Rage Against The Machine - The Making Of The Terminator, Part I
Linda Hamilton, Gale Anne Hurd, Lance Henriksen and Co. on the creation of a science-fiction masterpiece.
Eighteen-Eleven - Mary Shelley is holidaying in Italy when she has a vivid dream about the ultimate in human design, a man-made man.
Nineteen-Eighty-One -budding filmmaker James Cameron is in Italy to complete Piranha II: The Spawning when he too has a feverish nightmare about a man machine.
Shelley uses her frightening experience as the basis for a horror novel called Frankenstein. Cameron, on the other hand, makes his hallucination the subject of his next picture, a science-fiction thriller he christens The Terminator.
As Shelley spent seven years writing her genre-redefining tale, it took Carpenter a while to turn his dream into a work of art. Along the way, he’d brush shoulders with OJ Simpson, fire and rehire good friend Lance Henriksen, and befriend an Austrian bodybuilder who’d made a name for himself playing Conan The Barbarian.
The combination of a pre-superstardom Arnold Schwarzenegger and a Star Trek-influenced script might suggest the very worst sort of B-movie. But while it borrowed from episodic TV and shoddy cinema, there was nothing lower rent about The Terminator. Even the most uppity critics came to recognise it as one of the most significant films of the 1980s.
It says much for James Cameron’s story that, having spawned two smash-hit sequela, The Terminator bore that rarest of fruit - a successful TV spin-off, The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Of course, subsequent movie outings have seen returns diminish in both artistic and commercial terms. This, though, can tarnish the original’s lustre. As Arnold Schwarzenegger has it, “After The Terminator, nothing was ever the same.”
Lance Henriksen (actor, Detective Vukovich): I worked with Jim Cameron on that fabled classic Piranha II: Flying Killers, or Piranha Part Two: The Spawning as I believe it was released in some territories. It was while making that film that Jim came up with the idea for The Terminator. Since he’s such a passionate person, he was often talking about this new idea. So I guess I was among the first people to hear about the film that was going to change so many lives.
Gale Anne Hurd (co-writer, producer): The moment Jim told me about his idea, I knew we had something special. And it seemed a lot of studios felt the same way. From the off, there were people saying, ‘This is great but we want to get real producers and a real director to do it.’ They hoped we would take a pay cheque and leave them to get on with it. But the more we heard those comments, the more convinced we were that we had something good.
Lane Hendricksen: Arnold Schwarzenegger is so closely associated with the role of Terminator that it’s amazing to think he wasn’t Jim and Gale’s first choice for the part.
Gale Anne Hurd: Our first choice for the Terminator was OJ Simpson, who we thought was athletic and had a kind face, the sort of face you wouldn’t associate with a machine built to kill. But that didn’t work out so Jim talked to Lance Henriksen who he thought could bring some menace to the part. Lance was in fact instrumental in helping get the film made. Jim was trying to set up a deal with Hemdale, the company run by John Daly and the actor David Hemmings, so he sent Lance along in full Terminator make-up to give them an idea of what they were investing in.
Lance Henriksen: I went into Hemdale and Jim had planned it so I would get there about half-an-hour ahead of them. I went in decked out like the Terminator. I put gold foil from a carton of Vantage cigarettes in my teeth and waxed my hair back. Jim had put fake cuts on my head. I wore a ripped-up punk rock T-shirt, a leather jacket and motorcycle boots up to my knees. It was a really exciting look. I was a really scary person to be in a room with. I kicked the door open when I got there and the poor secretary just about swallowed her typewriter. I headed in to see the producer. I sat in the room with him but I didn’t talk to him. I just kept looking at him. After a few minutes of that the producer was ready to jump out of the window.
Gale Anne Hurd: It was a risky pitch but John Dally loved it. Then Orion and HBO came on board and we had our movie! Then we had a change of mind about the Terminator and found ourselves talking to a certain Austrian bodybuilder…