James Cameron Talks about all things Terminator

I am a huge fan of he Terminator films, I assume most people that are into science fiction are big fans of it as well. I grew up with the Terminator and it has been cool to watch the different Terminator movies and see how the story has evolved. I am really looking forward to Terminator Salvation, it looks like McG did a helluva job. But, without Cameron this franchise would never have come this far. Here is James Cameron as he discusses his incredible creation and how it came to be.

I first remember being aware of geopolitics during the Cuban missile crisis. When I was 7 or 8, I found a pamphlet for fallout shelters on the coffee table in my family's house in Ontario, and I remember thinking, "What's this about?" I had the sudden sensation that my coddled existence was a facade. Something dark and terrifying lurked behind it.

I've been fascinated ever since by our human propensity for dancing on the edge of the apocalypse. So when I wrote the first Terminator outline around 1982, I was just working out my childhood stuff. It was also born out of the science fiction movies and literature I grew up with. For the most part, they were warnings-about technology, about science, about the military and the government. You couldn't escape those themes or the fear of nuclear holocaust.

The idea of a hit man from the future trying to change past events was certainly not new. What I thought was cutting-edge was deciding to not have the Terminator be a guy in a robot suit. That's how it was typically done. But a flesh-covered endoskeleton? That was new. So for me it was all about how we could develop stop-motion animation and puppetry to create a true robotic endoskeleton. The team at visual-effects house Stan Winston Studio jumped into it and made it work.

Casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as our Terminator, on the other hand, shouldn't have worked. The guy is supposed to be an infiltration unit, and there's no way you wouldn't spot a Terminator in a crowd instantly if they all looked like Arnold. It made no sense whatsoever. But the beauty of movies is that they don't have to be logical. They just have to have plausibility. If there's a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don't care if it goes against what's likely.

I don't think anything resembling The Terminator is really going to happen. There certainly aren't going to be genocidal wars waged by machines a few generations from now. The stories function more on a symbolic level, and that's why people key into them. They're about us fighting our own tendency toward dehumanization. When a cop has no compassion, when a shrink has no empathy, they've become machines in human form. Technology is changing the whole fabric of social interaction. We're absorbing our machines in a symbiotic way, evolving to become one with our own devices, and that's going to continue indefinitely.

I kind of turned my back on the Terminator world when there was early talk about a third film. I'd evolved beyond it. I don't regret that, but I have to live with the consequence, which is that I keep seeing it resurrected. I'm not involved in Terminator Salvation. I've never read the script. I'm sure I'll be paying 10 bucks to see it like everybody else.

Wow, It doesn't sound like he enjoys seeing his creation resurrected. He calls it his consequence, ouch. Cameron did what he felt he needed to do. I think he made the right decision, but I still wonder what these last 2 Terminator films would have been like had he been involved. Everything that I have seen for this new Terminator film looks great, and I am excited to see it. From the sound of it everyone else seems pretty excited about it as well. Let's hope that it doesn't suck.

Source: Wired