Muren showed Cameron a rough but promising animation test of how the CG pseudopod would move. He assured Cameron ILM could do it. It would take the company nine months to deliver twenty shots, amazing when you consider that twenty years later on Avatar, Cameron’s crew would produce more than two thousand shots in the same time period, each of them many orders of magnitude more complex than the water tentacle. But this soft-surface, biotic-looking water weenie, which morphed into the actors’ faces, was a lot harder to accomplish than the stained-glass knight. Cameron and Bruno had a couple of other ideas about how to shoot the water tentacle if CG didn’t work out—at one point, Claymation was discussed. But ultimately they took a huge leap of faith with ILM. When Cameron got his first shots back from ILM, of Mastrantonio’s face imposed onto the water tentacle, he knew he had made the right decision. It was a darn good thing, too, because by then it was too late to do anything else. In the end, ILM produced twenty pod shots totaling about seventy-five seconds of screen time. Cameron’s water tentacle became the proving ground for realistic CG. For the first time, someone had created a lifelike, natural character—not some shiny, sharp-edged effect—using computers.
The Wave
For years, Cameron had suffered a recurring nightmare about a wave, miles high, rolling toward him. A wave is a symbol of inevitability—once it rises, it always breaks upon the shore. Like death, nothing can stop it. In the third act of The Abyss, a wave of biblical proportions threatens everyone on Earth. Angry with humanity for playing at nuclear war, the NTIs have raised the wave to teach us a lesson. The image of the standing wave looming over beaches and cities required the use of miniatures and freeze-frame technology. The tricky sequence still wasn’t finished by the time Fox held its first test screening of The Abyss in Dallas in May 1989—instead, the crowd saw a drawing of the wave. The test audience had a strong but strange reaction to it—members listed the wave sequence either under “scenes I liked most” or “scenes I liked least.” By now the release date had been pushed back multiple times due to delays on the effects. Cameron, as was becoming his habit, had a movie that was way too long and an ending that in some ways felt like it belonged in another film entirely. “People didn’t get it,” says Tom Sherak, who was in charge of marketing the film for Fox. “Jim was trying to deal with past aggressions by society, the Holocaust, cruelty, how precious life was. He was trying to delve deep inside the psyche, and we were just looking for a commercial movie.” Fox head Barry Diller told Cameron The Abyss was “too much movie for todays audiences.”6
Cameron elected to remove the problematic wave sequence, which diminished his defining theme of nuclear peril but brought the film down to a manageable two hours and twenty minutes. To their credit, executives at Fox questioned whether that was the right answer. But they knew the film had to come down in length, and Cameron had final cut. This was the director’s first experience with the test-screening process. “I believe we misinterpreted the results, due to my inexperience,” Cameron says. “I made cuts to the film that I shouldn’t have made. I now know how to better interpret the cards. And I also know, never, ever preview a movie with unfinished effects.” The Abyss opened on August 9, 1989, with the new, truncated ending. Reviews were mixed, and for the first time in his career, Cameron’s box-office performance was underwhelming. On a production budget of $45 million, the movie made $54 million domestically, $90 million worldwide. It won the Oscar for best special effects and earned three other nominations, for art direction, cinematography, and sound. Riding in a limo with Cameron after the Academy Awards, special-effects supervisor John Bruno tried to get the director to hold the trophy for the film he had worked so hard on, nearly died for, in fact. Cameron refused to take the Oscar.
In 1992, he reedited the film for a special edition, adding twenty-seven minutes of material, including the wave sequence, which would appear in a new theatrically released print in early 1993 as well as on laser disc and DVD. “I like the wave version,” he says. “I like the idea that we are judged and found wanting by rational, godlike aliens, but then saved by one good man. As a mob, we’re a lost cause. As individuals, there is hope.” More than twenty years after he first began it, Cameron’s long journey into The Abyss was over. He never had the nightmare about the giant wave again.
6.
