In an era when women talk covetously about the First Lady’s triceps, it’s easy to forget how revolutionary Hamilton’s chiseled physique and untamed performance were. It was 1991. Madonna still ate bread. A decade earlier, Robert De Niro had won an Academy Award for transforming his body to play boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, but Hamilton’s muscles threw some critics for a loop. In an article headlined “Why Can’t a Woman Be a Man?” Time magazine dismissed Sarah Connor in T2 as “Rambo in drag.” The article stacked Sarah up against old-school tough gals like Joan Crawford in the noirish Mildred Pierce, claiming Hamilton’s performance lacked Crawford’s “ingenuity, humanity and mother wit.”2 Mildred Pierce is an apt cinematic ancestor of Sarah Connor—as a single working mother in the forties, Mildred presented a strikingly strong image, the cultural equivalent of the sinewy lady who stockpiled weapons in the desert fifty years later. If Mildred is wittier, it’s because she never carries the fate of the world on her giant shoulder pads. As for Sarah lacking Mildred’s ingenuity—the woman breaks out of a mental hospital with a paper clip and saves humanity. There may never be a better screen metaphor for the resourcefulness of single moms. The truth is, there had never before been a female character like Sarah Connor in T2. Cameron had edged closer to her with each of his films, from young Sarah’s reluctant acceptance of her awesome responsibility in the first movie to Ripley’s ferocity fighting the queen in Aliens to Lindsey Brigman’s courage in the face of death in The Abyss. With T2, Cameron and Hamilton went all the way and created the ultimate female action hero. For the first time, saving the world was woman’s work, too. Sarah Connor owes as much to John Wayne roles as Joan Crawford ones. That idea may have shocked some people in 1991, but it doesn’t now, when any would-be action heroine is expected to know her way around a weight room.
Hamilton’s performance did lose a layer of depth in the editing room, however. Cameron, as usual dealing with an overstuffed movie, cut out a tender dream sequence that paired Sarah Connor back up with her lover from the first film, Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese. The sequence is restored in a longer version of T2 available on DVD, but its removal from the theatrical release meant Sarah Connor was all warrior. During the making of T2, Cameron and Hamilton would become romantically involved, a point they both refused to acknowledge publicly, as Cameron was still married to Bigelow at the time. The director had always been drawn to women who resembled his fiery heroines, and this time he went for the genuine article. The two intense personalities were pulled to each other like celestial bodies, as almost anyone working beside them could see. Despite their love affair, Cameron kept his decision about cutting the dream sequence to himself until the last minute. “I was sleeping with the man and he didn’t tell me, until we were looping,” Hamilton told Canadian film critic Christopher Heard. “There was so much that had gone into that love scene with Michael Biehn. You were brought into the open heart of the character, which is just never that wide open throughout the rest of the movie.”3
Mali and the Boy
With Schwarzenegger and Hamilton on board, Cameron’s toughest casting job was finding young John Connor. The boy needed to resemble the actors who play his parents, Hamilton and Biehn, and had to talk and act like a kid, not a little adult. Young John Connor had to show enough strength of character that the audience would buy his leading the human resistance against the machines as an adult in 2029. And yet he had to look like he needed the protection and stand-in father of the T-800. Luckily, Cameron embarked on the search with the best kind of help—a casting director as driven as he was.
Mali Finn had spent her early life as an actress in local theater in the Midwest and had toured with the USO before settling down as an English and drama teacher with her husband, Donn, a theater professor, in Michigan. In 1981, the Finns moved to Southern California. Mali applied for casting assistant jobs but was dismissed as under-qualified, overqualified, or too old, so she volunteered to help established casting directors for free, eventually earning credits on movies like The Untouchables and Outrageous Fortune. Cameron was one of the first directors to hire Finn after she hung out her own shingle at age fifty-one. She would go on to cast nearly eighty movies and TV shows, including L.A. Confidential and The Matrix, but it was the work she did for Cameron on T2 and all his subsequent feature films until her death in 2007 that earned Finn a reputation as Hollywood’s most indefatigable talent bloodhound. In 1995, Finn hunted down 1930s film star Gloria Stuart, then age eighty-five and without an agent, and suggested her to Cameron to play Kate Winslet’s centenarian counterpart in Titanic. At eighty-seven, Stuart became the oldest nominee ever for a competitive, nonhonorary Oscar.
