James Cameron wanted a villain made out of liquid metal. In the brainstorming phase for Terminator 2: Judgment Day, he knew the sequel to his first big hit had to have something no one had seen before. Something that, in the early ’90s, had never even been attempted. He’d landed on the idea of the T-1000, an android assassin seemingly made of flowing mercury that could shape-shift into any other organism. And by the time he was done, he’d created one of 20th century cinema’s greatest “Holy shit!” moments.
Yet the science-fiction epic, released 30 years ago this week, hinged on more than technical wizardry. To its director, T2 is the story of a boy and the father he never had. The sequel wouldn’t work without a strong bond between the reprogrammed title character and the teenager he’s sent back in time to protect. “Sure, there’s going to be big, thunderous action sequences, but the heart of the movie is that relationship,” Cameron says from his home in New Zealand. “I have always loved The Wizard of Oz. This movie is about the Tin Man getting his heart.”
T2 is a departure from the far bleaker original, 1984’s The Terminator, which its creator calls a “science-fiction slasher film.” Linda Hamilton’s franchise protagonist, Sarah Connor, has transformed from a put-upon heroine to a self-trained commando whose attempts to thwart the coming apocalypse land her in a psychiatric hospital. Her son, John, the future leader of the resistance in the war against the genocidally self-aware defense system Skynet, is in foster care. And the T-800, once a remorseless killer with a curious but hypnotic Austrian accent, somehow helps bring them together as a family—then helps them save the world.
“Look at Titanic, it’s all about relationships,” says Arnold Schwarzenegger, who relished the chance to turn the cybernetic bad guy he played in The Terminator into a good guy. “That’s what makes it touching.”
The juxtaposition of warmth and spectacle is what elevates Terminator 2 above nearly all other ’90s popcorn flicks. But that somehow undersells its appeal and influence. Industrial Light & Magic’s cutting-edge visual effects, a Kevlar-tough woman as the lead, dozens of memorable one-liners, and terrifyingly prescient themes combined to form a blockbuster that pushed the limits of the medium. The top-grossing movie of 1991 escalated a big-screen arms race that’s played out in American cineplexes every summer since.
Precious few massively budgeted, VFX-laden, star-filled tentpole pictures, however, have been able to replicate the alchemy of T2. Most imitators, ILM’s nine-time Academy Award recipient Dennis Muren says, are like “Xeroxes of Xeroxes of Xeroxes. And every time you copied something, you lost something.” Many of the facsimiles are entertaining, but they’re still facsimiles. In hindsight, there’s no mystery why.
“There’s only one Jim Cameron,” Schwarzenegger says. “It’s as simple as that.”
Part 1: “If We Pull It Off, It Will Be Huge.”
The saga of Terminator 2 begins with its predecessor. Cowritten and produced with Cameron’s second wife, Gale Anne Hurd, the first installment cost $6.4 million to make and grossed $78.4 million. The surprise smash, initially dismissed as a glorified B-movie, made Schwarzenegger an A-list star and gave its director instant Hollywood cachet. He went on to helm the mega-hit Aliens (1986), in which Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley cements her status as an action icon, and then the underwater sci-fi adventure The Abyss (1989). The latter had a nightmarish production and underwhelmed at the box office, but its trippy visual effects were proof of concept for his next project.
But before T2 could be made, the rights needed to be secured. Enter Carolco Pictures, the flashy independent that at the time was financing Schwarzenegger’s soon-to-be-released Total Recall. To make the sequel, studio head Mario Kassar reportedly had to buy out both the Hemdale Film Corporation and Hurd. It didn’t come cheap.
Mario Kassar (executive producer, Carolco Pictures cofounder): It’s $15 million, I have the rights, and we haven’t done anything yet.
James Cameron (director-cowriter): The first film made money and it was definitely a hit, but it wasn’t like Star Wars. You didn’t have to start on the sequel the next day. And frankly, in order to get that film made, I made this deal, to sell the rights. Whatever it took to get the film made, to get my foot in the door. And so I think it was justified. But then I didn’t control the rights.
