James Cameron ‘Knew Nothing About Guns’ When Making ‘The Terminator,’ but Then He Remembered: ‘This Is America, I Can Just Go Buy Them!’
James Cameron delivered a masterclass in Paris on Thursday night following a sold-out screening of his 1984 breakout “The Terminator.” With the title so fresh in his mind, the filmmaker spent much of the session sharing stories from the project’s improbable making of.
For one thing, what the production lacked in financial resources it made up for in pre-production time — eight months, to be exact, as the team waited for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s schedule to clear.
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“I figured we didn’t have the money for a designer, and I could draw, so what the hell,” Cameron recalled. “I drew everything, and storyboarded the film very, very meticulously.”
The masterclass kicked off a new exhibition at Paris’ Cinematheque Française that positions Cameron as a graphic artist who draws inspiration from his own subconscious. Running until January 2025, “The Art of James Cameron” showcases more then 300 paintings, etchings and production designs pulled from Cameron’s private collection, signed by the filmmaker’s own hand and exhibited as a kind of career retrospective (see some images below).
“The Terminator’s” script was lean and mean and full of weapons, a fact that soon proved an issue for a Canadian director exploring unfamiliar ground. “I knew nothing about guns,” Cameron said. “And then I thought, ‘This is America, I can just go buy them!’”
Now armed with a camera, a roommate (in fact, co-screenwriter William Wisher Jr.) and a newfound arsenal, Cameron went out rolling and shooting, working out each and every action beat and shot choice before production ever started.
“Ironically, my first film was my best-prepared film, which is probably why I got to direct again because we were actually reasonably on schedule — which has never happened to me again,” he said.
Cameron has previously said that he regrets fetishizing guns in some of his earlier work, including “The Terminator.”
“I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now. I don’t know if I would want to fetishize the gun, like I did on a couple of ‘Terminator’ movies 30-plus years ago, in our current world,” he said. “What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach.”
During that same eight-month wait before “The Terminator” filming started, Cameron also delivered scripts for “Aliens” and “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (“I was much faster then,” he laughed), but the filmmaker was still beset with a nagging uncertainty about his choice of leading man.
The producers originally recommended Schwarzenegger for the role of Kyle Reese, the time-traveling resistance fighter eventually played by Michael Biehn. Only the casting choice didn’t sit right with the film’s director, so Cameron accepted a meeting with Austrian bodybuilder just the throw a wrench in those plans.
“I didn’t know Arnold at all, but he didn’t strike me as that verbal yet,” Cameron said. “He was more of a physical presence. [When leaving for the meeting] I asked my roommate if I owed him any money because I had to go pick a fight with Conan so that I don’t have to cast him in the movie.”
Only Cameron hatched a new idea when he finally sat down with star.
“While he was talking, I was just watching his face — such a singular face with such indomitable will in his features, almost a brutal reality. And I thought he could play the Terminator.”
“Problem was, the Terminator was supposed to be very innocuous,” he continued. “He was supposed to be an infiltrator. That was the whole point with the cyborg outer flesh layer that he would just disappear into a crowd. Well, Arnold is not that guy. So I literally rewrote the story in my mind while talking to him.”
With contracts signed, months of pre-production since passed, and shooting now underway, Cameron only really confirmed that intuition while watching dailies from his star’s first day on set.
“[I directed him to] be like a shark,” Cameron recalled. “Your eye moves, but you don’t waste energy until you need to. The next day, sitting in dailies, I ran the close-up again and again. We just stared at it. He was so precise in his movement. That’s when we knew that we had a movie, because we had our character. He was no longer Conan; he was the Terminator.”
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