I wasn’t yet old enough to see The Terminator when it came out in theaters 30 years ago this week. My childish brain simply wouldn’t have been able to process the sheer awesomeness taking place onscreen. (That, and my parents would have probably gotten some dirty looks from other theatergoers had they taken me.) I do remember seeing Terminator 2: Judgement Day in the theater in 1991, though — it was the first rated R movie I saw in the theater and its special effects and action sequences blew my mind like a T-1000 that had just taken a shotgun blast to the head. The story of two terminators fighting over John Connor was actually supposed to be original film, but filming it the way James Cameron envisioned simply wasn’t possible in 1984. More on that later though. To understand how The Terminator and T-1000 came to exist and spawn one of the biggest sci-fi franchises in movie history, we need to start at the beginning. And the beginning was a low-budget sequel to a film that was a ripoff of Jaws — Piranha II.
After directing a small indie film called Xenogenesis in 1978 and working as a production assistant on Rock and Roll High School in 1979, James Cameron flew to Italy in 1981 to work as special effects director on Piranha II: The Spawning. When complications on the set arose over director Miller Drake’s direction, Drake was fired and James Cameron was moved into the director’s chair, though he had little power as he had to verify his day-to-day activities with producer, Ovidio G. Assonitis. While the experience wasn’t a pleasant one, Cameron said it proved to him that he could direct a big-budget film.
“I was hired by a very unscrupulous producer. He put me with an Italian crew who spoke no English then fired me a couple of weeks into the shoot and took over directing. Turns out, he’d done that on his two previous films.
“He wouldn’t show me a foot of film that I’d shot, so I went in and ran the film for myself. I made a few changes – I don’t know if the editor ever noticed – and it was fine. So I thought, ‘I actually can do this. I just fell in with a pack of thieves and wackos.’ I also realized nobody would hire me after that experience. I’d have to create my own thing to direct again.”
At the time, many of James Cameron’s contemporaries were doing horror films, and the director wanted to do his own take on the slasher movie. Cameron’s inspiration for his own sci-fi horror story came during the release of Piranha II in Rome, when the director had a nightmare about a chrome torso emerging from an explosion and dragging itself with kitchen knives across the floor towards him. When Cameron awoke from the terrible dream he grabbed some hotel stationery and began sketching out this metallic assassin, as ideas about its story came rushing into his head. At last, James Cameron had the vision for his own slasher movie.
“My contemporaries were all doing slasher-horror movies,” Cameron once said. “John Carpenter was the guy I idolized the most. He made Halloween for $30,000 or something. That was everyone’s break-in dream, to do a stylish horror movie. It was a very slasher film type image. And it really was the launching pad for the story.”
During the rest of his time in Italy, Cameron obsessed over the metallic torso in his dream, and when he returned home to California he began fleshing out the story for this indestructible entity that would stop at nothing to complete its mission: to kill. The young director would pull influences from his favorite science fiction films like Road Warrior, The Driver, and certain episodes of The Outer Limits to create this bleak world with an even bleaker future ahead. Writing the script was a lonely and tiresome process for Cameron “every thought, every gesture is judged directly, and it’s very hard to get started and stay focused,” he said. To help with the writing process, he roped in his friend Bill Wisher to help, particularly the scenes involving Sarah Connor and the police department. The two had developed a friendship over a similar interest in science fiction novels and because Wisher lived fifty miles away, they would communicate their script parts by Wisher reading what he had written and Cameron recording the phone call to transcribe later. Not as convenient as email, but the script got finished.
That initial script that Cameron and Wisher wrote leaned heavily towards what would later be T2, with two cyborgs from the future battling it out in 1984 Los Angeles. The only problem was that Cameron knew he wanted one of the cyborgs to be as close to invincible as possible and composed out of liquid metal, and the technology to make this happen simply wasn’t available at the time. The director was conceptualizing film elements of the future that weren’t yet even possible, and his liquid metal terminator would have to sit on the bench until the technology caught up — which it finally did for his 1989 film, The Abyss.
The director reworked the script to include a single terminator, hellbent on destroying its target, and told his agent about the idea. Cameron’s agent thought the story was a waste of time and advised him to scrap it and work on something else. Without a backup plan, Cameron fired his agent and began searching for someone else in the industry who shared his passion for The Terminator. The hopeful director found a believer in Gale Anne Hurd, a blonde former model who Cameron knew from working with on Rock and Roll High School, and was now looking to land a film for her newly formed production company. Cameron recalled the pricey negotiation deal:
“Everybody wanted to buy it from me, but nobody wanted me to direct it. They tried to split the team by offering Gale a lot of money. They said, ‘We’ll let you produce it, but you’ve got to get rid of him.’ But I had actually sold her the rights to the movie for $1 with the promise that she’d never cut me loose. And she kept that promise.”
(The two would later marry, but back to the topic at hand — robotic killing machines.) Hurd and Cameron secured a film distributor with Orion, but only under the agreement that another company, Hemdale Pictures would handle the financial backing. Hemdale was being run by John Daly at the time — who had made a name for himself launching bands like Yes and Black Sabbath — and the company specialized in low-budget flicks that usually went nowhere (like the 1981 Tony Danza comedy Going Ape!). John Daly didn’t expect a hit out of the script and wrote it off as being another cheap sci-fi movie, but Cameron was determined to get the producer excited about the project.
During one of his meetings with Daly, Cameron had arranged for his buddy from Piranha II, Lance Henriksen to make a surprise entrance. Wearing a ripped leather jacket, motorcycle boots, sunglasses, and smoking a cigarette, Henriksen kicked open the door to the office announcing he was there for John Daly. The stunt was a shock, especially since Cameron had not yet arrived at the meeting, leaving the staff stunned and puzzled about the psycho that was in their office building. Cameron finally did arrive and was able to explain the bizarre stunt and impress Daly his story and concept art, securing a $6 million budget for the movie.
James Cameron had found his own science fiction story in the vein of a slasher film. The script was completed, the money was there, all that was left was finding the right man to play this unstoppable killer from the future. That’s whole other story though.