I’d already made another couple films and forgotten about it, and I got a call from Carolco and they said, “We want you to make another Terminator film. We’ll pay you $6 million.” I said, “You have my full attention.”
Kassar: I have lunch with him at a place called Madeo. And I said, “Well, it’s a go. I mean, I already spent the money. You know I’m doing it, so go with God. Go write the script.”
Cameron: I talked to Dennis Muren at ILM. I said, “I’ve got an idea. If we took the water character from The Abyss, but it was metallic so you didn’t have the translucency issues, but you had all the surface reflectivity issues and you made it a complete human figure that could run and do stuff, and it could morph back into a human, and then turn into the liquid metal version of itself, and we sprinkled it through the movie, can we do it?” He said, “I’ll call you back tomorrow.”
Dennis Muren (visual effects supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic): I had an idea of what’s possible not only from The Abyss, but I’d seen there was work being done and research at universities, and commercials on TV at that time that had computer graphics, and their figures were moving and animated.
Cameron: Tom Sherak ran all distribution for Fox for years, and he said, “Who would have known that we made a $60 million movie that was just a test run for Terminator 2?” They were still stinging a little bit from the fact that The Abyss broke even, just barely.
Muren: James is a big lover of technology and of effects work, and really wanted to impress the audience with stuff they’ve never seen before.
Cameron: He called me back and he said, “We can do it. We can’t do a huge volume, we don’t have a pipeline, so pick your battles.”
Muren: It took a few months to get it in place. And Jim was very detailed on the storyboards; not every frame, but every single shot.
Cameron: We used the CG very sparingly. We had 14 CG shots in The Abyss and we had only 42 two years later in T2. There were probably another 50 or 60 shots that were practical prosthetic effects done by Stan Winston Studio, which today would have been done as CG.
William Wisher (cowriter): I think we were 18, 19 when we met. I did some writing on The Terminator. We had been talking about doing something else and he called me up one day and said, “I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Terminator 2 is going to happen and the bad news is that we’re already behind schedule, so why don’t you come on over here right now.”
Cameron: I basically had two competing ideas. One was Skynet sends a terminator, another Arnold terminator, to take out John, and the resistance sends one that’s been reprogrammed, that would’ve been Arnold too. So Arnold would become a dark hero character, obviously.
Wisher: Having Arnold fight another Arnold is just boring. Boring, boring, boring.
Cameron: When I first conceived the story idea, it was in two parts. In the first part, Skynet sent a cyborg with a metal endoskeleton and the good guys sent the protector. The protector crushes him under a truck or throws him through some big gear structure or machine. And then, up in the future, they realize the ripples of time are progressing toward them. They still haven’t won the battle.
[Skynet would] think long and hard about pulling the trigger on sending the experimental, one-off super weapon that they’ve created, that even they’re terrified to use. I didn’t call it the T-1000—it was just a liquid metal robot. And so now the thing that’s coming at you is much, much scarier than that other metal endoskeleton guy with his skin hanging off. I took that guy out of the story, but then I thought, “Let’s bring that guy back. Let’s make him the adversary.” I merged the two ideas. Instead of Arnold versus Arnold, it was Arnold versus the scary liquid metal weapon.
Wisher: We made him a cop. We thought, “Well, if he’s a police officer, he can go places and do things and won’t be questioned.”
Cameron: That was just me having fun with an authority figure. But there is a thematic point to that, which is that we, as human beings, become terminators. We learn how to have zero compassion. Terminator, ultimately, isn’t about machines. It’s about our tendency to become machines.
Wisher: We watched the first Terminator again and we were spitballing and thinking, “Where would these characters be?” So we thought, “Sarah, she knows what the future is—no one will believe her. She’s probably spent some years hanging out with survivalists or paramilitary types.”
