There’s a moment in an action film when the camera speed slows, when the director wants the audience to feel the hero’s adrenaline surging, to see the bullet about to whiz past his head. Standing in the Brandywine doorway that day, Cameron entered bullet time. He hadn’t known that Giler and Hill had produced Alien, a movie he revered and had studied obsessively while creating creatures and spaceships for Roger Corman’s Galaxy of Terror. Cameron had seen Alien on its opening night in 1979 with his friend Randall Frakes. Normally, at a movie he and Frakes would whisper and elbow each other in disbelief at some lame story element or cheesy gag. At Alien, neither one of them said a word. This movie was perfect. Instead of hewing to the Star Trek standard of space travel—a well-groomed crew in fitted jumpsuits piloting a shiny spaceship—Ridley Scott had depicted a band of oddballs in Hawaiian shirts and baseball caps rocketing through the galaxies on the dingy, lived-in Nostromo. The whole movie, including H. R. Giger’s gruesome biomechanical designs for the alien, bore a patina of realism that terrified audiences, including the cocky twenty-four-year-old Canadian who saw it opening night. James Cameron and Alien 2 were made for each other, he says, “like peas and carrots.” But in front of Giler and Hill, he played it cool, not wanting to seem too eager. The producers gave Cameron a half-page description of their plans for the follow-up: a colony gets wiped out and the Marines are sent in. Giler and Hill’s idea represented about the first twenty minutes of the movie, and, in case there was any doubt about how thoroughly they had thought it through, ended with the words “And then some bullshit happens.” Cameron suggested that he write a treatment to show them what he might do with an Alien sequel. After the meeting, he raced home and got to work crafting a forty-two-page story outline, an adaptation of a spec script he had written about eighteen months earlier called “Mother.”
“Mother” took place on a surface station on Venus—“Venus is hell” was its opening line. Cameron had first titled the script “E.T” but changed it when he heard Steven Spielberg had something cooking by that same name. The mother creature was a human-alien hybrid genetically engineered to live in an environment that was fatal to humans—Cameron would leave that story element in the desk drawer for a couple of decades, until he made Avatar. But the rest of “Mother” went right into his Alien 2 treatment. The story climaxed with a battle between the titular mother alien and the film’s male lead, who was wearing an exoskeletal loader called a power suit. For Alien 2, Cameron added a bunch of marines to “Mother” and swapped Sigourney Weaver’s character into the male lead’s role. Just a week after his meeting with Giler and Hill, he went back to them with, essentially, the movie. The producers immediately hired him to start writing the script.
The only problem was that on the very same day Cameron landed another, equally plum assignment—the script for the second Rambo film. He was also working on a Terminator rewrite, to be ready for the start of production in a few months. Cameron called Giler and asked what he should do. “Well, don’t be stupid,” Giler said. “Take both jobs.” So Cameron took both jobs. This meant that, in a three-month period in 1983, he had to write three scripts. Cameron approached the dilemma schematically, as a Terminator might, scanning the scene with a computer readout in its head. He decided each script would be two hours long and 120 pages, for a total page count of 360. He divided the total number of waking hours he had during that three-month period by 360 and figured out how many pages per hour he had to write. “And I just wrote that many pages per hour,” he says. Cameron wrote longhand on yellow legal pads, mostly starting in the evening and going into the early morning hours, so that he could attend to preproduction duties on The Terminator during the day. He listened to music—Gustav Holst’s The Planets for Alien 2 (“Mars, Bringer of War” was a favorite) and the Apocalypse Now soundtrack for Rambo: First Blood Part II. He downed pot after pot of coffee, ate plenty of junk food, and … didn’t really finish.
