James cameron biography terminator movie

After its release, critics and moviegoers were not impressed with the story of scuba divers who encounter aliens while recovering a U. Navy submarine. However, the film's visual effects were stunning and earned an Academy Award. Working with his third wife, Kathryn BigelowCameron helped produce her action flick, Point Break The couple's two-year relationship ended around the same time.

But Cameron returned to form that year with another box-office hit, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Several years later he later he would marry one of the film's stars, Linda Hamilton. The film made it to No. Cameron then began a massive undertaking with his story Titanica movie about star-crossed lovers played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet trapped aboard the doomed Titanic ocean liner.

To re-create one of the greatest disasters at sea in history, Cameron had a special studio built in Mexico, which featured a million-gallon water james cameron biography terminator movie and foot replica of the Titanic. But Cameron proved the skeptics wrong. Opening in Decemberthe film received critical raves and strong ticket sales. Inhe divorced Linda Hamilton, and in he married actress Suzy Amis, who appeared in Titanic.

James Cameron: Interviews. Google Books: University Press of Mississippi. Retrieved July 3, Archived from the original on October 17, Retrieved September 27, Retrieved September 14, Retrieved September 7, Retrieved October 7, December 31, Retrieved August 7, Archived from the original on October 25, Retrieved October 25, December 25, Retrieved October 20, All the Fanfare.

Retrieved September 17, Archived from the original on November 5, Retrieved November 5, Archived from the original on November 28, Retrieved August 31, The Guardian. Deadline Hollywood. May 29, Archived from the original on June 4, Retrieved March 30, Archived from the original on Archived from the original on February 12, Archived from the original on 9 December Retrieved 10 December The Hollywood Reporter.

Archived from the original on March 27, Retrieved September 24, Archived from the original on January 15, California Science Center. July 17, Archived from the original on July 20, August 20, Retrieved August 27, Archived from the original on July 26, Retrieved July 26, Archived from the original on September 30, Retrieved March 26, Archived from the original on March 5, Retrieved October 12, Archived from the original on November 1, Retrieved March 24, Retrieved I honestly do not believe Arnold was angling for the Terminator part.

I think he was honestly just enthusiastic about the film, and wanting to be in it. But I gotta set the stage for this lunch. I gotta go pick a fight with Conan. This was coming from on high at Orion that Arnold should play Reese. It was just a stupid idea. Arnold was not a verbal performer at that time, you know? We had talked briefly about the idea about six months before, myself and Gale, and we thought, man, maybe not.

So we discounted it and I went in [to the lunch] with a mindset of just ticking the box. Absolutely wrong. He did not. It happened while we were at lunch, and it happened internally with me, and we never even discussed it until I had that left that lunch and gone back and met with Gale and John Daly afterwards. He could be like a Panzer tank.

It would just be different. But man, it would be powerful. Punctuality is more important. I debated turning around, going back, grabbing the cash. This is the kind of level we were at.

James cameron biography terminator movie

So I raced across town. Cut to the end of the lunch. Arnold just laughed it off. It was all funny, you know? I thought, what a gracious guy. I had a completely different impression of him coming out of the meeting than what I had gone in with. He and I hit it off at that lunch. But he is the title character, Lou. I find out 24 hours later that Arnold has fired Lou Pitt — he subsequently hired him back, and Lou and I got to be friends.

Gale eventually signed with Lou Pitt! He turned out to be a great guy. But he was dead wrong in this scenario, and Arnold fired him. So then a deal got struck, and we were on. The only problem was, Arnold turned out not to be available in the exact year that we wanted to shoot the film, which was summer of Before, I had been busy on The Terminator.

You heard it. This is the straight shit. My mind is like a freaking surveillance camera. You can count on this. You can take it to the bank. Was that emblematic of the shoot? Hemdale had the money. They committed it. The question was, were they going to keep me on as director? But I managed to get through the shoot. I got 40 grand to direct the movie, and I put of that, oh let me see, forty grand into reshoots.

