The Terminator changed cinema forever. It’s original trilogy of talent, James Cameron, Linda Hamilton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, look back on the making of a blockbuster classic – and how they’re bringing the story into the future with Dark Fate…
Linda Hamilton, left, and Arnold Schwarzenegger star in Skydance Productions and Paramount Pictures’ “TERMINATOR: DARK FATE.”
One of the best American movies of the ’80s, and certainly one of the most influential, Terminator is a monumental sci-fi action blockbuster. It still feels fresh, timely and exciting, 35 years since its US release on October 26, 1984.
The foundation of the film was the imagination of co-writer and director James Cameron, who put the threat of Artificial Intelligence in humanoid form, with the killer cyborg T-800. But the character wouldn’t have been so unforgettable without the calculated, terrifying performance of Arnold Schwarzenegger – or the relatable, vulnerable, ultimately powerful humanity of Linda Hamilton as his target, Sarah Connor. The trio who made the original Terminator so impressive returned with the even bigger and bolder Terminator 2: Judgment Day seven years later, and three decades on are all back to continue the original story in Terminator: Dark Fate. Here, they recount why they’re all back – and their memories of making a movie that shaped cinema forever…
What are your memories of making that first Terminator movie, 35 years ago?
HAMILTON: “I was a bit of a snotty New York actress. And there were people then who would say, ‘Don’t go to LA – you’ll be ruined!’ You know, New York is New York; there is this preciousness about acting. My ‘people’ [laughs] at the time – my agent and so on – were really excited about that film. I was like, ‘Hmm. I don’t know. I didn’t really have an appreciation of what we were doing until I actually went to set before I started. When I did, I was like, ‘Oh, okay. This might be alright.’ I was very like that until, probably, halfway through the film, at which point I was just so deeply engaged. And then, of course, we saw it, and I thought, ‘Okay. Wow. Jim Cameron is a genius…’ But I really did not know, until I saw the film, that it was that good.”
SCHWARZENEGGER: “I literally paid no attention to anybody in the first movie. I lived in my own kind of shell, because I was the Terminator, you know? I came to the set, I did my scenes, then I split. I didn’t talk to anybody, deliberately. Also, my character doesn’t meet Sarah Conner until the second half of that movie. After that, all I remember is that whenever I’d walk into a room, she’d run from me. That whole first movie, whenever I walked in somewhere, [Linda] would run out the other side of it [laughs]! It’s not like we hung out. Also, you know, I was made up a certain way – my eyebrows were burned off, I had a wig on, spiky and burned, my face was all burned, my eye had already gone. I guess it wasn’t my best look. So, I don’t think [Linda] was probably in the mood to hang out either. It was all work, work, work. I remember her more from the second one. We had dinner the day before we started shooting and I was so impressed with how much she had changed herself. It was incredible. She had this Israeli guy who was training her. I was so impressed with the shape she was in. Then, when we started shooting, I saw the way that she handled the weapons very well and she was so refined and intense. It was great.”
CAMERON: “I tend to be pretty analytical when I’m making a movie, in the mindset of: ‘Is this working?’ There was a moment when I first filmed Arnold, on the first movie, I was watching his first day’s dailies with him. It was about 10 days into the shoot because he joined the shoot a little bit late because he was working on something else. It was a shot where he’s in a police car and he’s cruising along. And his eyebrows have been burned off and his hair has been singed back and there’s glycerine on his face and he just looked so fucking cold and machine-like. And I remember that moment – that camera sort of jolts up the side of the police car to his face, and I just thought, ‘Holy shit. This is great.’ And I had the same feeling on this [Dark Fate], when I saw him as the T-800. It was, ‘This is great! This is what a Terminator would look like, because it’s a cyborg. And the ‘borg’ side of that is the organic part of him – the human flesh that covers the machine endoskeleton. Which is kind of a goofy idea, if you really think about it. But the concept was: if you really want to be a perfect infiltrator, you have to be able to stand up to close scrutiny. And that organic part of him would age and the machine underneath wouldn’t. Which is exactly what you see.”
Jim, you were incredibly prescient to dream all this up, 35 years ago…
CAMERON: “I don’t know how prescient I was, I was just a science fiction fan, and science fiction had dealt with the idea of super-computers and emerging machine intelligence long before I was talking about it. I knew my sources. I just mixed it together into a unique blend of high-octane adrenaline action. It wasn’t a bunch of people just sitting around and talking to a big black box that was talking to them. They were being hunted and killed! It was a little bit taking those ideas and figuring out how to use them as the basis for what was really a highly propulsive action narrative. As a science fiction fan, I was also thinking about what that would be like. What would it be like to be in the future after the apocalypse, after the machines had rained down nuclear fire on the human race and we had to dig ourselves out of the ruins and fight back against them? The character of Reese [Michael Biehn, who travels back in time to try and save Sarah Connor in the first movie] was born out of that, and we see in his flashbacks what I imagined that might be like. While I knew my sources, I also knew where I was doing something new, you know?”
