Deadline managed to talk to James Cameron about the world famous Hollywood Director reconnecting with his creation all these years on, how they approached rejuvenating the franchise, deliberating what age rating the movie should aim for, and also if the movie can be successful enough to validate the continuation with another pre-planned Terminator trilogy.
“I suppose it is an unusual situation from a high-level perspective since I wasn’t involved in three intervening films, but when I talked to David Ellison about it his vision for this was basically to go back to basics and do a continuation from Terminator 2, which is one of his favorite films,” Cameron said. “He’s always believed in the potential of Terminator but he really felt that his own film, Genysis — and he was quite honest with me about this — fell short of the mark and didn’t really do what he had wanted it to do. So he said, ‘Let’s start with a blank slate and take it back to Terminator 2.’ And that idea was intriguing.”
David Ellison’s vision? “STOP THE BIKE!” Oh right… the fans apparently never campaigned and never railed against David Ellison’s previously planned Terminator Genisys trilogy, and vision, by demanding a T2 sequel and the return of Linda Hamilton?? We on this site, along with many other Terminator Fans, pushed for Linda Hamilton’s return to the Terminator franchise for 10 years.
The fans never asked for a Terminator 2: Judgment Day sequel??
Its just all David Ellison’s idea – or at least that’s what James Cameron was told… ?
It is amazing how history can be rewritten through the press. In all honesty; what added to making us want a T2 sequel was the passion and enthusiasm that Neill Blomkamp showed for Alien 5 (a sequel for Aliens), this is what made TheTerminatorFans.com more passionate about, and want to campaign for, a T2 sequel.
James Cameron then goes on to talk about how the team broke a story and the planning of a three film arc for a trilogy. *Just to add that T3: ROTM, Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys all were planned with back to back sequels and trilogies in mind* … but with James Cameron involved they may expect to break that curse but whether they will, will probably be determined by the movie’s success in Asia.
“We spent several weeks breaking story and figuring out what type of story we wanted to tell so we would have something to pitch Linda, we rolled up our sleeves and started to break out the story and when we got a handle on something we looked at it as a three-film arc, so there is a greater story there to be told. If we get fortunate enough to make some money with Dark Fate we know exactly where we can go with the subsequent films.”
James Cameron then spoke of the hiring of Tim Miller for the Director’s seat…
“My belief is that if you get a director who’s a grown-up and knows what to do, you turn them loose,” Cameron said. “My role as producer was in pre-production, and prep and shepherding the script. But it was Tim’s film when it reached the floor.”
James Cameron then discusses the script and that it wasn’t as polished as he would have liked when the movie went into principal photography but that didn’t stop him giving a helping hand – in some cases a day before the shooting of a scene!
“I focused on getting the script punched up, I didn’t feel like we went into the shoot with the script exactly where it should have been. There was a lot of momentum on the project, there was a start date, there was a lot of energy and a lot of “go fever,” but the script wasn’t where it needed to be so I quietly worked on it in the background and shipping out pages. Sometimes I was shipping out pages the day before they shot a scene. I’m not sure that was 100% always helpful but overall I kept the characters on track and sounding right and being where they needed to be.”
Next Jim talks about making things more streamlined and setting the story in a time duration of roughly a couple of days.
“One of the things that seemed obvious from looking at the films that came along later was that we would need to get everything back to the basics and that we would need to avoid the mistakes of making things overly complex and that we needed to avoid stories that jumps around in time and one that goes backward and forward in time, let’s keep it simple in the relative unity of time. With the story, let’s have the whole thing play out in 36 hours or 48 hours. In the first two movies everything plays out in less than two days in each one so there’s energy and momentum.”
The franchsie (at least the movies) did always stick to that, and only Genisys flitted through time backwards and then forward, while many said this was too complex to understand we at TheTerminatorFans.com just found it convoluted.