That took us a week, and Gale put some money into it. We scheduled one week of reshoots. Even on a Terminator james cameron biography terminator movie, a week of reshoots would have cost you half a million bucks. So we had to do it for a tenth of that, which we did. I called in every favour. I got a stage from a friend of mine that was running the stages for Roger Corman.

And we just did a bunch of inserts. We never did shit like that at Corman. We never did anything that was wasted energy. I had the storyboards. I should have shot them and I should have cut them in so they could have seen what the scene would be like. And the entire last reel of the movie, every other shot was a slug. I get this ashen-faced thing a lot.

You should have seen on Avatarby the way, the first time they saw that film. Seriously, six people in a room, all looking like Russia had launched and you have twenty minutes to live. So I walk in, and everybody looks like that. Cut to credits. Guess what? It was a real tricky moment in the whole process. Jesus, I mean, they could have fired me on the spot.

Our post-production was so ludicrously short that the week they lost trying to find somebody to take over would have been fatal. I think I knew that. One of the things I think gets overlooked about The Terminatorin amongst the action and the Arnold of it all, is its emotion. You said earlier on that people criticise your dialogue. But that line could have been cheesy.

That could have gone wrong. Look, all my stuff can be cheesy, and some people think it is. Fortunately, not the majority. Because my whole approach to science-fiction is, the more outlandish a story, the more real you have to ground it in how people really talk, and how they really would respond if something like that was really happening to them.

Titanic is a wildly romantic story, but I still played it as real as I could from the perspective of the characters. Winston sculpted reproductions of Schwarzenegger's face in several poses out of silicone, clay and plaster. The sequences set in and the stop-motion scenes were developed by Fantasy II, a special effects company headed by Gene Warren Jr.

Cameron wanted to convince the audience that the model of the structure was capable of doing what they saw Schwarzenegger doing. To allow this, a scene was filmed of Schwarzenegger injured and limping away; this limp made it easier for the model to imitate Schwarzenegger. Both non-functioning and functioning versions of the prop were created.

At the time the movie was made, diode lasers were not available; because of the high power requirement, the helium—neon laser in the sight used an external power supply that Schwarzenegger had to activate manually. Reynolds states that his only compensation for the project was promotional material for the film. In Marchthe film began production in Los Angeles.

I just found myself on the set doing things I didn't think I would do — scenes that were just purely horrific that just couldn't be, because now they were too flamboyant. A week before filming started, Linda Hamilton sprained her ankle, leading to a production change whereby the scenes in which Hamilton needed to run occurred as late as the filming schedule allowed.

Hamilton's ankle was taped every day and she spent most of the film production in pain. Schwarzenegger tried to have the iconic line " I'll be back " changed as he had difficulty pronouncing the word I'll. Cameron refused to change the line to "I will be back", so Schwarzenegger worked to say the line as written the best he could. He would later say the line in numerous films throughout his career.

After production finished on The Terminatorsome post-production shots were needed. The Terminator soundtrack was composed and performed on synthesizer by Brad Fiedel. Fiedel said his score reflected "a mechanical man and his heartbeat". Cameron turned down this theme, as he believed it would lose the audience's excitement. Orion Pictures did not have faith in The Terminator performing well at the box office and feared a negative critical reception.

The film remained at number one in its second week. It lost its number one spot in the third week to Oh, God! You Devil. But it's better to be a big fish in a small pond than the other way around. Contemporary critical responses to The Terminator were mixed. Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast in a machine-like portrayal that requires only a few lines of dialog.

The Los Angeles Times called the film "a crackling thriller full of all sorts of gory treats Right from the start it's all action and violence with no time taken to set up the story It's like a streamlined Dirty Harry movie — no exposition at all; just guns, guns and more guns. Cameron's no-nonsense approach will make him a sought-after commodity".

He continued, "Linda Hamilton is admirable as the woman in peril who discovers her own strength to survive, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is eerily wonderful as the unstoppable cyborg. Other reviews criticized the film's violence and story-telling quality. Much of it There is far too much of the latter, in the form of car chases, messy shootouts and Mr.

