TERMINATOR GENISYS Takes Place in an Alternate Timeline and Other Things We Learned at The Press Junket
Late last week, I attended the press junket for Terminator Genisys, the latest film in the sci-fi franchise. (You can read my review here.) Stars Arnold Schwarzengger, Emilia Clarke, and Jai Courtney, writers Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick Lussier, director Alan Taylor, and producers David Ellison and Dana Goldberg were on hand to answer questions about the film, and I've compiled the most interesting responses into one easy-to-read piece for you here. Let's get to it.
The Movie Takes Place in an Alternate Timeline
Trying to parse the exact chronology of the Terminator franchise is enough to make anyone's head spin, so the writers decided to pick and choose elements that they liked from what came before and wrote in a J.J. Abrams Star Trek-style alternate timeline element to avoid having to deal with story threads they didn't want to bother including. Kalogridis explains:
If you are looking at it as a temporal nexus, which is branching out into alternative timelines, nothing that’s in canon is changed. Those other timelines are preserved and they remain. We’re on an alternate universe timeline, so we are not negating anything that came before us. We are hopefully just adding to it and creating another storyline with the same core characters. Probably the biggest single advantage of that is that you’re not asking the audience to put aside anything they’ve seen before, you’re asking them to incorporate it and imagine, ‘OK, here are characters you know and love. What if you saw them in a different situation? What about them is at their core that wouldn’t change? What about them would, if their environment was different?’
In some ways, we’re expanding on the idea of the learning chip — which, ironically, everybody knows about, even though the scene itself was cut out of the second movie, but everybody knows about it, even though we didn’t talk about it in this film — you take a T-800 model with his learning chip turned on and you put him there. And he’s in the middle of humans for decades. And he’s going to change. That’s very much an exploration of something that I think we’ve always wanted to see done from the first two movies, because it’s very much teased in the second film, and you never got to go there. A lot of this is about that: what do you love about the franchise, what can you take forward and do more with that we just never had a chance to see?
How Sarah Connor is Different From Daenerys Targaryen
Emilia Clarke is best known for her work on HBO's Game of Thrones, but she saw this as an opportunity to do something different and be a little more hands-on. The realization of what she'd accepted was daunting, but she ultimately hopes that despite the different timeline and new version of the character, people recognize the DNA of Linda Hamilton's iconic performance in hers:
I had grown up watching the Terminators and being continually inspired, especially by Linda incredible performance, so I jumped at the chance to be able to take on this role. And then it was sort of after the fact that the daunting realization of the enormity of the part sunk in. But yes, it’s been an absolute joy to take this on. There are many elements to my work on Game of Thrones that were helpful to try to harness the inner badass. But the difference between the two is that in Game of Thrones I do a lot of delegating, and then here, in this movie, I really had to get down and dirty and do a lot of the stunts and the gun work and everything. Similarities, but Sarah Connor is a whole other kind of badass...
The Sarah that we see in this movie is so different. The spirit is definitely still intact and I really hope that you can see the essence of what Linda Hamilton created with Sarah Connor is there. But having such a different upbringing, such a different childhood, really, the result is a girl who is ahead of the game from when we saw Sarah Connor at this age last. She’s there to save this guy as opposed to the other way around. There’s a lot of really wonderful differences, and so that’s what was important to me: to show the history of what Sarah’s been through whilst maintaining the spirit of what we created.
Schwarzenegger Wasn't Sure The Arnold vs. Arnold Fight Would Work At First
It happens relatively early on, but it's been one of the centerpieces of the film's marketing campaign: a young CGI Arnold fights the aging Arnold at Griffith Observatory. Producer David Ellison says it took "hundreds of visual artists" a full year to finish the sequence. ("Creating a walking, living, breathing synthespian has always been a holy grail to achieve in visual effects, and we absolutely think they’ve achieved it for the first time in this movie," he says.) But even a few days into filming the scene, Schwarzenegger didn't know if it would work:
First of all, I think the bodybuilder they picked was really an extraordinary champion bodybuilder who had terrific muscles, so I think that was a really great idea to use that approach. But even after three or four days of doing this fight scene and being thrown around and doing all of the crazy stunts and this epic battle, I was always wondering while I was doing it, ‘How are they going to do this face replacement? How are you going to do this technological head replacement? And how do you make his body exactly like my body?’ Because his body was extraordinary but it was not exactly like my body was, right, because every body’s different. So I was always like, ‘How is this going to work out?’
And I really never knew…and then when I saw it just three weeks ago, the finished movie for the first time — I made it very clear that I didn’t want to see it just going through stages, I want to see it when it’s finished and really see how it works — so I looked very carefully at the technical aspect when I watched it the first time…but I looked at the technical stuff and thought it was so seamless, and the technology has advanced so much that it was really extraordinary that you can get this kind of entertainment in storytelling, that you can do that today. In the old days, you had to do split screens and all kinds of things and you could tell that it was not the same, it wasn’t two Arnolds fighting, two Terminators fighting, different ages and stuff like that. But in this movie it totally worked. I was really impressed. I thought it was smart from a scheduling point of view that they did that scene pretty much in the beginning of the movie, because I didn’t realize it would take one year…because it barely got finished on time.
The Arnold vs. Arnold Fight Was The First Thing The Writers Came Up With
As you've undoubtedly seen from the trailers and TV spots, the film makes a few references and callbacks to James Cameron's original film, both in locations and in specific lines of dialogue. Thankfully it doesn't rely on those too much, but I asked the writers about how they struck the right balance of calling back to those iconic moments and pushing forward to create their own narrative. Patrick Lussier responded:
When we started the process, the first scene we came up with was actually the scene where Arnold fights Arnold and everything sort of branched out forward and back. We knew that we wanted these core group of characters — we wanted Sarah Connor, we wanted Kyle Reese, we wanted John Connor. We wanted that moment that you’ve seen in the trailers, the ‘I’ll be back’ moment, we knew we wanted that, but we knew that if we were going to use it, we had to earn it, and make it so that it had a real significance and an emotional significance. So everything was a massive love letter to what James Cameron created and out of that was just trying to find the balance of where to slide it in. A lot of that was just you felt it — we just felt our way through it, and whenever it felt wrong, the actors would lean up and we made a point of not overdoing it.
Terminator Genisys hits theaters on July 1st.