Hurd mentality
LEGENDARY PRODUCER GALE ANNE HURD O NTHE KEY PROJECTS OF HER CAREER
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
Gale Anne Hurd with a Terminator at a 30th anniversary screening.
GALE ANNE HURD has been one of the most important producers of the last 40 years, lending her Roger Corman-trained nous to any number of iconic projects, including some trailblazing efforts with her first husband, one James Cameron. We sat down with her in London recently to talk through her astonishing CV…
BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980)
Credited as Assistant Production Manager on the low-budget sci-fi produced by her mentor Corman, Hurd had fingers in many pies, resulting in a fateful encounter. “Roger said, ‘I need you to go down to the model shop where they’re building the spaceship miniatures and see how they’re doing,’” she recalls. “And there was this tall, blond guy who said, ‘Let me show you around.’ Show me around? I was blown away! I went back and told Roger, ‘You are in such good hands with Jim Cameron.’”
THE TERMINATOR (1984)
At Hurd’s recommendation, Cameron was swiftly promoted to art director, and the two clicked so creatively that they teamed up to somehow make Cameron’s nightmarish sci-fi vision a reality. “We had 99 doors slammed in our faces,” she says. While they eventually got funding, courtesy of Orion Pictures, Hemdale and HBO Films, money was still an issue when they first met with their prospective title star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. “When Jim and I went to lunch with Arnold, I think I had a credit card denied and we had no cash,” she says. “At which point we thought, ‘Okay, we fucked this up. If we can’t even pick up a lunch tab, how is our financing legitimate for the movie?’ But Arnold was so gracious and so smart about believing in The Terminator.”