The Futurist
Page 14
As usual, Cameron threw himself into the design effort on T2, leaning over Winston’s concept artists at their drafting tables and weighing in with sketches of his own. Winston artist Crash McCreery was laboring on a complicated design the team had nicknamed “pretzel man” one day when the director was stalking the floor of the studio. “That’s cool, but it should be like this,” Cameron said, as McCreery remembers, taking a napkin and in a few seconds drawing a perfect sketch of the effect, the T-1000 splaying open after a shotgun blast. “As an artist, you look at that and you just want to throw your pencil down and give up,” says McCreery.8 From those designs, Winston’s crew created several foam-rubber puppets of Patrick with a Vacumetalized inner portion to approximate the appearance of liquid metal. The puppets were used to depict the T-1000 in its various stages of battle—in addition to pretzel man, there was the “donut head” puppet for the T-1000 with a gaping gunshot hole in his brain, “splash-head” for a shotgun blast to the noggin, and “cleave man” to show Patrick being sliced through with a steel rod.
One of the more ingenious effects the Winston crew devised were appliances that would represent the impact of bullet hits on the liquid-metal man. The artists spent weeks shooting pellets into mud and studying the impressions they left to get the right look. They then sculpted those forms in several sizes and fitted them with a spring-loaded mechanism that would snap open the bullet wounds on cue. The wound rosettes attached to a fiberglass chest plate Patrick wore under a prescored costume. When a puppeteer released a radio-controlled pin, the chrome bullet wounds would bloom on the actor’s body.
The Art of Making Mayhem
Film sets take on the personalities of their directors, and Cameron’s sets are bustling and sometimes brutal. On T2, the accelerated production schedule meant Cameron’s usual kineticism was ramped up even more. From shooting script to release date, the crew had just twelve months to deliver all of the movie’s ambitious action sequences and special effects. Shooting began in the Palmdale desert in October 1990 and continued through April 1991 at locations all over California, from a dormant steel mill in Fontana to flood-control channels in the San Fernando Valley to a crowded shopping mall in Santa Monica to an office building in Silicon Valley.
The first-act chase sequence, which winds through the Valley flood channels, contains some of the film’s trickiest action photography and most dangerous stunts. The T-1000 is driving a tractor-trailer truck chasing Schwarzenegger and Furlong on a motorcycle. Shortly before they filmed the sequence, the crew realized the truck was too tall for some of the bridges it had to pass under. Cameron decided to use the logistical problem to his storytelling advantage and make this semi a “convertible,” prescoring the truck so the top would slice off cleanly when it went under the first overpass. Several cameras were used to shoot the sequence, including one held by Cameron from a motorcycle sidecar, the tractor-trailer looming above the director while he bumped along four inches from the ground. At one point Cameron wanted a shot of the T-800 alone on his bike to look more intense. He radioed Schwarzenegger, who was not just his star but by now his good friend and frequent weekend motorcycling companion, and asked the actor if there was any way to take his Harley-Davidson Fat Boy around the corner faster. “Not with me on it,” said Schwarzenegger, a man who knows his limits and is one of the few people who can say no to Cameron. The director switched to a longer lens and undercranked the camera slightly, and Schwarzenegger looks to be scooting along plenty fast in the final shot.
Perhaps the film’s most troublesome location was the freeway. The production had arranged to close a five-mile stretch of highway in San Pedro, California, to shoot a night chase scene in which the T-1000 pursues the Connors and the T-800 via both semi and helicopter. (Bad guys always get to drive the semis in Cameron’s films—good guys get stuck with station wagons, vans, pickups, and motorbikes, creating a kind of vehicular underdog effect.) The trouble started on this shoot when the production’s cabling was stolen and T2’s beleaguered producers, B. J. Rack and Stephanie Austin, had less than twenty-four hours to find enough replacement gear to light five miles of road. After the cable was laid a second time, guards were hired to watch it for the duration of the shoot. Some nights rain prevented the crew from filming Schwarzenegger, Hamilton, and Furlong barreling down the highway in a SWAT van, so the crew shot it “poor-man’s process.” They parked the van under an overpass, and a bunch of grips rocked it back and forth from the outside as lighting and effects crews swept spotlights and squibs past the windows.
Despite the image suggested by publicity stills of men like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese gazing sagely through lenses, it’s rare for a director to hold his own camera in Hollywood. Cameron can, and often does, with great pride. A crew-tested diversion tactic when Cameron is in a foul mood is to ask him, “How’d you get that shot, anyway?” Inevitably, Cameron’s spirits lift and he starts a long, detailed story by saying something like, “Well, the camera operator didn’t have the guts to get on the dolly. …” Like asking Dad about his college football career, it works like a charm—by the time the story is over, the director has forgotten why he was mad. During T2, Cameron had a few chances to add to his lore. His Steadicam operator, Jimmy Muro, balked at what Cameron wanted him to do for one chunk of the freeway chase scene—follow the T-1000’s helicopter as it flew under an overpass. Muro, a young, enthusiastic film school grad, had become a Cameron favorite on The Abyss for his determination to deliver smooth shots while running backward holding his eighty-pound Steadicam rig in the tight confines of the Deepcore set. But that night on T2, Muro recalls, “I said, ‘Jim, I don’t want to do this,’ and he said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’” Cameron had faith in Chuck Tamburro, the helicopter pilot, a Vietnam vet and masterful flier, who would make the dangerous maneuver twice so the director could get both the forward and rear angles. Cameron considers filming those shots—and all the fancy helicopter work in this sequence—some of the most exhilarating moments in his career. “I’ve always loved good action in movies,” Cameron says. “I love how you can sit in the safety of a theater seat and still feel your heart pounding and a palpable sense of personal jeopardy. To get to do that, to cast that spell myself, over audiences worldwide, is one of the great thrills of my job which makes all the grueling hours and lost sleep worthwhile.”
