Terminator: Dark Fate will be centre stage at San Diego Comic-Con 2019 in Hall H at 11 am, which starts on 11 am (PT) Thursday July 18th – the latest instalment to the Terminator franchise will be presenting new footage/a trailer at the event.
To mark the occasion Den Of Geek got the inside scoop on the production, its stars, the characters and more!
Producer David Ellison tries again:
David Ellison, owner of Skydance (and Terminator rights holder, with James Cameron) didn’t want to give up after Terminator Genisys, and wanted another “bite of the apple”.
Tim Miller told Den of Geek:
“Even despite Genisys not playing as well as expected, he [David] didn’t want to give up, he still wanted to take another bite of the apple and he thought I might be a good candidate to help because The Terminator was a very formative movie for me. I have a great affection for the franchise and really wanted to see it come back in a big way.”
Tim Miller
Sarah Connor’s Story:
Director Tim Miller on story, and the importance of Sarah Connor…
“For me, it was never the story of John Connor, it was always the story of Sarah Connor, and nobody could play that character like Linda could,” he says. “So if Linda would ever come back to check on her again, that would be the best of all possible worlds. And that is, of course, what happened.”
Tim Miller
We at TheTerminatorFans.com have been fighting the real Sarah Connor’s corner for years, Tim is not the first to understand her importance: mother of the franchise, Gale Anne Hurd, understood that it was Sarah Connor’s story.
Even though John Connor can be resurrected at the drop of a hat (with the science-fiction tropes that this franchise has at its disposal) it perhaps shows a lack of foresight to underestimate the importance of John Connor with fans, and though some fans have called for the Connor’s to be removed from the future of the franchise, we wonder – was that through the genuine want and need for new characters, or the sullying of those characters through bad movies, sequels, reboots and re-castings… ?
Perhaps that’s food for thought.
Linda Hamilton also stated:
“This film is a direct sequel to Judgment Day, but many years have passed. The story and timeline track very well.”
Linda Hamilton
Linda Hamilton’s Return:
Linda emailed Den of Geek to say that she was “extremely hesitant” about returning but that she was interested in reconnecting with the character…
“The fact that so many years have passed for the character of Sarah Connor intrigued me, certainly, events have marked her. I wanted to explore that… who is she NOW?”
Linda Hamilton
We know that Linda turned down T3: Rise of the Machines due to her character being more of the same but in a much lesser capacity; this is something Linda wasn’t interested in but reconnecting with the character all these years on did interest Linda…
“The first two films had such a complete arc for the character, and I only wanted to participate in this project if there was something new and challenging to play, she is a wild thing still, but her mission has changed. The years have not treated her kindly. She is bitter, near-broken, and very much alone.”
Linda Hamilton
Tim Miller talks more about Linda returning…
“I think that she [Linda] felt like she said what she needed to say about that character and revisiting the well in some lesser form was not of interest to her. I wouldn’t say it took a little convincing because I honestly think that she wouldn’t have engaged in the conversation if she didn’t want to or didn’t have some hope that it would work out. Linda is very decisive, and all the factors aligned for her that now was the time to do it.”
Tim Miller
Schwarzenegger on working with Linda Hamilton again:
“Linda’s always fun to work with and she’s just as intense now as she was when we did Terminator 2. She’s very adamant about the way she handles the weapons, the action, and all that. She’s a very strong woman and I think that one thing that always comes up is that, in all of these movies, the women are always kind of the leaders and they have the strong upper hand and are very heroic. Cameron writes that very well. Feminine but also hard, it’s a great combination.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Mackenzie Davis on working with Linda:
“She really resonates a type of cool toughness and is incredible to be around, but she’s also the sweetest woman and so full of love. She does have this warrior’s exterior, and I imagine being in these movies has really shaped part of her. She’s tough and cool and she does seem like she could survive in the apocalypse but she’s also extremely loving. I got to work with her pretty much every single day for six months, and it was such a lovely experience.”
