40 YEARS OF THE TERMINATOR

FOUR DECADES AGO, A LITTLE LOW-BUDGET THRILLER FIRED UP JAMES CAMERON'S CAREER AND WENT ON TO CHANGE THE COURSE OF ACTION FILMS FOREVER. AS THE TERMINATOR HITS 40, ITS CREATOR TALKS ABOUT MAKING HIS CYBORG DREAMS REALITY

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

WHEN JAMES CAMERON wrote, “The future is not set,” he wasn’t kidding. The year was 1982 and Cameron —then a Roger Cormanschooled production designer, art director, effects guru and general Jim of all trades — was in Rome, directing a few ill-fated days on Piranha II before getting the boot, when a vision came to him in a fever dream. It was a hellish image, of a chrome skeleton, an unstoppable robot that Cameron decided was from the future. He called it, and the movie it inspired, ‘The Terminator’.

When he got back to Los Angeles, licking his wounds from the Piranha II fallout, he started writing the screenplay for a movie in which that unstoppable robot travelled back in time to try to kill the mother of the leader of a future resistance. It included that line, “The future is not set.” Which, for Cameron, wasn’t so much a line, more a mission statement. “You seize the day,” he tells Empire now. “You don’t come to watch; you come to play. Those are principles that I apply to myself.”

And how. These days, Cameron is arguably the most successful director of all time. Three of the biggest movies of all time (Avatar, Titanic, and Avatar: The Way Of Water) are his. He has three Oscars. Every single one of his films — from Aliens to The Abyss and True Lies —has made a lasting impact on pop culture.

And it all began with The Terminator, the movie that also catapulted its star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to mega-fame after its debut in 1984. It was tight, taut, and incredibly intense. Seven years later, Cameron and Schwarzenegger (and Linda Hamilton, as Sarah Connor) repeated the trick with the pumped-up blockbuster behemoth that is Terminator 2: Judgment Day. After that, Cameron left the franchise (which then endured diminishing returns with a raft of inferior sequels) before returning to produce Tim Miller’s 2019 legacy sequel, Terminator: Dark Fate.

These days, Cameron’s future is a little more set than most —the Avatar sequels have him booked up for the rest of the decade —but over the course of nearly two hours on Zoom, his focus is firmly fixed on the past, and The Terminator’s latest milestone.

The Terminator is 40 years old. Which ain’t bad for a fever dream in a cheap Rome hotel. A cheap pensione in Rome, and you know, I was just a punk starting out when I directed The Terminator. I think I was 29 at the time, and it was my first directing gig. I’d gotten fired off Piranha II after a few days of shooting, so I don’t really put that on my CV, even though other people love to remind me all the time.

But Terminator was my first film, and it’s near and dear for that reason. But I think I can look at it pretty objectively now as a creature of its time, both in terms of how it sits in the zeitgeist of that moment, and also how it sits in my career as a first effort. I don’t think of it as some Holy Grail, that’s for sure. I look at it now and there are parts of it that are pretty cringeworthy, and parts of it that are like, “Yeah, we did pretty well for the resources we had available.”