Finn undertook a nationwide search to find Cameron his John Connor, looking at hundreds of professional child actors. Not one to sit in her office sifting through head shots, she was watching kids play at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Pasadena when a pale, thin youngster caught her eye. Edward Furlong, then twelve, had some things in common with John Connor. He had never met his dad, didn’t live with his mom, and was at once streetwise and needy. Finn smiled and approached Furlong, who thought he was getting in trouble for something and snarled at her. “I was intimidated by him,” Finn told People magazine in 1991. “Eddie really gave me a tough time. If I touched him, he pulled away. He called me things like ‘frog lips.’ He had this real strong presence.”4 Finn snapped a Polaroid of Furlong and asked if he would like to come out and audition for a movie. He dropped his guard quickly after that. Furlong’s auditions didn’t go well at first—he was awkward, inexperienced, and intimidated by Hamilton, with whom he was asked to read. But Finn kept pulling for her boys’ club find, and Cameron agreed that Furlong had some indefinable natural quality. The boy did with ease things that professional child actors struggled with, like crying convincingly. Though Cameron kept auditioning other actors, after watching Furlong, they all seemed phony to him. Finn assigned a dialogue coach to work with Furlong for a few weeks, and then Cameron saw him again and hired him. Casting an inexperienced actor like Furlong as the lead in what was about to become the most expensive movie to date was one of the bigger risks Cameron took in his career, as nervy a move as depending on still-nascent CG technology to deliver his villain.
The John Connor part would have been demanding for any actor, much less a total newcomer. Furlong had to cry on cue with Hamilton in one scene and flee the T-1000 on the back of a dirt bike in another. He had to get used to the sound of gunfire around him and to filming grueling, sometimes frightening action sequences. For the dirt-bike scene, Furlong was hooked onto a moving camera car and pulled along as a tractor-trailer truck flipped over behind him. In a chase scene where he rides on Schwarzenegger’s motorcycle, the action hero kept inadvertently clocking Furlong on the back of the head with his gun, once nearly knocking him out. The easiest part of Furlong’s job turned out to be sharing scenes with his massive costar. The day he met Schwarzenegger, the twelve-year-old nervously extended his hand to shake. “Shake hah-der. Give me a real hahd one this time,” Schwarzenegger said, immediately falling into his character as stand-in father figure and keeping it up for the duration of the shoot. The action hero and Furlong were “about the same age emotionally,” Hamilton told Schwarzenegger biographer Nigel Andrews. As the three spent long stretches together in a car in the desert during filming, she said, “I would just sit there helpless while Arnold was giving Eddie tips on women. It was excruciating.”5 Over the course of the production, Furlong would grow up, not just as an actor but as a teenager. About halfway through filming, his voice changed, necessitating lots of extra work in the dubbing room to rerecord his early scenes. Furlong had begun the shoot as a small, frail child, but after eating from the catering truck for months, he had grown noticeably. Late in the production, when Cameron had to return for a pickup shot of Hamilton and Furlong standing on either side of a car, their height ratio didn’t match the scene as filmed months earlier. For continuity, the crew had to dig a hole for Furlong to
stand in.