“Science fiction filmmaking has been compromised over the past couple of decades, that compromise is trying to pander to a larger audience and making these big expensive movies and then following the common wisdom that, well, once you’re making one of those movies the reflex is it must be PG-13 and the thinking is if it’s not then you’ll cut out 25%-30% of your potential earning power. And on a big film that’s your margin, that can be the difference between profitability or losing money.”
We find this one worrying, starting the film as PG-13 with a PG-13 script for a more mainstream profitability then switching while filming… this isn’t cool and doesn’t impress us as it could cause the final version of the film to lack cohesion in regards to tone/theme and overall performance.
Not sure how to feel about that… but thanks for the R Rating anyway.
“Even going into the shooting we were like, ‘OK let’s cover it both ways, so we would have a scene where Sarah is completely unfiltered and with no mediation and then shoot it again where it was tamed down. But eventually we just said, ‘To hell with this, it’s a waste of time.’ I think the feeling was that everyone wanted to recapture the tone and the sensibility of the first two films, which I considered flattering.”
TheTerminatorFans.com have been open to the idea of filming both PG-13 and R Rated variants simultaneously as a form of a compromise, to get that much needed and wanted R Rating. Though we fully understand that that could cause delays in filming and be more costly on the production, which would probably be seen as a negative by studios.
Next time if they make it R on the written page (the script) it should be more efficient and effective from day one.
“I think it’s part of the fun to be in that sort of causal chain in the development of artistic memes — or however you want to think of it — in cinema, you know, I think of where I was when I was writing Terminator, I loved Alien, I loved The Road Warrior, I loved Blade Runner, I loved Westworld, I loved 2001: A Space Odyssey. And all of that, It’s all in there. So I was influenced by the films that came before me. No artist exists in a vacuum and all screenwriters are fans of something. Something got you so excited you just had to jump up and go try to do your own version of it and so none of that exists in a vacuum. The trick is to make it new and fresh and take the elements that went into your thought process and to combine those elements in some new and fresh way and then make that your own.”
Always nice to hear Jim talk about inspiration and passion for other movies and those are some cool movies, and yes, you can see them in Terminator but we love Terminator even more than those movies – though Yul Brenner was The Terminator before The Terminator.
“I look at a film like The Matrix for example and I see little snippets of DNA from The Terminator in there and I’m fine with that it’s like, ‘Great!’ I can celebrate that. It’s a completely fresh idea. I think The Matrix is one of the most profoundly fresh science fiction films ever made and yet I do see snippets of Terminator DNA in it. And I’m flattered by that. I like that because I kicked the ball down the field and somebody else took it and ran with it. They did something great. I might riff on something from The Matrix at some point, consciously or unconsciously. I think that’s how it works, we inspire each other as artists to go farther and to think of new things based on ideas that are in the zeitgeist.”
On the evolution of science-fiction movies and storytelling, Jim Says things are much easier now…
“The benefit there is now you don’t have to stop and explain stuff, there was a point in time when things needed to be explained and now we can build on those ideas without having to explain them. You know, some mud-man from Borneo might come in and watch a science fiction movie now and, well, they’d be lost for a lot of reasons so let’s say instead it’s somebody that has been plucked from the 1940s. If they are watching a science fiction movie from today they wouldn’t get it at all. They’d be missing all the cultural references and the development of the ideas in between the world as they know it and the worlds as we know it now.
What I love to do the most is to create that completely kind of subsuming experience where you turn off your phone and you engage. You, as an audience member, engage for two hours or two and a half hours, whatever it is. That’s what I love. We stand and stare at each other on the Avatar set sometimes when we’re just kicking back with some of the animators and we’re like, ‘Wow, this is really cool!’ That’s my favorite thing. And you ain’t seen nothing yet baby!”
It is still good to hear that Jim is passionate about movie making and storytelling – we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again; we are happy he is reconnecting with Terminator, and while we didn’t fall in love with Avatar in the same way we did with Terminator, we hope the new Avatar movies can get that job done next time!
What do you think about this interview with Deadline?
Let us know in the comments below.
Source: Deadline