When Hurd and Cameron were trying to raise the money for The Terminator in 1982, it was a terrible economy in which to be chasing a movie deal—unemployment topped 10 percent and interest rates hovered at 17 percent. But the duo had the advantage of selling a sci-fi script, a hot genre in the wake of the first two Star Wars films. And they had some other Roger Corman alumni pulling for them at Orion Pictures—Orion would distribute the film, it said, if Cameron and Hurd could get the production financed elsewhere. Eventually, The Terminator landed on the desk of John Daly at Hemdale Pictures. Hemdale picked up low-budget movies passed on by the major studios, like the breezy Farrah Fawcett vehicle Sunburn and Tony Danza’s contribution to the primate comedy genre, Going Ape! “Hemdale didn’t expect to make a movie that was a hit, or even a movie that was any good,” says Hurd. “They just wanted to take their fee, and that’s it.” When Daly read the Terminator script, he was intrigued, not least because this script had already cleared the toughest hurdle, interesting a distributor.
Cameron wanted his pitch meeting with Daly to close the deal. So the director asked his friend from Piranha II, actor Lance Henriksen, to show up to the meeting early, decked out as the Terminator. Henriksen burst into the staid Hemdale offices with all the fearsome cy-borgian drama Cameron had requested, literally kicking in the door. He was wearing a ripped T-shirt, a leather jacket, and knee-high boots and had gold foil from a pack of Vantage cigarettes smoothed on his teeth and special-effects cuts painted on his face. Henriksen’s performance was convincing enough for Hemdale’s poor receptionist, who screamed and jumped out of her chair. The actor sat waiting for fifteen minutes, saying nothing, simply staring icily. By the time Cameron arrived, entering the office in a more traditional fashion, the Hemdale staff were delighted to see him, if only to be freed from Henriksen’s creepy gaze. Cameron delivered an enthusiastic pitch, aided by detailed sketches he had made of sequences from his screenplay. Daly was impressed by the young director’s passion and persuaded by the sketches that Cameron had a clear, well-thought-out vision for the film. In late 1982, he agreed to back The Terminator, with help from Orion and HBO for the $6 million budget. Cameron was ecstatic and couldn’t wait to start production. What he didn’t know was that it would be nearly eighteen months before he got to step behind a camera.
Picking a Fight with Mr. Universe
One of Cameron’s first tasks was to cast the actor who would play Kyle Reese, the heroic warrior from the future who visits the present to save humanity. Reese had to be believably butch enough to take on the Terminator but vulnerable enough to pull off an apocalypse-straddling crush on Sarah Connor. Orion wanted a star who was rising in the United States but also had a huge foreign appeal. The studio’s co-founder, Mike Medavoy, had just met Arnold Schwarzenegger at a party and sent the bodybuilder’s agent the script, with the lead role in mind. Schwarzenegger’s representatives, who felt they were grooming an action hero, not a villain, thought “lead” meant Reese. A five-time Mr. Universe and seven-time Mr. Olympia, Schwarzenegger had already been in Hollywood for over a decade. He had played Hercules with a dubbed American accent in the often unintentionally hilarious Hercules in New York (credited as “Arnold Strong”) and a conveniently speechless hitman in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. But most of the town had first glimpsed Schwarzenegger’s glistening pecs and Teutonic charisma in George Butler’s intelligent 1977 docudrama about the bodybuilding subculture, Pumping Iron. In one memorable scene, the future California governor likens the pump he gets from working out to the satisfaction of “having sex viz a woman and coming.” It was this nuanced performance that earned Schwarzenegger some parts where he actually got to open his mouth, including the role of Conan in John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian in 1982. The actor was now at a crucial moment in his career. Would he, like most bodybuilding stars, end up relegated to toga movies until he was too old to look good in a skirt? Or would he break out and get roles limited not by the width of his fifty-seven-inch chest but by the breadth of his charm? Cameron was skeptical—if this Austrian oak played Reese, he figured someone even bigger would have to play the Terminator. For that part, the studio had suggested another athlete-turned-actor: O. J. Simpson. In 1983, Cameron didn’t see O.J. as a believable killing machine. He’s a futurist, not an oracle.
Purely as a courtesy to the studio, Cameron agreed to take a lunch meeting with Schwarzenegger. As he walked out of his apartment that day, the director devised a plan to get this absurd casting idea dismissed. At lunch, he would pick a fight with Mr. Universe, and then head back to Hemdale and declare Schwarzenegger an asshole. The meal didn’t go exactly as planned, however. Schwarzenegger was so entertaining and excited about the script that Cameron instantly forgot his hostile agenda. And while he was supposed to be lobbying for the role of Reese, Schwarzenegger kept talking about how the villain should be played. “I spoke much more enthusiastically about the Terminator character, about how he has to handle weapons, to be always like a machine,” Schwarzenegger recalls. As the bodybuilder talked, Cameron noticed the sharp, symmetrical angles of his cheekbones and jawline and began sketching Schwarzenegger’s face on a notepad at the table. He wanted to ask the gregarious Austrian to just stop talking for a second and be really still, but he was petrified. This guy even had muscles in his forehead. This guy, Cameron thought, would make a great Terminator.