The T-1000
Cameron spent a lot of time working out the rules that would govern his villain, which he envisioned as a metal liquid that could rapidly shift its shape and mimic almost anything—a person, a table, a knife blade. During the writing process, he was in his living room excitedly explaining the T-1000 to his friend and collaborator Stan Winston when Winston raised a concern. “I don’t know who the bad guy is,” Winston said. “I need a specific character, a specific image.” To Winston, what Cameron was describing sounded like a blob of goo, not an iconic evildoer. “From a story standpoint, I thought it was a problem,” Winston later recalled in an interview for the picture-book history of his studio, The Winston Effect.6 Cameron respected Winston’s instincts for creating memorable characters, and he started reconsidering how he would shape this one. Later that same night, the effects artist got a phone call from his friend. “I’ve got it!” Cameron said. “He’s a cop!” The form the T-1000 would take for most of the movie was a Los Angeles police officer. This solved the storytelling dilemma Winston had raised and also gave Cameron an opportunity to underline a central theme in both of the Terminator movies—how people, especially those in violent jobs, like soldiers and cops, can become barbarized. “The Terminator films are not really about the human race getting killed off by future machines. They’re about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other,” he says. “Cops think of all noncops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job.” Cameron’s creation of an LAPD villain in his 1990 script eerily predates and is strangely linked to one of the darker moments in the department’s history. One of the locations in T2 is the very spot in the San Fernando Valley where police pulled over Rodney King in March of 1991. The famous amateur video has two chunks of footage on it, the first of the T2 crew driving around on an insert car shooting Schwarzenegger and Furlong on a motorcycle, and the second of King being beaten in the same location just weeks later.
One of the rules the T-1000 had to play by was that it could turn into a knife but not a gun, a limitation revealed when the character passes through the bars of a mental institution, but its pistol gets caught. As Cameron saw it, the T-1000 could harden portions of its mass to form edge weapons and stabbing weapons, but it couldn’t convert part of its mass into a complex machine involving separate, detached pieces or make gunpowder to launch projectiles. It was important to Cameron to show the audience the character’s restrictions. It also meant lots of work for Winston, who would create hundreds of blades, from spike fingers to knife arms, for the T-1000’s effects. “In science fiction you have to have rules and you have to state them, and you have to play by them,” Cameron says. “Somehow it makes the fantasy more real, by adding complexity.”
The director was looking for a lean, agile actor to play his villain this time around, someone more in line with his original vision of the Terminator as an infiltrator. “I wanted to find someone who would be a good contrast to Arnold,” he says. “If the 800 series is a kind of human Panzer tank, then the 1000 series had to be a Porsche.”7 Early concept art for the film shows Billy Idol’s sneering visage in the cop uniform. At one point, Cameron was considering the rock singer for the role, until Idol broke his leg in a motorcycle accident that would prevent him from getting into running shape in time. A much less familiar face, a Georgia-born actor named Robert Patrick who had played a string of bad guys in Roger Corman movies and a terrorist in Die Hard 2, ultimately won the T-1000 part. A college athlete in football and track, Patrick had just the kind of athleticism Cameron was seeking and an intensity that could sell the audience on this unusual villain with little dialogue. Patrick threw himself into the unique physical demands of playing a liquid character, hiring a trainer and focusing on flexibility that would allow him to make his body look more fluid on camera. He practiced sprinting while breathing only through his nose to appear robotically smooth as he ran. The actor’s incredible speed actually created a problem for the production one day. The T-1000 was supposed to be on foot, chasing young John Connor on his dirt bike out of a parking garage. A camera car was towing Furlong on his bike, with Patrick in hot pursuit, delivering his best liquid-metal sprint. The scene calls for young John Connor to get away. But Patrick, running in heavy cop shoes, caught up with the camera car and tapped Furlong right on the shoulder. Cameron had definitely found that human Porsche he wanted.
The T-1000 fantasy was realized by blending Patrick’s performance with nascent CG techniques and the highest art in makeup and puppets. Dennis Muren, who had supervised ILM’s work on The Abyss, returned to shepherd the company’s thirty-five CG artists through the process of delivering Cameron shots of this strange, intelligent liquid metal. Working from film and photos of Patrick, the ILM team built 3-D models in their computers, duplicating the actor’s movements, right down to a barely perceptible limp from an old football injury. Cameron was taking an even bigger leap of faith this time than he had on The Abyss. If the pseudopod sequence hadn’t worked, he could have cut it and still had a movie, but the T-1000 was central to the story. If it couldn’t be done, T2 wouldn’t be made. For the scenes in which the T-1000 mutates from one form into another, ILM relied on a technique called morphing, which it had pioneered in the 1988 Ron Howard movie Willow. In Willow, a character smoothly transforms from a goat into several other animals before becoming a human. A flop at the box office, Willow didn’t lead to the excitement about the digital breakthrough that ILM had thought it would. It wouldn’t be until T2 that the technique took off to the point of overkill, appearing in everything from movies like The Mask to Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video to TV commercials for hair-loss products.