SCHWARZENEGGER: “It was nice to all work together again. It was great. I remember that it was really the first time [on Terminator] I had played a machine and it was fun to do that. I’d seen Yul Brynner in Westworld and the way he played that role was so powerful and so believable that I wanted to play it exactly the same way. So that was my motivation: Brynner! That’s why when I met Jim Cameron for the first time, and I told him what needed to happen, how the Terminator has to act, how he has to carry himself, how he has to behave, Jim offered me the role! I’d gone to talk to him about playing Reese, that was the idea. But then Jim realised I could play the Terminator really well and that was that.”
Related: Terminator: Dark Fate review
What got you all to return to continue the story from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in Terminator: Dark Fate?
HAMILTON: “The fact that Jim [Cameron] was at the helm, even though remotely [as producer]. I really acknowledge that Jim was the major creative force in the first two movies and that his leadership, the overall concept of the franchise, is very important. But more than that, it was that so much time had passed and that although in some ways the character is the same, the situation has changed. There was new stuff to play. That’s what intrigues me, as an actress: the time that has passed and the potential to explore so much more. I never wanted to keep playing the same thing, with diminished returns. And here it was different. Here it was like, ‘Hmm… This is intriguing. Let’s see what we can do!’”
SCHWARZENEGGER: “It has Jim Cameron’s fingerprints all over it. Also, Linda Hamilton’s. So, it’s kind of like going back to the old days of Terminator. And it has more action in it than any of the other Terminators have ever had. More unique action. And the visual effects are unlike anything you’ve ever seen.”
CAMERON: “The first movie came out in 1984. I wrote it in ’82. So, the question is: ‘What is relevant about Terminator now?’ Well, obviously, the imminent existential threat of rogue artificial intelligence, which is now not science fiction. It is now being discussed, seriously, in the AI research community, amongst world leaders, defence think-tanks and so on. Vladimir Putin said a year ago that the nation that is the first to dominate artificial general intelligence will dominate the world. Now, only a guy like Vladimir Putin would talk about dominating the world without sounding like a Bond villain. He often sounds like a Bond villain anyway…
So, that was a motivator for me. And as it all played out, we didn’t wind up in the final film spending an awful amount of time talking about the fine nuances of artificial intelligence research. We sort of did what the first two films did, which is take it as read that the next phase of human evolution, for better or worse, is going to be the emergence of machines as smart as us, smarter than us. And, at least in our fable, we propose that they are going to decide that they don’t need us.”
How much do you change characters – like Sarah or the T-800? Was it ever a temptation to keep the T-800 – Arnold’s character – as he was, as people love the original so much?
CAMERON: “No. It’s just not interesting to do the same thing. Here was the big problem that we faced: ‘How do you go back to the basics, to the things that people liked about the original films, but do it in a unique and original way?’ It’s a dilemma, because you’re being pulled in two different directions. How do you surprise an audience, but not betray an audience? That’s the great dilemma of all sequels, really.”
SCHWARZENEGGER: “It is about Sarah Connor. She’s always been the focal point to the story. And it’s Jim’s writing. Jim is very good at making the guys look very heroic in a movie, but he feels that women don’t end up looking heroic in movies because people don’t write them that way. And it’s very important to him. Jim makes more effort than probably anyone else in the Hollywood community to write women as heroes. That’s his writing craft. And in the first and second and now this movie, Sarah is such a great hero. And that’s because Linda can sell it. You can have a great script, but it doesn’t work if Linda can’t sell it. And she is so strong in this movie. And so is Natalia [Reyes] and Mackenzie [Davis] – all of them are very heroic characters and all of them sell that so well. But Linda is so strong.”
HAMILTON: “I was very instrumental in the shift between the Sarah of T1 and the Sarah of T2 because it was just sort of a little blank embryo from the first movie to the second. [When T2 was greenlit] I said, ‘Okay, we’re doing another one? Well then, this woman is mad in this one…’ She was out of her mind because she was the only one who knew how the future was going to unfold. For T2, I likened her, in my mind – and in asking Jim to create her – as John The Baptist, the wild man in the desert trying to tell people of the glory that is coming or – in her case – the disaster that is coming. That was the first thing I said to Jim before T2, before he went off to write it. I said, ‘Make her crazy.’ And he gave me an amazing canvass to paint that with. And that was a very complete character arc. So, after that movie, I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know if I’ve got anything more to say.’ But all these years later it turns out that there is more to say. And on this, although the story was essentially built, but not written, when they approached me, it was more about what I could contribute to elevate her. Not developing her so much but just bringing 28 years [between the events of T2 and Dark Fate] of a hard life lived, of exploring her deepest sorrows, and what that brings to the screen. Because she is a broken woman when you meet her…”
Terminator: Dark Fate is now playing.
