- The Terminator
- T2: Judgment Day
- T2:3D B.A.T
- T:SCC
- T3: Rise of the Machines
- T4: Salvation
- T5: Genesis
- T6: ?!
Metal as anything - The making of the Terminator in quotes!
From: Hot Dog #10
Date: April 2001
By: Alex Godfrey
Date: April 2001
By: Alex Godfrey
Making of The Terminator (in quotes by the stars). How the star of Hercules In New York and the director of Piranha 2 created one of the most successful low-budget movies of all time.
The Uprising
- James Cameron
"I'd always wanted to do some sort of really different robot story 'cos it really had never been done."
- William Wisher
"Cameron wanted to write something that was so commercial, that was so good, that people wanted to make so badly, that he could force them to let him direct it."
- James Cameron
"When I originally got the idea for Terminator, I was sick, I was broke, I was in Rome, I had no way to get home and I couldn't speak the language. I was surrounded by many people I couldn't get help from. I felct very alienated and it was very easy for me to imagine myself as a machine with a gun.
- Bill Paxton
"I'd say: 'Wait, let me get this straight. The Terminator comes back from the future to change something in the past because of a future war and there's gonna be a revolution... oh, oh, I get it. That sounds pretty cool, Jim.'"
- Stan Winston
"My first impression of Cameron was this guy is bordering on probably being a genius, and that's someone I want in my corner."
Enlisting
- Gale Ann Hurd
"Jim had worked with Lance Henrikson on Piranha 2 and he very much wanted Lance to play the Terminator."
- James Cameron
"I actually saw him playing the Terminator because we'd always made the assumption that the Terminator would be an unknown actor. He was supposed to be this anonymous face in the crowd that could walk up and kill you.
- William Wisher
"Henrikson went around climbing fire escapes in New Venice, sort of just being this Terminator/praying mantis thing, and probably scared a lot of his neighbours."
- Lance Henrikson
"I went to Hemdale (the production company) with gold foil from a Vantage pack over my teeth and a cut on my head, and kicked the door open."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"Mike Medavoy (of Orion Pictures) came up to me during a screening of Blue Thunder, and said: 'Look, there's this movie we're doing that has a great part in it. We have O.J. Simpson for the Terminator and we'd like you to play Reese.'"
- James Cameron
"I was always a big Conan freak, so I thought well, I'll go meet Conan! I knew that Arnold wasn't right for Reese. Reese was a very verbal character, a guy who's just rapping off information, bomm boom boom boom. Arnold didn't strike me as a guy who could deal with page after page of dialogue at that time."
- William Wisher
"The only way Cameron could get him out of the movie was to not het along with him and then nobody would wanna have them all work together. So he said: 'I'm gonna go pick a fight with Arnold - if it doesn't go well, you can have the chair and the stereo.'"
- James Cameron
"I had to get in an argument and come back and say he was an asshole. But that's not what happened. I had lunch with Arnold and he was so charming and entertaining that I totally forgot my agenda. I had a great time, even though he made me smoke a cigar that made me sick for six hours."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"I read the script and I could immediately relate much more to the character of the Terminator than the heroic character."
- James Cameron
"Over lunch I started thinking, this guy has got the most amazing face. I almost wanted to say: 'Arnold, just stop talking for a second and be real still.' But I was petrified.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"I kept saying he had to be able to change the weapons blindfolded and shoot without blinking his eyes, and how he should walk and look with his head tilted forward. Then Jim said: 'You should play the Terminator.'"
- James Cameron
"We cast Arnold because of his impressive implacable face. His body, his power were things that you hold in the back of your mind throughout the film as a latent sense of great force - on tap but not on display."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"Everyone around me said: 'Maybe you shouldn't play a villain. It might be bad for your carreer.' I thought about it for a little bit, but by then I was hooked on playing the Terminator."
- Michael Biehn
"I came in as an actor and read for Reese's part. I read for Gale and then Jim. I read for Jim a couple of times."
- James Cameron
"Linda Hamilton was among a number of actresses I saw. I think it narrowed down to her, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rosanna Arquette. At the time, Jennifer Jason Leigh had only done a couple of TV movies. She is an awesome actress, but Linda was great in the part."
- Bill Paxton
"Cameron called me up at the last minute and asked me to do this cameo, which was a lot of fun. I had this kind of blue harred mohawk with this tyre track on my face. I was the leader of this punk gang at the opening of the movie."
Preparing for battle
- Michael Biehn
"No one knew who Cameron was. And when I would tell my friends I was doing sci-fi with Schwarzenegger, they would smile and go: 'Hey... great'!"
- James Cameron
"Having written Terminator, waiting, waiting, waiting to get that picture started, I was starving and had to take some work. I worked as an illustrator doing posters for movies that were pure and utter cheese. They were so bad that most of them were direct-to-video. I couldn't watch them, they were so bad."
- Michael Biehn
"I spent a lot of time with Jim before we started filming, we would shoot guns, really fun guns, like Uzis and sawn-off shotguns, all the stuff we used in the movie - we would go out into the rifle range and just blow everything down. We talked about the character a lot, and by the time we started that movie we were just ready to rock'n roll."
- James Cameron
"I had Michael Biehn training really hard for that picture; he was taking a lot of martial arts. He was getting very physically confident so that he could do rolls, falls and things like that."
- Michael Biehn
"I thought about Reese, who comes from the future, and I wondered what I had to identify with. So I went back and read a lot about the Warsaw Ghetto, about people living in the rubble and facing insurmountable odds with the Nazis closing in on them."