Schwarzenegger's slamming brutally into anything that gets in his way. This schizoid style actually helps, providing a little humor just when the sci-fi plot turns too sluggish or the dialogue too hokey. InRichard Schickel of Entertainment Weekly reviewed the film, giving it an "A" rating, writing that "what originally seemed a somewhat inflated, if generous and energetic, big picture, now seems quite a james cameron biography terminator movie little film".

He called it "one of the most original movies of the s and seems likely to remain one of the best sci-fi films ever made. Still endlessly entertaining. For our money, this film is far superior to its mega-grossing mega-budgeted sequel. Wittily written with a nice eye for sharp detail, it's hard sci-fi action all the way. Sadly, it spawned a string of pointless and inferior sequels, but the first Terminator [ Writer Harlan Ellison stated that he "loved the movie, was just blown away by it," [ 91 ] but believed that the screenplay was based on a short story and episode of The Outer Limits he had written, titled " Soldier ", and threatened to sue for infringement.

Cameron was against Orion's decision and was told that if he did not agree with the settlement, he would have to pay any damages if Orion lost a suit by Ellison. Cameron replied that he "had no choice but to agree with the settlement. Of course, there was a gag order as well, so I couldn't tell this story, but now I frankly don't care.

It's the truth. The psychoanalyst Darian Leader sees The Terminator as an example of how the cinema has dealt with the concept of masculinity ; he writes:. We are shown time and again that to be a man requires more than to have the biological body of a male: something else must be added to it To be a man means to have a body plus something symbolic, something which is not ultimately human.

The Terminator also explores the potential dangers of AI dominance and rebellion. The robots become self-aware in the future, reject human authority and determine that the human race needs to be destroyed. The impact of this theme is so great that the Terminator robot has become the "prevalent visual representation of AI risk". The Terminator features a narrative where elements of the science fiction film and action film genres prevail.

While rarely considered a horror filmthe film does feature iconography associated with the slasher filmsuch as The Terminator as an unstoppable villain, and Sarah Connor as a final girl archetype. Both authors applied the term as a film genre to several works from the s to the s. Frelik wrote that the films Auger mentioned including The Terminator and Blade Runner had no applicable reason to be understood as tech-noir rather than science fiction.

The Terminator premiered at number 35 on the top video cassette rentals and number 20 on top video cassette sales charts. In its second week, The Terminator reached number 4 on the top video cassette rentals and number 12 on top video cassette sales charts. Through their acquisition of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment 's pre film library catalogue, MGM Home Entertainment released a special edition of the film on October 2,which included documentaries, the script, and advertisements for the film.

These are the exact same special features that have been carried over from previous Blu-ray releases. Discovery Home Entertainment in November 5, Its critical consensus reads: "With its impressive action sequences, taut economic direction, and relentlessly fast pace, it's clear why The Terminator continues to be an influence on sci-fi and action flicks.

InTotal Film named it the 72nd-best film ever made. InHuw Fullerton of Radio Times ranked it the second best film of the six in the franchise, stating " The Terminator was a brilliantly original, visceral and genuinely scary movie when it was released inand no matter how badly the visual effects age it hasn't lost its impact. A soundtrack to the film was released in which included the score by Brad Fiedel and the pop and rock songs used in the club scenes.

Dark Horse Comics published a comic in that took place 39 years after the film. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item. This article is about the film. For the franchise, see Terminator franchise. For the character, see Terminator character.

For the character concept, see Terminator character concept. For other uses, see Terminator disambiguation. James Cameron Gale Anne Hurd. Release date. October 26, Running time. Plot [ edit ]. Cast [ edit ]. See also: List of Terminator franchise characters. Arnold SchwarzeneggerLinda Hamiltonand Michael Biehn pictured in, andrespectively played the film's leads.

Production [ edit ]. Development [ edit ]. Casting [ edit ]. Filming [ edit ]. Music [ edit ]. Further information: The Terminator soundtrack. Release [ edit ]. Critical response [ edit ]. Contemporary [ edit ]. Retrospective [ edit ]. Post-release [ edit ]. Plagiarism and aftermath [ edit ].