Cameron: I remember sitting there once, high on E, writing notes for Terminator, and I was struck by Sting’s song, that “I hope the Russians love their children too.” And I thought, “You know what? The idea of a nuclear war is just so antithetical to life itself.” That’s where the kid came from.
Brad Fiedel (composer): The first film was really dark and propulsive. It just never stopped moving forward. But this had a little bit of a warmer heart.
Wisher: It’s a mother-son story where the stakes just happen to be the survival of the human race.
Cameron: Linda, I called her up and I said, “Look, they want to pay us a lot of money to make a sequel. Are you in or are you out? But just between you and me, I don’t really want to do it if Sarah doesn’t come back and I don’t want to recast Sarah, so you got to say you’re in.” And she and I weren’t involved. [Editor’s note: Cameron and Hamilton were married from 1997 to 1999.] We hadn’t even really hung out at all much since the first film. She was making a movie somewhere down South.
And so she said, “Yeah, in principle, I’m in, but I want to be crazy.” I said, “Well, what do you mean, crazy? How crazy?” She said, “Crazy, like I’ve been driven crazy.” I said, “Like you’re in an insane asylum, like you’re institutionalized?” She said, “Yeah, sure. Let me play crazy. Let me go nuts.” I said, “All right. Well, you’re going to get my version of nuts,” and she said, “All right. I’m down.”
Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor, to Entertainment Weekly): Anything that scares me I want to do.
Editor’s note: Through her agent, Hamilton declined to be interviewed for this article.
Wisher: We had to call Arnold up and go, “We’ve got this great idea.” He listened to us and he said, “Just make me cool.”
Cameron: I wound up writing right up until the very last second where I had to get in a limo and squirt to the airport and jump on a big charter jet that Carolco was using to fly in all of its stars and filmmakers to Cannes in early May of 1990. And I’m scrambling down to the wire to get this script done and printed out and my printer fucked up. I’m printing this thing out and I’m supposed to have left already 20 minutes ago. I literally pull it out of the laser printer hot, put a clip on it, and shove it in a gym bag and haul ass to the airport. And I walk on the plane and all of the big agents and movie stars and filmmakers in Hollywood are all sitting there, all in their seats, and you could hear a pin drop. And I have to walk all the way down the aisle past all these accusing eyes. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, you think you’re special, don’t you? There’s always one.” I’m like, “I know, guys, I know. Sorry.”
Anyway, as I’m going by, I hand the script to Arnold.
Arnold Schwarzenegger (T-800): I read it on the plane on the way over there. I remember that very well.
Cameron: Horrible flight, incredible turbulence. I’m thinking, literally, “Movies are going to grind to a halt because this plane is going down in the Atlantic.” It’s like the Titanic times five, right?
Schwarzenegger: Several times I read something that I had no fucking idea what he was talking about. I said, “What is polyalloy?”
Cameron: He and I had a breakfast meeting. Arnold always had the same thing—oatmeal with nuts and dates and fruit in it—so that’s what I had. I could tell there was something bugging him, right? We were pals at this point. Post-Terminator, we rode motorcycles together. And he said, “Jim, I have a big problem with the script.” I said, “Well, what is it?” And he said, “I don’t kill anybody.” I said, “I know, right? They’ll never see that coming. Nobody will guess it.” He said, “I know, but one thing is surprise. Another thing is I don’t kill anybody and I’m the terminator.”
This is happening on some terrace at Cannes and everybody’s looking. I’m like, “Let’s talk this out.” I give him all the reasons how it’s going to work. He said, “I know, but everybody knows I kick in the door and shoot everybody. That’s what I do.”
Schwarzenegger: How do you make people believe that this is the same guy we’ve seen in the first Terminator? Now all of a sudden, he’s protecting the human race and protecting this kid? How do I switch over to that?
Cameron: I finally got him to get his head around that part of it.
Schwarzenegger: It was strange, but I thought, “If we pull it off, it will be huge.”