With Rambo, Cameron had hoped to write a sophisticated action movie, one where the characters were motivated, the set pieces thoughtfully conceived. In Cameron’s initial Rambo: First Blood Part II screenplay, Sylvester Stallone had a sidekick, and the prisoners of war Rambo rescued were fully drawn characters whose personal histories unfolded throughout the film. Stallone vetoed the sidekick, whom he felt got all the good lines, and reduced the POWs to symbols rather than human beings whose stories help explain his character’s daring return to Vietnam. “It was almost like they were parachuting into ‘Nam to pick up a six-pack of beer,” Cameron told Canadian film critic Christopher Heard.3 But after devoting time to four drafts of Rambo, Cameron had only been able to finish the first two acts of the Alien sequel before it was time to dive into shooting The Terminator. Fortunately, Twentieth Century Fox loved the first ninety pages of the script. The studio offered to do the unthinkable—wait until Cameron was available to finish writing. If The Terminator turned out well and Cameron demonstrated talent as a director, Fox said it would also let him direct. “Sometimes a director fits a movie like a glove,” says producer Larry Gordon, who was president of Fox at the time. “Everything about him spelled right guy, right guy, right guy.” Of course, Fox could have replaced Cameron at any time if another “right guy” appeared—he had no written contract. “But we chose to believe it,” says Hurd. Sometimes when you’re young in Hollywood, it pays to assume people actually are telling you the truth.
Stan
The effects shots Cameron had planned for The Terminator would have been ambitious on any budget—on a bare-bones shoot like this one, they seemed impossible. Cameron wanted full-sized robotic endoskeletons and human prosthetics that would look convincing even during lingering close-ups, as in a scene where the injured Terminator performs surgery on its own face in a bathroom mirror. Cameron felt he knew just the man for the job, Dick Smith, the makeup artist who had aged Marlon Brando for The Godfather and sploshed the fake blood in Taxi Driver. But when Cameron approached Smith with his lofty plans, the venerable special-effects man shook his head. This cyborg stuff was too much for him. Cameron should try his friend Stan Winston. “Stan does good robots,” Smith said. Cameron persisted. “No, I want you.” “No, you want Stan.” Dejected, Cameron went to meet Winston, who had just received an Oscar nomination for his makeup work on a little robot love story called Heartbeeps. Winston had studied painting and sculpture at the University of Virginia and moved to Hollywood in 1968 to pursue an acting career. When he struggled to find acting work, Winston began a makeup apprenticeship at Walt Disney Studios, ultimately striking out on his own and racking up Emmy nominations for his makeup work on various TV projects. By the time Cameron met him, Winston was ready for a challenge. “Stan and I clicked early on because we both respect the artist, and he saw one in me and vice versa,” Cameron says. “And we are both a little crazy and enjoyed each other’s eccentricities.” Winston was just nuts enough to take Cameron’s outrageous ideas and execute them. The work he did for Cameron in subsequent films would earn Winston three of his four Academy Awards and would lead to their cofounding a visual-effects company, Digital Domain, in 1993. When Cameron resigned as chairman of that company in the middle of a tense board meeting in 1998, Winston stood up and walked out with him, quitting in solidarity. He was one of Cameron’s closest artistic collaborators and friends until his death from cancer in 2008. But first, on The Terminator, the two had to learn to trust each other.
Normally, Winston would have started from scratch with a design—most directors have some concept of what they would like to see onscreen but rely on artists like Winston to realize and refine the image for them. But Cameron had already created several detailed pieces of concept art. Some artists might have been threatened by a director who could do their job as well as they could, but Winston saw it as an opportunity to up his own game. He and Cameron communicated by passing sketches back and forth, sharing a boyish zeal for the spectacular. Winston would later joke that Cameron was “one of the most talented artists who ever w
orked for me.”4 Ultimately, they settled on a design for the Terminator that was almost identical to the one Cameron had sketched that night in Rome. Now they just had to build the thing. Because this robot had its skeleton visible in certain places, it couldn’t be played by a man in a suit. It had to be a full-sized puppet. Seven artists worked continuously for six months to build the Terminator puppet: First it was molded in clay, then plaster, then urethane. Then the mold was cast in epoxy and fiberglass and reinforced with steel ribbing. Those pieces were then sanded and painted to achieve a distressed look and then chrome-plated. Inside the robot’s head, Winston’s team placed a radio mechanism they would use to control the movements. In the end, the full-sized Terminator puppet weighed more than one hundred pounds, a bulk that would add to its on-screen appearance of unkillable strength. For the Terminator’s tricky bathroom mirror scene, Winston painstakingly sculpted a lifelike reproduction of Schwarzenegger’s face in various poses using silicone, clay, and plaster. Cameron was pleased—he felt he and Winston had built the definitive movie robot together.