Shoot to kill
- Biehn
Jim was working 14 to 16-hour days and writing Aliens at the same time.
- James Cameron
"After training with Roger Corman, Terminator was like a real movie. A $6.5m budget was as big as it got. It was a real rush to direct that film, but there was a great deal of terror involved as well, and I never really got to enjoy it. Oh, there were moments when I could kick back and be real excited about things, but the next instant, responsibility would settle in and I would be sweating bullets again."
- Lance Henrikson
"Oh God. It was so much fun! Paul Winfield (Lt. Traxler) and I joked that the relationship between those guys would make a great TV series."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"It was fun to play the bad guy. Jim used to talk about how deep down we'd all like to be the Terminator for at least two minutes. We'd all like to be able to do the things he can do and be able to get away with it. I mean, maybe I could break down a door but I probably wouldn't get away with it."
- Michael Biehn
"It was hot, it was humid, it was dirty, smelly, all those alleys and stuff, it was nasty."
- Linda Hamilton
"I had no idea it was going to be that good. I didn't like making the film, it was very tough."
- Michael Biehn
"There were times that Linda got frustrated, tired, crying and dirty and pissed off. I think it absolutely worked for the character."
- Linda Hamilton
I was young and thought Cameron was too tough to work with. I felt he was too machine-orientated and there wasn't room for my measly acting concerns. In honesty we didn't get on."
- Michael Biehn
"You can't comprehend how hard it is to work on a Jim Cameron movie."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"The worst moments were not when I had to do something physically, like, you know, running through a window or falling through a window or landing on glass or being on top of the car. It was more the acid that was poured on me to make me smoke."
- Michael Biehn
"Arnold was always very professional, he did most of his own stunts, he sat for two hours of make-up and smoked his cigars, and told very funny, very dirty jokes."
- James Cameron
"The stunts in The Terminator weren't that great. They were pretty average. There was nothing you couldn't see in an average Dukes of Hazzard episode."
- Michael Biehn
"When I did The Terminator, I thought Reese was the kind of guy I wanted to be when I was growing up. He had a beard, carried a shotgun, loved a women, and killed all the bad guys. I though tehre was something about the guy that was sensitive to women's needs."
- Linda Hamilton
The execs would come on set and say: 'If you shoot one more scene in the future, we'll wrap you right now!'"
- James Cameron
"It's a really valid argument that the average studio suit can't look at an effects film when it's slugged out with uncompleted shots and know that they've got anything. They will immediately lose heart. Chairman John Daly at Hemdale didn't beg, he demanded that I remove the last reaal of The Terminator. The entire last reel. He said: 'When the truck blows up, the film has to end.' I said: 'No, fuck you, it's not done yet.'"
- Michael Biehn
"Arnold's a smart guy. A real smart guy. From what I remember, he collaborated with Jim about the shots, the way they were going to be shot, the way the character was going to, you know, use certain weapons. I just remember them discussing it like partners as compared to, you know, the director telling the actor what to do.
- James Cameron
"Arnold was the one true believer. He was the only one who really thought it was going to be a hit."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"I believed all along that it was going to go through the roof... I knew I was sitting on a goldmine."
Post-apocalypse
- James Cameron
"It was a rush. It was cool. We never had any real great expectations for the film. I didn't think it would capture people's imaginations the way it did.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"Conan was God's gift to my carreer, but The Terminator automatically doubled my price."
- James Cameron
"People want to have that fantasy of being able to do exactly what they wanted to do whenever they wanted to do it."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"A lot of guys would like to destroy a police station. Even the police guys came to me in the gym and said: 'That was my favourite scene!'"
- James Cameron
"I think people rooted for him because there's some little chittering demon down in the back of everyone's mind that would like to be him for about ten minutes, to go in and talk to the boss whithout using the doorknob."
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"No matter what picture I did after that, people would say: 'When are you going to do another Terminator?'"
- William Wisher
"It's funny with hindsight... No one I've ever met, including Jim, said: 'I think I'm gonna write something and change history with it.' You never know. But I mean it turned out that that is what happened."
- James Cameron
"Paul Verhoeven knocked his soup over, then came running around the table to shake my hand. He said: 'I studied your film Terminator many times on my VCR.' I nodded knowingly and said: 'I know!'"
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
"Our intentions going in were to make a quality, classy action movie. We had no idea at that point that there would be an intelligent group of movie people who would elevate the film to a much higher level. Normally, people don't say that about action movies, especially the ones I do."
- Linda Hamilton
"It succeeded not because it was a great action picture, but a love story as well. It was more than just shoot-'em-up and blow-'em-up. The love story drew many people who ordinarilty wouldn't have liked the picture: the whole chase, the whole struggle - it was all for a purpose."
- William Wisher
"I think The Terminator is very much like It's A Wonderful Life - it's a story that says your life could make a difference. On the surface you're nobody, but you could be the most important person in the world. People can't help but love that kind of story."
- James Cameron
"I think it would be hard pressed to make a better film for so little money."
- Chuck Cominsky
"The weekend the execs were maming up their minds about who was going to direct Aliens, Terminator opened pretty impressively. On the strength of that, Jim was asked to direct Aliens."
- James Cameron
"Eleven years after my fever dream in Rome, I should kiss the feet of the scumbags who were responsible for me being in that dark and depressing state of mind."
TerminatorFiles Editorial remark
Some of the text can have errors, due to the scan of which the text was typed over, was somewhat unrecognisable. As a nice side-note, the image accompanied to this article is available as a desktop download!