AND THEN THERE WERE TWO
Rebooting
When Cameron had first sketched out the Terminator story, his plans were too grand for the era—1982—and for his stature—a no-name crashing on his friend’s floor in Pomona, California. Cameron’s initial outline had called for two Terminators sent sequentially to our present from the future. The hero, Kyle Reese, was able to dispatch the first—essentially the T-800 model that Arnold Schwarzenegger played—at about the midpoint of the story. Then the future enemy reluctantly sent the second killer. This was the Terminator even the bad guys feared to deploy, because of its power and potential effect on history’s time line. It was a tenacious liquid-metal robot that couldn’t be destroyed by any conventional weapon—shoot it or blow it up and it would just reform and come after you again. Cameron tried to think of ways to depict the liquid-metal man using the filmmaking techniques of the day. He thought Claymation might work, if it was shot carefully and in shadows. But he wasn’t sure. “I was seeing things in my head which couldn’t be done with existing technology” Cameron says. “Eventually I realized I had too much story and nobody would fund it anyway.” So he cut the narrative down to just the T-800 idea, which made The Terminator less an effects picture and more a conventional shoot with actors on street locations, an easier sell to financiers. But the liquid-metal villain always stayed in the back of his mind.
After The Abyss had underperformed at the box office, Cameron figured he’d better get back in the game right away. Within months he would get a chance to return to the story that had launched his career. It was just before Christmas in 1989 when he received a call from Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna at Carolco Pictures, the fast-growing independent production company behind the first three Rambo movies. Kassar and Vajna wanted to become major players in Hollywood, and they were spending money accordingly, buying up talent and irritating the studios by upsetting the value placed on stars and filmmakers. Carolco had bought the rights to The Terminator for ten million dollars, and the investors asked Cameron to write and direct a sequel. “They offered me a lot of money,” Cameron says, six million dollars, to be exact. “I can be bought.” Schwarzenegger could, too—for the action hero’s participation, Kassar gave him a twelve-million-dollar Gulfstream jet. After he signed on, Cameron’s first thought was of the liquid-metal villain he had dreamed about seven years earlier. Thanks to the pioneering CG work on The Abyss, now he knew just how to accomplish it.
This was a period of professional and personal new beginnings for Cameron, who was, for the first time since Piranha II, working without Gale Anne Hurd by his side. In early 1990, he founded his production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, so named for the lightning effect in The Terminator that accompanies the arrival of the future warriors in the present. The director bought a building next to the Burbank airport as headquarters and hired Larry Kasanoff, an executive from Vestron Pictures, which had produced Dirty Dancing, to run it.
Before starting production on The Abyss, Cameron had begun dating a woman who could have strutted right out of one of his action films, director Kathryn Bigelow. Strong, lean, and nearly six feet tall, with a pretty, angular face, Bigelow resembles a female Clint Eastwood—enough that she sort of played him in a spaghetti Western–style video that Cameron directed for Bill Paxton’s band, Martini Ranch. Like Cameron’s mother, she was a painter. She studied at the Art Institute of San Francisco and later at the Whitney Museum in New York with Susan Sontag before earning her master’s degree in the film division at Columbia University. Artistically, Bigelow was a good fit for Cameron. Her movies are both macho and high-minded, starting with her 1978 short film called The Set-Up, in which Gary Bus
ey and another actor fight each other while cultural critics deconstruct the violence in voice-over. Her second feature, the 1987 Western-horror hybrid Near Dark, became a cult hit and starred a number of Cameron regulars—Paxton, Lance Henriksen, and Jenette Goldstein. While Cameron was in South Carolina shooting The Abyss and Bigelow was in New York directing the Jamie Lee Curtis cop drama Blue Steel, they would fly to see each other on weekends. After The Abyss was released, they married and bought a cliffside house in L.A.’s Coldwater Canyon.