Some of the things Cameron wanted the T-1000 to do were a stretch for ILM—literally. When the computerized character extended into certain poses, giant black gashes appeared in his shoulders. The movements were ripping up geometry. Scientists visited the company’s San Rafael, California, offices to help the artists with the mathematical challenges the T-1000 posed. “I’d go by and there’d be somebody giving a lecture at a blackboard, and it was like something out of a joke science movie with the math on there,” says Muren. Muren’s team pulled it off, thanks in part to a cool new piece of software invented by a twenty-something ILMer named John Knoll and his brother Thomas, a grad student at the University of Michigan. That software happened to be the very first version of Photoshop, still a few years away from becoming the industry-standard graphics-editing program. Cameron breathed easier when he saw an early proof-of-concept shot of the T-1000 walking out of an explosion. With sparks reflected on his sleek, chrome body, the liquid-metal man looked just as Cameron had envisioned him. This might actually work, he thought. Each step the ILM team took built on the one before it, enabling them to achieve once-impossible shots like the T-1000 sliding through the bars of the mental hospital. “It wasn’t like you couldn’t have done this two years ago. It was more like you couldn’t have done this a week ago,” marvels Muren. Cameron’s wild ideas gave the ILM artists opportunities to advance their craft in ways they wouldn’t have if they had been creating something more mundane, like a CG bear. “The movie pushed us right to the very edge,” Muren says.
The budget for the work ILM did on T2 was more than $6 million, a sum considered astronomical at the time, although it would quickly be surpassed. One thing that helped sell the liquid-metal man to audiences was the considerably more low-rent sound effects that accompanied its movements. The noise of the T-1000 shape-shifting through the metal bars was actually dog food sliding out of a can. Other oozy sounds came from dipping a condom-covered microphone into a flour-and-water mixture and then shooting condensed air into the goop. “I like the fact that ILM had to spend millions of dollars on the visual effects and all we had to spend was thirty-five cents on a can of dog food,” says the movie’s soun
d designer, Gary Rydstrom. ILM’s schedule for delivering the T-1000 images was so rigorous that the background plates had to be photographed before Cameron shot the scene in which they belonged. For the scene where the T-1000 is lying on the floor healing instantaneously from gunshot wounds, for instance, Cameron had to photograph the floor, committing to the lighting and camera angles in advance, and give the plates to ILM so it could begin working on the special-effects shots. Months later, he finally filmed the footage with Patrick that would lead up to the special-effects shot and follow it, hewing to the same lighting and angles he had originally promised.
Although T2 is best remembered for the strides it led to in CG, of the fifteen minutes that the T-1000 displays its morphing and healing abilities only six were accomplished with pure computer graphics. The other nine were achieved with the use of puppets and prosthetics created by Winston’s studio, the first time physical and digital effects were deployed so symbiotically Typically, a T-1000 sequence would be divided between ILM and Winston—Winston’s prosthetics would show a bullet hitting the T-1000’s chest, for example, and ILM would close the wounds digitally. The effect was so smoothly executed that many of the shots later assumed by keen-eyed industry viewers to be CG are actually from Winston’s crew. One of the most often misattributed is the moment when Schwarzenegger delivers his classic line, “Hasta la vista, baby,” and shoots the frozen T-1000, which shatters. For that sequence, Winston’s studio built a fiberglass dummy of Patrick and filled it with metallic flakes and Vacumetalized urethane foam shards. The crew then blew the foam apart with Primacord. The first attempt at the shot was underwhelming. The microscopic pieces blew out, as in an explosion, not down, as they would after gunfire, and the smoke shrouded some of the effect. So Cameron added giant fans blowing down on the dummy, dispersing the smoke and making the pieces flutter magically to the ground. With the help of another simple sound effect—a bunch of nails thrown on the floor—the sequence comes off brilliantly.
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