Instead of clashing, Schwarzenegger and Cameron had bonded. These two Hollywood immigrants had a lot in common. Both men were abnormally capable—one with prodigious physical gifts, the other with intellectual ones. Though they had come to the United States from other countries, they shared a lot of qualities Americans often claim for themselves: self-reliance, creativity, energy, and an indefinable hunger. In Schwarzenegger, Cameron had met a man as preposterously confident as he was—how else do you walk out onstage in a bathing suit to the opening theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey? And in a town full of girlie men, here were two men’s men. They both liked motorcycles and guns and raising hell. Instead of a smackdown, this lunch had turned into an alpha male lovefest, one that would lead to a decades-long friendship. The awkward moment came with the check. Cameron had no money in his wallet, and the Hemdale executive who accompanied them was having trouble with his credit card, so Schwarzenegger paid. After the meeting, Cameron, still sick from Schwarzenegger’s cigar smoke, went back to John Daly with bad news and good news. “Forget it,” he said of Schwarzenegger playing Reese. “It’s not going to work. But boy, he’d make a hell of a Terminator.” The deal was closed the next day, when Schwarzenegger overrode his agent.
While The Terminator would become the movie that catapulted him from simple strongman into screen icon, Schwarzenegger didn’t seem too optimistic about Cameron’s passion project before shooting commenced, at least as described by a journalist who visited him on the Conan set in 1982: “As we sat there talking, he picked up the Conan sword, which weighed a ton, and went through all the movements he’d practiced. Then he picked up a pair of shoes and I said, ‘What are those for?’ And he said, ‘Oh some shit movie I’m doing, take a couple of weeks.’”1 The shit movie was The Terminator. Schwarzenegger prepared diligently for the role nonetheless. He spent three months training with weapons of all sorts—submachine guns, rifles, shotguns, pistols, revolvers, grenades—not just to know how to use them but to be completely comfortable around them. The truth is, casting Schwarzenegger as the Terminator shouldn’t have worked. The character is supposed to be part of an infiltration unit, a supersoldier that insinuates itself into the human resistance movement fighting the machines in 2029. Cameron’s first thought for the role was the man he had used to sell the film to Daly—Henriksen, with his lean build and world-worn face. What could a man who looked like Schwarzenegger infiltrate—a Greco-Roman wrestling team? “It made no sense whatsoever,” Cameron says. “But the beauty of movies is that they don’t have to be logical. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care i
f it goes against what’s likely”2
Other casting suggestions were floated for Kyle Reese—at one point Sting was even considered. But Cameron ultimately found his hero in a handsome twenty-seven-year-old actor named Michael Biehn, who had some TV under his belt and a film role as a psychotic fan stalking Lauren Bacall in 1981’s The Fan. When Biehn’s agent sent him the Terminator script, the actor was dubious—he was to audition for a time-travel movie made by some Roger Corman vets and starring Conan the Barbarian? “The project seemed kind of silly to me at the time,” Biehn recalls. But any feature-film audition was an opportunity worth pursuing, and so, after a morning spent in rehearsals for a theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Biehn drove up to Hurd’s house in the Hollywood Hills. “From the moment I met Jim, my feelings about the project changed,” Biehn says. Cameron had drawings of the Terminator and different sequences of the film tacked up at Hurd’s house. Over the years, the director’s way of describing his scripts—a mixture of animated verbal storytelling and detailed visual aids—has helped him woo actors and executives. “There’s something clear about the way Jim thinks,” Biehn says. “He wasn’t looking for me to fill in the blanks for him. At that point, all of a sudden I really wanted the movie.” Cameron and Hurd were impressed, too. The Kyle Reese role was a tricky one, with pivotal exposition delivered in the heat of a car chase—it’s Reese who tells the audience that Sarah Connor is being targeted for assassination because in the future she’s going to bear a child who will lead the human resistance. Biehn had delivered his lines with convincing strength. And he’d nailed the softer side of Reese—after all, we’re supposed to believe this guy has been in love with a picture of Sarah Connor his whole life, that he’s crossed time to be with her. “Michael was probably overly vulnerable for the role,” Hurd says. “Almost everyone else who came in for the audition was so tough that you just never believed that there was gonna be this human connection between the two. They have very little time to fall in love. A lot of people came in and just could not pull it off.” The only hurdle, the filmmakers told Biehn’s agent, was the actor’s Southern accent. Could he get rid of it? Since Biehn grew up in Nebraska and had no accent to speak of, his agent was perplexed. Apparently a little of the Tennessee Williams drawl was left in Biehn’s mouth the day of the audition. Once he returned, sounding as regional as Walter Cronkite, he got the part.
Do I Look Like the Mother of the Future?