The Do-It-Yourselfer
Finally, in March 1984, after two years of meticulous preparation, Cameron called action on The Terminator. “He had a kid-in-a-candy-store feeling about him,” Biehn recalls. “Jim had been on the outside of the candy store looking in for a long time. He had been let in one tiny candy store once before—Piranha II—and been pushed out the door.” But now Cameron had assembled all the people he wanted to work with, all the gadgets and the cameras and the lights. He had none of the burdens of studio or media expectations that hung over his later shoots, nor the responsibilities of massive budgets, army-sized crews, and groundbreaking technologies. “At that point he wasn’t James Cameron,” Biehn says. “He was just Jim, and there was a great joy in him when he was making that movie.” With most of the movie’s complex action sequences to be filmed at night, Cameron was constantly fighting the clock, trying to accomplish as much as possible before the sun came up each morning. He had to make a quick adjustment just a week before filming started, when Linda Hamilton severely sprained her ankle and the production schedule had to be shifted entirely so that the actress’s running scenes occurred as late in the shoot as possible. Even with the schedule change, Hamilton’s ankle had to be taped every day, and she spent most of the movie in pain.
On The Terminator, Cameron established the hands-on working style he would take to an extreme in his later films. By the time he got to Avatar, Cameron would be holding the camera, editing the footage, mixing the sound—performing almost every technical and artistic task on the film himself except acting. At lunch, his crew half expected to see their director at the craft services table, manning the grill in pursuit of the flawless burger only he could achieve. Cameron’s taking on every job, no matter how inconsequential or even dangerous it might appear to others, was a habit developed partly out of necessity in his Corman days. If a light needed to be moved on a Roger Corman movie, whoever was closest moved it. But the truth is, Cameron can do almost everything there is to do on a movie set as well as any specialist—and he knows it. Why bother struggling to explain something when you can just do it yourself? “Jim is actually as good as he thinks he is,” says a crew member on Avatar. “It’s kind of creepy.” And then there’s the machismo element of mastering tasks far outside his job description. On The Terminator, if an actor needed to have a stunt explained to him, Cameron demonstrated it, without padding. “He jumped on this Honda motorcycle I was supposed to be riding and accelerated and spun around, did a one-eighty to show me what he wanted,” Schwarzenegger recalls. “I thought he was crazy.” Cameron relied on all the low-budget tricks he had learned working for Roger Corman but delivered them at triple the scale. For a scene where a truck explodes on a downtown street, he cut from a long shot of a real semi to a miniature on the first burst of flame. “He had everything laid out in such detail that there was no room for error,” Schwarzenegger says. “He got so obsessed and so into it, he lived the movie.”
The Sleeper
The passion paid off—Cameron was proud of the end result he achieved on The Terminator. So it was a shock to him when executives at Orion dismissed the movie as just another down-and-dirty genre picture that would be gone from theaters within three weeks of its opening. Fearing critics would trash the film, Orion held just one press screening for it and spent the movie’s small advertising budget on the week of release. Many influential critics who got to see The Terminator, however, raved about it. The Los Angeles Times called the movie “a crackling thriller full of all sorts of gory treats” and said it was “loaded with fuel-injected chase scenes, clever special effects and a sly humor.” Critics at the New York Times and Newsweek were equally laudatory, and Time magazine put The Terminator on its “10 Best” list for the year. Audiences cheered, too. The Terminator became a sleeper hit, earning $78 million worldwide off its $6.4 million production budget. It was one of the first films to find an even bigger audience in the home video market and over the years saw its reputation grow from trash classic to simply classic. In 2008, The Terminator was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry, which maintains prints of films it deems culturally historically or aesthetically significant.