Since he had worked successfully with Hurd, it seemed natural to Cameron to work with his third wife. In this case, their roles were reversed, with Cameron producing and Bigelow directing. Bigelow had found a mediocre action script about surfers called “Johnny Utah,” which she wanted to make darker and more psychological. She enlisted Cameron to rewrite as much of the script as he could while he prepped Terminator 2. “I wound up going to studio meetings with her, pitching it, and pretty much woke up as producer one day,” he says. Bigelow was convinced she had found the next big action star to play her lead, an actor then best known for his dopey role in the teen comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure—Keanu Reeves. “She was determined to make him a star,” Cameron says. “I didn’t see it. But she insisted she would dress him, cut his hair, teach him to walk, to move. To this day I have no idea how she saw this in him.” Executives at Columbia, which originally had the film, didn’t get it either, and they passed on “Johnny Utah” with Reeves as lead. But it was Cameron’s job as producer to back Bigelow’s play So he helped her set the film up with his old friend from Fox, Larry Gordon, who had by now launched the independent production company Largo Entertainment. The film’s title was eventually changed to Point Break, and it became a surprise hit, launching Bigelow as a maker of big-boy action films and minting Reeves as the next big thing in Hollywood. Cameron’s role as producer was mainly as Bigelow’s guardian angel with the executives, including Gordon, with whom he engaged in at least one tense shouting match on Bigelow’s behalf. “I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed producing that much,” Cameron says. “But with Kathryn it was always a fun partnership. She is so committed to making great films, without compromise.”
“Hey, Can We Really Do That?”
When Cameron signed on for T2, it meant returning to his old torment—writing. To have someone to share the agony with, he recruited Bill Wisher, his friend from Brea who had collaborated with him on the script for the original film. This time, Wisher and Cameron sequestered themselves in the director’s tiny home office. The writers decided the T-800 would be the hero and would arrive in the present to protect John Connor, not to kill him. “We thought, ‘If we make Arnold the good guy, that’ll surprise people,’” Wisher says. “That was a daunting decision at the time.” Schwarzenegger as the Terminator was considered one of the film’s great villains. If they turned him into a cyborg humanitarian, Cameron and Wisher wondered, “Will people hate us for doing this?” The first person they had to convince was the actor himself. When the writers got Schwarzenegger on the phone and pitched him the idea, he was dubious at first. At the end of the day, as Wisher recalls, Schwarzenegger gave in to their enthusiasm, saying, “Just don’t make me gay.”
Next the writers turned to their villain, the mimetic poly-alloy T-1000, the second Terminator Cameron had envisioned in his original telling of the story. Working late into the night as the coyotes howled in the canyon below, Cameron and Wisher kept trying to top themselves with crazy things the T-1000 would be able to do—what if he could shape-shift into a knife or fit through prison bars? It was an intensely creative period, as Cameron and Wisher pushed each other out of the way at the computer to get their ideas down in words. They were writing with the potential of CG in mind, but sometimes they wondered, “Hey, can we really do that?” So Cameron called Industrial Light & Magic, the company that had created his pseudopod in The Abyss, and asked. “They’d always say yes,” Wisher recalls, “whether they knew they could or not. And we said, ‘Well, it’s going in the script, so you’d better figure out a way to do it.’” It was one thing to tie a single scene in The Abyss to the unproven computer graphics technique. But to make the nemesis in this big-budget action picture dependent on CG was a whole other gamble. This time Cameron would need ILM to push the technique further, to create not just faces but full body motion and even dialogue.
After a few weeks, Cameron and Wisher had a forty- to fifty-page treatment with a beginning and an end and all the beats Cameron felt it needed. The writers cut the treatment in half, with Wisher taking the first chunk and Cameron the second, and each headed off to turn his portion into a real script. This early 140-page draft contained plenty of sequences that didn’t make it into the shooting script—there is an expanded future war at the beginning of the film where an adult John Connor defeats Skynet, breaks into the time-displacement lab, and sends young Kyle Reese through time, as well as a scene where Connor finds a cold-storage room full of racks of unactivated Terminators. The scenes created a vivid backstory for the first film, but with finite resources and bold plans for the T-1000, Cameron felt he had to focus the story on the present. He added a new character, Miles Dyson, the inventor of the neural net processor that would lead to the development of Skynet. Though he had mostly stuck to soldiers and blue-collar types as his brave characters in the past, Cameron’s personal idols have always been scientists. With Dyson, he got his first lab-coat hero.