Mackenzie Davis
Thanks to @Keda_92, Christophe Dewez and demofob for helping us track down this larger image of Mackenzie as Grace in the future war (below)
Grace:
Grace, played by Mackenzie Davis, is a hybrid/enhanced human soldier who will lead as primary protector to Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes). Think, Marcus Wright but slightly different, Grace has been described as being in “constant pain” and in need of drugs to relieve that pain. Tim Miller described Grace, and others like her, as “Augments” to Den of Geek.
Mackenzie Davis on her character of ‘Grace’…
“It was intimidating to play her. It’s a very athletic role and one I never really thought I would play or, if I did play it, not execute. I think she’s an interesting addition to the Terminator canon. She is working in service of the future and that’s a cool sort of mantle to carry.”
Mackenzie Davis
Tim Miller goes on to elaborate about Mackenzie’s role…
“Mackenzie is a revelation and what a badass she is, she’s faster than normal. She’s stronger than normal. You give her a set of futuristic weapons, and she is a force to be reckoned with. [Augments] are the shock troops in the future war. But they feel pain. They feel emotion. It’s a messy process; it’s imperfect; it’s not shiny and clean, but she’s fucking tough as nails.”
Tim Miller
Dani Ramos:
Tim Miller goes on to say that Dani Ramos will be handled in the same way Linda was in the first movie, most fans had already presumed this from the teaser trailer of Terminator: Dark Fate, and we all know that the intention of this new trilogy is to make Reyes the lead star and to pass the baton to her.
“Natalia is just wonderful all around. She brings a lot of emotion to this movie. The idea with Dani is you want to have this person, like with Sarah Connor, who comes from a background you would never expect someone to come from to then become one of the most important people in the future. I don’t want to tell you what Dani becomes, but I will tell you that she’s very much akin to the way Linda handled [the first movie].”
Tim Miller
REV-9:
Tim Miller goes on to tell Den of Geek that the REV-9 can be fought off with guns…
“It’s essentially a T-800 and a T-1000 together, I think that the DNA of Terminator is very grounded. It’s not space battles… I didn’t want to make a Terminator that was so powerful that you can’t fight it off with guns. I didn’t want to make a Terminator that could shoot ray blasts out of its hands or turn things into molten lava. All of that stuff, while visually spectacular, just doesn’t feel like a Terminator movie. We tried very hard to make Gabriel as formidable as possible while also keeping him and the action grounded.”
Tim Miller
Gabriel Luna talks about transforming his body and becoming the next killing machine…
“Arnold laid the template and then Robert [Patrick] was this other version, I wanted to be the perfect hybrid of that. The powers of the character kind of lent itself to that anyway—to be the perfect hybrid between the T-800 and the T-1000. So I gained 14 pounds of muscle and I had never done that before.”
Gabriel Luna
For a movie sounding a somewhat feminist, horn, there seems to be disregard for the first female Terminator (the T-X) played by Kristanna Loken, which was technically a hybrid of the first two Terminators (T-800 and T-1000) and Kristanna Loken did indeed use Robert Patrick as inspiration for her performance. The T-X also had an Endoskeleton with a liquid metal exterior; in the same way REV-9 does but the two components did not separate, or maybe they could and we just never saw it in the movie ;). Yes, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is apparently no longer part of the canon (unless Dark Fate is a huge failure, fans will make up their own minds about ROTM) but we should not forget to acknowledge the first ever female Terminator.
Schwarzenegger on Luna:
“He’s a hard-working guy and takes the role seriously because he’s young and very agile and in good physical condition, he was willing to train really hard to build his body and do all the stuff that he needed to do.” Schwarzenegger adds that he pushed himself in the gym as well to get back into T-800 form: “I trained my ass off for the film. When you get to my age, you have to train twice as much to get the same result as you did 20 years ago.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Gabriel has made no secret about how inspirational Arnold is to him and how he loves spending time with Arnold. The two seem to have developed a friendship.