One person who caught The Terminator while it was still in theaters was Harlan Ellison, the prolific and often contentious science-fiction writer. “I loved the movie, was just blown away by it,” Ellison said. “I walked out of the theater, went home and called my lawyer.”5 Ellison alleged that the Terminator screenplay was based on two episodes of the TV show The Outer Limits that he had written, “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Hand.” The episodes seem a plausible inspiration—in the first three minutes of “Soldier,” as in the first three minutes of The Terminator, two mysterious warriors from the future materialize in the present. And the mechanized hand of “Demon with a Glass Hand” bears some resemblance to the translucent structure of the Terminator robot. But the Terminator script can hardly be called a straight rip-off of Ellison’s work—in the Outer Limits episodes there’s no one resembling the central character, Sarah Connor, nor any reference to preventing the birth of a future warrior. And in a genre in which countless books, movies, and TV shows tackle the same themes of time travel, robots, and future warfare, no one writer can claim ownership of them. But rather than wage a costly lawsuit, Orion gave Ellison an undisclosed sum and added a credit acknowledging the author in later prints of the film. Cameron objected to that decision at the time but felt he had little power to change it. “It was a nuisance suit that could easily have been fought,” he says. “I expected Hemdale and Orion to fight for my rights, but they abandoned me. The insurance company told me if I didn’t agree to the settlement, they would come after me personally for the damages if they lost the suit. Having no money at the time, I had no choice but to agree to the settlement. Of course there was a gag order as well, so I couldn’t tell this story, but now I frankly don’t care. It’s the truth. Harlan Ellison is a parasite who can kiss my ass.”
During postproduction on The Terminator, Cameron and Hurd’s relationship had evolved from a professional partnership into a romantic one. In Hurd, Cameron had found a woman who could keep up with him—literally keep up with him: The two adrenaline junkies would race each other to meetings, he in the Corvette he had bought with his Terminator fee, she in a Porsche. They talked on their car phones as they topped 120 miles per hour on L.A. freeways. Their dates consisted of firing AK-47s and M16s at shooting ranges in the desert, riding horses together, and scuba diving. Once they crash-landed a hot-air balloon outside Palm Springs. Cameron’s love interests, like his screen heroines, have tended to be highly capable women, and quite different from the armpiece wives favored by many powerful men in Hollywood. “I’ve always liked strong women, both in films and in life,” Cameron says. “My mother was always very independent, so maybe it’s just that the closest role model I had was like that.” Of course, it would take him quite a few
tries to get love right—it wouldn’t be until his fifth marriage, to actress Suzy Amis in 2000, friends say, that Cameron found the right heroine for him.
Tech Noir
Like the film noir crime thrillers of the 1940s and ‘50s, The Terminator told a fatalistic tale in a shadowy urban setting. But instead of showing audiences the dark side of humanity, it revealed to them the dark side of technology. In The Terminator, a defense network computer has engineered a nuclear war. Machines called hunter-killers round up the few humans left in the bleak, ash-strewn world for orderly disposal. And robots that look like people—Terminators—infiltrate the population. The Terminator wasn’t the first movie to raise questions about our reliance on machines—2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner both posited futures in which humanity’s mindless dependence on computers leads to grave consequences. But Cameron effectively coined the genre name “tech noir” when he chose that moniker for the nightclub where the Terminator first tracks down Sarah Connor. Since The Terminator, plenty of tech noir films have followed, such as Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca.
As far out as Cameron’s vision of future warfare in The Terminator seemed in 1984, it was frighteningly prescient in many respects. Today robots are used as exterminators in Afghanistan and Iraq, where Predator drones do the killing once left to flesh-and-blood soldiers. Counterterrorism operations rely on robots to sniff for explosives and gather visual intelligence. And the U.S. Department of Defense has developed remotely operated robotic guns that can kill at a half-mile range—essentially the first hunter-killers. In 2009, a group of computer scientists were worried enough about the possibility of a high-tech coup to convene a special conference to assess the possibility of “the loss of human control of computer-based intelligences.” Twenty-five years after he made The Terminator, the movie’s admonitory themes still concern Cameron. “It is not the machines that will destroy us, it is ourselves,” he says. “However, we will use machines to do it.”
The Futurist Page 6