Cameron had set for himself the somewhat arbitrary deadline of finishing the script in time for his flight to the Cannes Film Festival in May, where Carolco would be announcing Terminator 2: Judgment Day along with the rest of the company’s slate. Kassar had chartered a jet to take Cameron, Schwarzenegger, and a number of other big names, including Oliver Stone and Paul Verhoeven, to the festival for Carolco’s press conference and legendarily extravagant yacht party, at which the titles and stars of the new films would be spelled out in fireworks. As the deadline drew closer, Cameron’s nights of writing got longer. After one last thirty-six-hour-straight writing push, he finished in the nick of time. As Cameron hit “print” on his computer, the airport limo idled in his driveway. The last of the hundred passengers to arrive, Cameron was booed as he boarded the Carolco jet for delaying the flight. He gave copies of the script to Kassar and Schwarzenegger and passed out in his seat for the rest of the long, turbulent ride. As Cameron slept, Schwarzenegger read and was riveted. He liked the script, but he was nervous about not getting to kill anybody. “Can’t I just kill a few, at the beginning, before John tells me not to?” Schwarzenegger asked Cameron. “I said what I always say when actors have ideas for changing the script,” Cameron says. “No.”
Rambolina
Cameron quickly signed Linda Hamilton onto T2 with a simple pitch—it’s twelve years later, your son is the target, and you’re in a mental hospital. Like Sarah Connor, Hamilton had become a single mother in the years since the last film, and she found the character easy to grasp. The actress had struggled with mood disorders and depression throughout her life, and three years after filming T2, she would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Hamilton felt she could access those troubled parts of herself in playing Sarah Connor, a woman emotionally burdened by knowing the apocalypse is coming when no one else does. The biggest challenge of the role would be physical. The T2 script called for Sarah Connor to have become a kind of feral warrior in the years since her innocent waitressing days. She was supposed to have begun preparing herself for the bleak future by learning weapons and combat techniques and training her body into peak physical shape. To get her in futuristic fighting form, Cameron paired Hamilton with Uzi Gal, an ex–Israeli commando who was as far from the usual sycophantic Hollywood personal trainer as could be. The actress worked out three hours a day, six days a week, for four months, lifting weights and performing aerobic exercises. “Linda is blessed with a muscle system which responds at the mere sight of weights,” Cameron says. “So her physical transformation was dram
atic.”
More than just building biceps, Gal forced Hamilton to focus her mental energy. He made the actress strip and reassemble the three weapons she was to use in the film, in the dark, repeatedly, every day. He threw tennis balls at her while she loaded her guns and fired them without ammunition over and over, for hours on end. Hamilton became machinelike in her precision of movement. And yet she had never fired a single round, not even a blank. The power of the training was demonstrated when Cameron and Gal finally took her to a range for live firing. Hamilton stood silent and still, ten yards from a human silhouette target with a Colt .45 automatic pistol and two loaded magazines. On a command from Gal, she smoothly slammed a magazine into the weapon, cocked it, and emptied the gun rapid-fire. Then she reloaded and did it again. “It was all thunder and smoke and flying brass, and it was over in seconds,” Cameron says. The woman who had never fired a weapon in her life landed every round in the torso area of the target. “The gun guys at the range were duly impressed,” Cameron recalls. “They did not believe her when she said she’d never shot before. They couldn’t process how that was possible.” Hamilton’s hard hours of preparation paid off. On the first day of shooting, out in the Palmdale desert, Schwarzenegger took one look at her in her tank top and said what everyone else was thinking: “Linda! You are ripped to shreds!” There’s no endorsement like Mr. Universe’s. The training would help Hamilton make it through the grueling shoot, in which she was battered and chased and slammed into walls. “Every day was a physical challenge, but I was prepared for it,” Hamilton said. “I was as much of an Arnold Schwarzenegger as I could be.”1
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