Arnold Schwarzenegger Had a Problem With James Cameron’s ‘Terminator 2’ Script
Arnold Schwarzenegger revisited his iconic role as The Terminator in the titular film T2: Judgment Day. But some of the differences the film’s director James Cameron made for the film raised some alarms for the actor.
Arnold Schwarzenegger complained to James Cameron about the ‘Terminator 2’ script
Although Schwarzenegger would return to the Terminator franchise in 1992’s Judgment Day, his character would be slightly different. In The Terminator, Schwarzenegger played a brutal killing machine responsible for several deaths in the feature.
But in Judgment Day, Schwarzenegger noticed this aspect of his character was absent from the script. In an interview with The Ringer, Cameron recalled Schwarzenegger’s trepidation towards the project.
“We were pals at this point. Post-Terminator, we rode motorcycles together. And he said, ‘Jim, I have a big problem with the script.’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ And he said, ‘I don’t kill anybody.’ I said, ‘I know, right? They’ll never see that coming. Nobody will guess it.’ He said, ‘I know, but one thing is surprise. Another thing is I don’t kill anybody and I’m the terminator,’” Cameron recalled.
Cameron would later pull Schwarzenegger aside and explain to him the reasoning for the character change.
“How do you make people believe that this is the same guy we’ve seen in the first Terminator? Now all of a sudden, he’s protecting the human race and protecting this kid? How do I switch over to that,” Schwarzenegger remembered thinking.
“It was strange, but I thought, ‘If we pull it off, it will be huge,’” Schwarzenegger said.
Why James Cameron didn’t feel Arnold Schwarzenegger being a good guy in ‘Terminator 2’ was a twist
It may have come as a surprise to many that Schwarzenegger was actually playing the hero in the second feature. But in the days leading up to Judgment Day, audiences would’ve already known about it due to the film’s trailers. Speaking to Empire, Cameron confided that this was a deliberate choice. Schwarzenegger being a good guy was never meant to be an elaborate twist.
“All of us have had our battles with the Suits, but the case you mention was not a battle. The Carolco guys, Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna, were good partners with me on T2, and I led the charge on marketing, including showing Arnold as the good guy,” Cameron said. “It wasn’t a Sixth Sense kind of twist that’s revealed only at the end of the film. He’s revealed as the Protector at the end of Act One. And I always feel you lead with your strongest story element in selling a movie.”
Cameron believed that sharing his new direction with Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character would’ve generated more interest among audiences.
“I believed our potential audience would be more attracted to seeing how the most badass killing machine could become a hero than they would be to just another kill-fest in the same vein as the first film. Sequels have to strike a delicate balance between honouring the most loved elements from the first film, but also promising to really shake things up and turn them upside down. Our marketing campaign for T2 was exactly that promise, and it worked,” he said.
James Cameron isn’t sure he’d make his ‘Terminator’ movies today
As proud as Cameron was of his movies, he shared that there are certain elements about his films that he’s been uncomfortable with. Speaking with Esquire, he confided he wasn’t sure if his Terminator films would exist in contemporary times because of those elements.
“I look back on some films that I’ve made, and I don’t know if I would want to make that film now. I don’t know if I would want to fetishize the gun, like I did on a couple of Terminator movies 30+ years ago, in our current world. What’s happening with guns in our society turns my stomach,” he said.