In popcorn movies of the 1980s, if women existed at all, it was so the audience could learn more about the guys. Female characters were a vehicle for the hero’s development—they raised the stakes by being enslaved and forced to wear a metal bikini (Return of the Jedi), getting kidnapped by heroin-smuggling Vietnam vets (Lethal Weapon), or held hostage by radical German terrorists (Die Hard). Or they inspired a man to greatness simply through the astonishing magnitude of their hotness (Karate Kid, Top Gun). Hollywood didn’t invent this reductive use of female characters—who was Helen of Troy but the motivation for some sensational battle sequences?—but in an era of films driven by special effects and action set pieces, the movie industry let its female characters languish to new depths.
Starting with The Terminator, however, Cameron would flip the sexist storytelling axiom on its end multiple times in his career and with great success. The character who takes a real journey in The Terminator is the film’s heroine, Sarah Connor. In the first few pages of his script, Cameron describes Sarah Connor as “19, small and delicate features. Pretty in a flawed, accessible way. She doesn’t stop the party when she walks in, but you’d like to get to know her. Her vulnerable quality masks a strength even she doesn’t know exists.” Sarah Connor begins the film, which takes place over two days, as a sweetly flustered waitress. She doesn’t immediately see herself as a likely caretaker of humanity’s salvation. As she tells Reese when he delivers the news of her burdensome fate: “Do I look like the mother of the future? Am I tough? Organized? I can’t even balance my checkbook.” But by the final scene, Connor is a fledgling guerrilla fighter, a woman who has improvised explosives out of mothballs and corn syrup and rallied a wounded Reese to his feet in a brutal fight scene. And, like the Virgin Mary, she’s pregnant with the child who will save us all—John Connor.
Cameron wasn’t making a feminist statement by giving a woman the juiciest role in his film—nor was he making a religious one. He was just trying to stand out from the crowd. “In writing I like to be fresh, and at the time of Terminator, that kind of female character hadn’t really been done,” Cameron says. It helped that Cameron didn’t give much credence to two Hollywood truisms—that an action movie about a woman would inevitably fail with the young male audiences who drive box-office receipts and that female audiences wouldn’t turn out for a film with cyborgs and car chases. Later on in his career, Cameron’s ability to tune out conventional wisdom would serve him, and the field of filmmaking, well as he pioneered technical advances. In his early movies, that indifference to popular sentiment was mostly a boon to his actresses. “He was fearless in thinking a strong woman is not gonna turn the men off,” Hurd says. “Male audiences will still come. And they did.” Over the course of his career, Cameron was to give women more power, authority, and strength than any other mainstream director has been able to get away with. To this day, the highest-grossing action film centered on a woman is still Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which made $520 million worldwide in 1991. Unless, of course, you care to call Titanic an action film, which you certainly could, with its heart-pounding last hour devoted to the ship going down. In that case, the highest-grossing movie of all time is Cameron’s action epic about a young woman finding the meaning of life thanks to some great sex on a sinking boat. Either way, it’s hard to imagine the sinewy heroines of the decades that followed, in films like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2, without Sarah Connor’s legacy.
Casting someone who could make the transition from everywoman to supermama was a challenge, however. Cameron needed an actress who was girl-next-door pretty but also athletic enough for the physical demands of the part. He watched prospective Sarah Connors run laps down Hurd’s driveway to see how they’d look fleeing the Terminator. Cameron ultimately found his mother of the future in a little-known actress named Linda Hamilton, who was fresh off starring in the not-yet-released horror movie Children of the Corn. “Linda was believable as someone who felt she was completely unprepared for this responsibility and didn’t want it, but at the same time, you thought she might be able to get away,” says Hurd.
“Don’t Be Stupid. Take Both Jobs.”
With his cast assembled, Cameron prepared to start filming The Terminator in the spring of 1983 in Toronto. He found a role for Henriksen, his friend who had been so crucial to locking up the money on The Terminator, as Detective Hal Vukovich and continued to refine the script. But the production hit its first speed bump when Dino De Laurentiis, the producer of the Conan movies, exercised a preemptive option in Schwarzenegger’s contract. That meant Cameron would have to wait nine months while his villain laced back up his moccasins for Conan the Destroyer. That wasn’t enough time for Cameron to shoot another movie, but it was enough time for him to take on a writing assignment, so he started circulating his Terminator script as a writing sample and meeting with producers, including David Giler and Walter Hill.
Giler and Hill’s Brandywine Productions owned the remake rights to Spartacus. Impressed by Cameron’s Terminator script, the producers invited him to pitch them ideas for a futuristic treatment of the Roman slave drama. Cameron saw lots of potential in a Spartacus-in-space story and showed up for the pitch meeting full of ideas. It quickly became clear, however, that Cameron’s high-concept sci-fi pitches weren’t what Giler and Hill had in mind. The producers wanted to make a swords-and-sandals epic—with actual swords and sandals—that just happened to take place on another planet. The meeting was a bust. As the disappointed screenwriter headed for
the door, Giler nonchalantly mentioned one other project that had been kicking around Brandy-wine for years—Alien 2.
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