Gabriel on Arnold:
“If I wasn’t inspired already, which I already was, his encouragement, his knowledge, and everything he could share with me just left a super strong imprint and became part of my life,” says Luna. “Now it’s just what it’s all about. The training hurts in the beginning, but you keep on going and eventually it stops hurting.
Gabriel Luna
Schwarzenegger’s Aged T-800:
Tim Miller and James Cameron told fans that Arnold would play an “Aged T-800” Terminator in the movie, via an event/interview with The Hollywood Reporter. This T-800 will be pretty much similar to the other T-800’s we’ve seen but with a new twist.
Tim Miller talks some more about Arnold’s T-800:
“This version of Arnold is something that Jim has been thinking about for a long time, I think it’s a really great way for him to come back to the franchise. I understood the other movies and the way they handled him, but I didn’t want to do that again. I really thought that the way to do something unique for this film was to have Arnold’s backstory and the way he interacts with the rest of the characters be something we hadn’t seen from that character before… but I also think it has the expected amount of Arnold kicking ass.”
Tim Miller
Schwarzenegger on the ‘ACTION’ of Terminator: Dark Fate:
“I would say [this movie] is huge action-wise,” says Schwarzenegger, who certainly knows his way around the genre. “I was very satisfied with the ideas and the big action that this movie has. It’s really wild.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Tim Miller on the Action:
“It’s pretty hard to raise the bar on things like Avengers: Endgame or Avatar, or things like that,” he explains. “Everybody likes a good spectacle but I think it doesn’t have quite the same impact as it did when you saw that first liquid metal man in Terminator 2. I like action and I like spectacle, but I’m not like, ‘Oh my God, I have to do something I’ve never seen before.’”
Tim Miller
Tim Miller continues to state that, even though the action is big and previously told EW that he is competing a little bit with Marvel (which we could see a mile off anyway with all the blue chroma key sets), he still wants characters and development of those characters, to be paramount (pardon the pun) in relation to the action/spectacle…
“That is one of the big things I learned about working with Jim Cameron. Here’s a guy who approaches it from character first and then does an action scene, and the action scenes always seem to support the character so well. That’s one of the things I love best about his movies.”
Tim Miller
Regarding the mythology, Tim Miller doesn’t feel like he’s changing the mythology in the franchise (even though it looks like that’s exactly what’s happening, if you have read the leaks).
“I don’t feel like I’m changing the mythology,” he says. “I think it’s a continuation of the cause and effect that [James Cameron] set up in the other Terminator movies—which is simply if you make a change in the past, it will change the future. So you have to expect that what happened before, or the history that Sarah had been told of the future, was going to change. I don’t look at it as changing mythology. I look at it as the natural outcome of the set of rules that Jim established in the first two movies.”
Tim Miller
You can agree with cause and effect or not but just because you blew up Cyberdyne didn’t mean that there was not another division of Cyberdyne with data backups (super-computer SkyNet wouldn’t have one base of operations and neither would the corporation that conceived it).
We’ve discussed how the blowing up of Cyberdyne could delay the future (as a device to bring back Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese) but just exploring the idea doesn’t mean there can’t be other plot avenues or explanations.
Umbrella companies and other SkyNet artefacts, collected through time, have previously been explored in the comics.
Gabriel Luna ended the article with the pretty cool story of…
“One day I had them both looking down the sights of long guns aimed at me, and I’m looking at both of them, thinking, ‘Holy fuck, this is a Terminator movie you’re in right now.’ To be part of the continuation of that story that I watched with my jaw on the floor when I was 12 years old is just indescribable.”
Gabriel Luna
This is definitely something to chew on until we get the new trailer/footage (possibly shortly after the initial showing on Thursday the 18th), and it’s very interesting to read what the stars think of their characters, each other and the story.
*The quotes used come from the Den of Geek Special Edition Magazine.
What do you think of the information?
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Source: Den of Geek