T2’s compressed schedule had no effect on Cameron’s usual maddening perfectionism. His take-ending catchphrases, “That’s exactly what I didn’t want!” and “Perfect! Let’s do it again!” chafed the T2 crew, some of whom took to wearing T-shirts that said “Terminator 3: Not With Me.” One chunk of the freeway sequence called for the T-1000 to be flying a helicopter and reloading a machine gun at the same time. But on the night of that shoot, the director realized he hadn’t given the T-1000 enough arms for the two tasks. This is classic Cameron logic—he asks the audience to suspend disbelief enough to accept time travel and cyborgs, but he’s not going to ask them to believe a character could load a gun and fly a chopper two-handed, even for a shot that flashes by at lightning speed. The T-1000 would have to grow two new arms—and fast. At 5:00 a.m. the freeway would reopen. A frantic effort ensued to rouse Winston’s crew, asleep in their homes, to rush to their studio in the San Fernando Valley, pick up some supplies, and drive the forty miles to San Pedro to help improvise a new four-armed costume. It was the kind of middle-of-the-night call guys like Winston artist John Rosengrant grew accustomed to during the frenzied making of T2. “You’d be lying there, and you weren’t supposed to shoot for three or four more days, and then that phone would go off and you’d pick it up and hear the crackling walkies and ADs talking in the background,” Rosengrant recalls. “Somebody says, ‘Can you be down here with the bullet-hole number five shirt?’ Oh my God, what?!” Austin, who was producing her first Cameron film, was afraid Winston’s fabulous bullet wounds wouldn’t arrive in time, so she went down to the catering truck, found some tin foil and a Magic Marker, and sat on the s
ide of the freeway creating makeshift ones. Winston’s wounds made it at the last minute, but Cameron, amused by Austin’s resourcefulness, used some of hers in the scene, too. One sign of just how much Cameron appreciated his scrappy producer on the movie is the name on the police uniform the T-1000 wears—“Austin.”
One night while filming a scene from the future war sequence in the Fontana steelyard, the director was intent on getting a shot of a Terminator endoskeleton’s foot stepping on a child’s skull just right. It was a complicated shot that required several puppeteers to move the Terminator with precision and explosions in the distance to be timed correctly. Winston’s crew had fashioned crushable wax skulls for the purpose. For any other director, they would have made ten skulls. This being their third film with Cameron, they knew enough to make twenty-eight. But by take twenty, at 3:00 a.m., Winston’s guys were sweating it. No one wanted to tell Cameron he would eventually run out of skulls. At take twenty-six, the director finally decided to move on, reluctantly. Winston’s crew went home disheartened, thinking they had failed. The next day when they arrived on set, Cameron beckoned them to his trailer and popped in a videotape from the previous night’s shoot. “Watch this!” he said. “It’s perfect!” It was the fifth take.9
A Violent Movie About Peace?
As usual, the editing room was just the next circle of hell for Cameron. As it had been on The Abyss, Cameron’s biggest challenge was the ending. The ending isn’t just where Cameron rolls out his most spectacular set pieces; it’s also where he tries to drive home his larger message. And the director had a lofty goal for this action epic, with all its explosions, shoot-outs, clubbings, and poundings. “I think of T2 as a violent movie about peace,” he told Newsweek four months before the film’s release. “And I’m perfectly comfortable with these ambiguities. It’s an action film about the value of human life.”10 Cameron might have been fine with that dichotomy, but his backers were having some trouble. The first ending to T2 cuts from the industrial inferno of the steel-mill battle to Hamilton in age makeup many years in the future, having averted a machine takeover and nuclear apocalypse. As bright sunlight streams down, she sits in a park watching an adult John Connor, now a U.S. senator, playing with his daughter. There are a lot of problems with this ending, some tonal and some logical. It seemed to be a scene from another film—our intense, athletic heroine had become a placid grandma. If Sarah prevented the future war, how did she ever meet the father of her son? And how did a delinquent like John Connor become a senator?
