life when you were casting especially the female lead which then became Linda Hamilton's pod I remember you were very interested in finding someone that fits a certain specification there a certain woman and I think that's interesting you were telling me that what you were looking for are you saying it's from the future one possible future then you're from the future too is that right right well it's interesting that we you know we cast Linda and she was right for the first picture and she wasn't Ness she had to have some strength but when you first saw her she's had to seem to be kind of an everyday person and and vulnerable and the kind of person who was was really almost a victim in a way right and at the end that strength emerges first she was too soft nice feminine girl that was working there and it's a restaurant right and you know just having a great time being one for young girls is what was out there having a good time and then as she became the victim and as time went on and she realized what her mission was she became harder and harder and she was really tough and you really got the feeling this woman has changed and she's she's ready to take on this challenge Michael Biehn obviously did a you know fabulous job with with Rhys there is a funny anecdote there which is that Michael came into to read for us and he gave the best reading of any of the actors that we'd seen but it was with a southern accent and and I you know we talked to his agent very politely said you know Michael is very good but but we really don't want him to see him so specific that he comes from the south because it's it you know he's from the future we don't want it we don't want it to be that that specific and the agent said what accent he doesn't have a southern accent it it turned out that he'd been reading for a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof the morning you know that morning of the reading and he hadn't shaken the exit should he give another great reading - the accent and that doesn't look as I came across time for you Sarah I love you I always have I always felt that this this was more than the ordinary action film it was more than a special effects from and/or like what some thought was just a b-movie and that it is only appealing to the kids between 14 and 18 this is not to be looked at it's just a limited audience a movie for limited audience but in fact I think the story is so solid and so good and has so many interesting messages there and it is also entertaining and so that it would have a broad appeal it would have an appeal to towards the word for the women it would have something for the order folks it was it was just something that had something in there for everyone and I think because of that there was after the movie was gone from the theaters it then when it came on television it was it was 10 times as big the ratings and how many people saw it and then when the video came out it was like a mushrooming effect and I think that's what eventually led to the belief that we must to a second Terminator it's funny that every year that went by that we didn't make the sequel the demand for the sequel got greater exactly and you know that's why you and I have we got together periodically and read started working on a plan right and mapping out times to keep a certain time period blocked out so we can go and eventually down the line actually you'd call me up about once every six months and say so how's it going on to know you talk about other things for about five minutes in it so I was terminated to go I mean anyway so they would say we were fortunate enough they did come together that we did make a second Terminator what did you just say he said there's a storm coming in I know Terminator 1 was was like a hallucination for me I was making my first my first picture I had no idea it was really gonna be a success I mean when I when I wrote it I probably thought it stood the chance of being a success I wrote it that way on purpose you know but you never really believed that that it's going to happen or that it can happen and so everything after that was like a dream for me for a while and then I realized yes it did happen this really did find its audience and gave me a lot of you know courage as a filmmaker to go on and do do other stuff I felt right from the beginning when I read the script and when I had my meeting with Jim Cameron that it was a winner I felt it all the ways through the shooting of the movie every time we prepared for stunts every time we did the scene I was one more convinced that we had a winner in our hands and then when the Jim showed me after the film or was the shooting was completed he showed to me some of the edited footage and when I saw that it was so intense and it was so well done that I I just couldn't get enough of it and it was really one of the first times that I could see rough cuts off of a film and wanted to see more and more of it so I believed all along that it's gonna go through the roof I was hoping and praying that the studio would believe the same thing and was supported a hundred percent and so I knew I was sitting on a gold mine you

Channel: James Cameron France

Views: 698,087

Keywords: Terminator (Film Character), Making-of, The Terminator (Award-Winning Work), james cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Terminator

Id: KBF4Rxm_dlc

Length: 20min 31sec (1231 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 02 2014