30 Years of "The Terminator" - How it all came to be

[_____V_____]

A fascinating look-back at the concept and events which ultimately built up to make the biggest cult-classic sci-fi film of our times.

Excerpts:

It all started in 1981 with a dream. Cameron, then a 26-year-old model maker and art director for Corman, was in Rome attempting to get his name off the ignominious Piranha II: The Spawning, a low-rent horror sequel he had directed for five days before being fired.

CAMERON Gale was working for Roger on a movie called Humanoids From the Deep, and they were doing reshoots of some teenagers in a pup-tent getting raped by slimy creatures from the swamp. She was young and supersmart. I showed her what I was working on, and she thought it was pretty cool.

GALE ANNE HURD (producer-coscreenwriter) He told me about the dream he had of the metal endoskeleton, and the whole story came together as a result of that stirring image.

CAMERON We saw it as a low budget guerrilla-style production, but we had aspirations to do something that was somehow world-class within those limitations. It was pretty clear that the studios were only interested in buying the script; they were not interested in me as a filmmaker. I was actually worse than a first-time director because I had directed a little bit on Piranha II and it was a piece of garbage.

HURD We pitched it to every studio. All the usual suspects, followed by all the unusual suspects. Then we took it to Barbara Boyle, who had been one of my mentors when she worked for Roger Corman. She had taken a job at Orion, as had Frances Doel, who had also worked for Roger.

HURD Initially Jim and I thought in order to keep the budget down we would use a fairly unknown cast. Lance Henriksen was originally going to play the Terminator.

CAMERON Medavoy came to me and Gale and he said, “Are you sitting down? You must sit down. I want O.J. Simpson for the Terminator and Arnold Schwarzenegger for the good guy, whatever his name is.”

MIKE MEDAVOY That did come out of my mouth. At the time, O.J. Simpson had one of those commercials for Hertz where he jumped over a counter and ran to get a rental car. It was all of that athletic stuff, which I thought the Terminator should have.

CAMERON Gale and I just looked at each other and thought, “You’ve got to be f- - -ing kidding me.” Mind you, this was before O.J. was actually a killer. We might have reconsidered after he had killed his wife. [Laughs] This was when everybody loved him, and ironically that was part of the problem—he was this likable, goofy, kind of innocent guy. [Laughs] Plus, frankly I wasn’t interested in an African-American man chasing around a white girl with a knife. It just felt wrong.

BIEHN Jim had seen The Fan, where I play an obsessed fan who stalks Lauren Bacall. At the beginning of that film I start out as a nice guy and he turns out to be a really bad guy. That’s what Jim wanted to do with Reese. I never do anything in the first hour of The Terminator that makes you think I’m a nice guy until I come out at the bar and start shooting at Arnold to protect Sarah.

HURD Jim and I auditioned quite a few actresses and Linda was the only one who captured the essence of Sarah—her relative innocence as well as the strength of character she develops over the course of the film.

LINDA HAMILTON (Sarah Connor) I was going to be a Shakespearean actress when I came out of the Strasberg studio in New York. And so I wasn’t as excited about The Terminator as my people were. Maybe I was a little snobby. I thought, “Oh, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m not sure about that.” I was little nervous about whether all the pieces would fit together.

Full details - http://insidemovies.ew.com/2014/07/1...-oral-history/

[Sculpt]

It is funny stuff. At the time the film came out, there were cheap violence exploitation films like "the exterminator" all around. The title had to throw some people off the sci-fi it was going for.