Carolco demanded a test screening, a process Cameron had felt burned by on The Abyss. The screening was held at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. There was a consensus among the crowd: they hated the ending. Initially reluctant to accept the results of the screening, Cameron eventually backed down and substituted a new final scene. “I began to think that the message of the film might be better served by not letting the audience off the hook so easily,” Cameron explains in an introduction to a published version of the T2 script. “We decided not to tie it all up with a bow, but to suggest that the struggle was ongoing, and in fact might even be an unending one for us flawed creatures trying to come to terms with technology and our own violent demons.”11 Cameron’s final rewrite on T2 came just a month before the film’s release, when he cut the future park coda and replaced it with a shot traveling down a dark highway at night, with a voiceover from Sarah Connor: “The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope, because if a machine, a terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can, too.” 12 It was a good compromise: Cameron got to keep his nonviolent message but packaged it in a way that was a lot less jarring to audiences.
With what Kassar had already spent to lock in the talent and what Cameron had ordered up in effects and action sequences, T2’s budget had ballooned, eventually making it the first movie ever to top $100 million in production costs. It was Cameron’s first “most expensive movie in history,” but it wouldn’t be his last. The financial decision wasn’t as risky as it sounds. Thanks to lucrative distribution deals, T2 earned Carolco its money back before it played on a single screen. When it did hit theaters, on the July 4 weekend in 1991, T2 accounted for more than half of all the movie tickets sold in North America. It would go on to earn more than $200 million domestically and more than $500 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film in the now-four-movie Terminator franchise. As he had with Aliens, Cameron delivered a sequel that expanded the audience for the original story without alienating its fans. T2 garnered mainly positive reviews—the New York Times called it “a swift, exciting special effects epic that thoroughly justifies its vast expense,”13 and Newsweek said, “For all its state-of-the-art pyrotechnics and breathtaking thrills, this bruisingly exciting movie never loses sight of its humanity”14
T2 earned four Academy Awards, for sound, makeup, visual effects, and sound-effects editing. The film’s most enduring impact would be on the field of CG. The strides ILM made on T2 enabled its next big project, Jurassic Park. “T2 was the film that changed everything,” says Muren. On the other side of the world, in New Zealand, a young horror director named Peter Jackson was taking note. “My God, I had no idea a computer could even do this,” says Jackson, who was a decade away from releasing the first Lord of the Rings movie, and launching into the epic that would show just how lifelike a computer-generated character could become. “It was CGI, but it looked incredibly realistic. It was the genesis of the whole CGI movement.”
For Cameron, everything about making T2 had been thrilling, from the pioneering effects to the wild action sequences to falling in love with Hamilton. But after directing his fourth science-fiction movie in a row, Cameron was ready for a new challenge—maybe a character-driven drama or a comedy. Something small, for a change. Naturally, of course, his next movie would involve landing a Harrier jet on top of a skyscraper.
7.
MYTHS AND LIES
Little Movie, Big Deal
After the astounding success of Terminator 2, Cameron reached a pivotal moment in his career. The sequel had earned him heaps of Hollywood capital—every studio in town wanted to be in business with a filmmaker who both dreamed and earned on a spectacular scale. But Cameron had his eye on something more intimate, a nonfiction book by Daniel Keyes called The Minds of Billy Milligan, about a rapist in Ohio who suffers from multiple personality disorder and whose lawyers successfully use his mental illness as a defense for his crimes. “I was looking for a small drama after the ‘most expensive movie in history,’” Cameron says. The director found Milligan’s story and his long history of childhood abuse both moving and intriguing as a cinematic exercise. “To do all those characters and externalize the drama that was playing out in that guy’s head would have been as big a challenge, in its own way, as making The Abyss.” He optioned the rights to Keyes’s book from Sandra Arcara, a New York–based restaurateur who was trying to establish herself as a producer, and he got to work on a script with Todd Graff, the actor and writer who had played Hippy in The Abyss. Cameron and Graff’s script, “The Crowded Room,” employs a lot of the same visual flourishes that mark the director’s sci-fi writing, but this time the science and the set pieces take place inside the human mind. “The Crowded Room” uses a flashback structure like the one Cameron would employ on Titanic and reads as a great psychological thriller. But Cameron’s little movie was about to hit a big wall.
In the spring of 1992, Cameron signed an unusual $500 million, multipicture domestic distribution deal with Fox that gave him power to put any movie he wanted into production without Fox’s approval up to a budget of $70 million and retained for him ownership of the copyrights to his own films. In exchange, Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment would have to shoulder its own overhead costs as well as take responsibility for any budget overages, which the company planned to do by selling the foreign distribution rights to its films itself. It was a remarkable deal for a filmmaker—typically, studios
acquire the worldwide rights to a film, pay for the entire production, and own the movie outright. The deal gave Cameron both more control and more responsibility than a director typically enjoys or bears. “I’d just made T2 for Carolco and I admired how they rolled, being their own bosses, mavericks, entrepreneurs,” Cameron says. “I’d been fed up with the studio system after Aliens and The Abyss, both of which I felt were not released properly. So I figured coming off of T2 I could set up a structure which would allow me to call the shots myself.” The Los Angeles Times said the deal “may be a classic” and heralded the ingenuity of its architects, Lightstorm president Larry Kasanoff and Cameron’s agent at ICM, Jeff Berg.1