News culture “I think about it” James Cameron is uncomfortable with a very particular element of Terminator which is “fetishized”

Culture news “I think about it” James Cameron is uncomfortable with a particular element of Terminator that is “fetishized”

A storyline full of guns

It was during a masterclass recently held in Paris that James Cameron returned to the adventures that took place during the production of Terminator. He first insisted on the fact that the lack of budget pushed him to make complicated choices. For example, no storyboard was done by a professional artist, since it was Cameron himself who took on the task. “I figured we had no money and I knew how to draw, so too bad.” he remembered. “I drew everything and storyboarded the film very meticulously”. With eight months of preproduction, a generous amount of time caused by the entire team waiting for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s schedule to open up, Terminator suffered from a “a little skinny”, by the director’s own admission.

In Terminator, guns are everywhere. Which put Cameron in a certain embarrassment, he who said he knew absolutely nothing about firearms. “This is America, I just have to go buy them!” he explained. In order to make his story credible and better understand one of the central subjects of his work, he toured American stores and continued the pre-production of his film with a huge arsenal in his bags. This gun madness is reflected in the film, so much so that Terminator has already been accused of fetishizing firearms. Cameron agrees: “Sometimes I think back to certain films I’ve made and I don’t know if I would want to make them now. I don’t know if I would want to fetishize guns, as I did with the few Terminator films over 30 years ago, in our current world“, he conceded. “What’s happening with guns in our society makes my stomach turn”.

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Robot Rock

Although the role of the Terminator continues to stick with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the filmmaker once again admitted that he had many uncertainties about the Austrian actor. Originally, he was supposed to play the role of Kyle Reese, the resistance fighter. But Cameron changed his mind after his first meeting with the actor. “As he spoke, I looked at his face. Such a singular face with such indomitable will in its features, almost a brutal reality. And I thought he could play Terminator” he said. The director then rewrote his character so that it corresponded to the “brutality” by Schwarzenegger. The sequel, as we know, the film became a huge success and grossed more than $78 million at the worldwide box office, for an initial budget estimated at $6.4 million.