‘The Terminator’ First Came to James Cameron in a Dream
The Terminator‘s concept feels like something straight out of a nightmare. The idea that there might be a time when technology results in the rise of killer machines is enough to send chills down the spine. However, James Cameron recently revealed that the idea for this film actually came to him in a dream.
James Cameron’s ‘The Terminator’ dream was a sickness-induced nightmare
The Terminator is arguably one of the best sci-fi movies to have ever been released, and we all have Cameron’s fever to thank. In a recent video from GQ, Cameron revealed that the movie came to him in a dream, but there’s more to it than that.
Before The Terminator, Cameron wasn’t a well-known director and was mostly involved with low-budget productions. At the time, he was working on the sequel to Piranha. The first Piranha was moderately successful and had solid reviews. However, Piranha 2: The Spawning wasn’t well received, with several critics panning it.
When Cameron joined the production as the director, he took over from another director who’d left the project due to creative differences, but Cameron didn’t stay too long on the project either as he got fired by its producer. Cameron was burnt out from overworking on the Piranha sequel that he contracted a fever due to exhaustion.
It was then that the then 27-year-old director had a dream about a chrome metal in a fever dream. “I was sick, I don’t know what with, some flu-like virus and had a bit of a fever and just had a dream. It was an image that I remembered when I woke up. An image of a chrome-like skeleton emerging from a fire,” he told GQ.
In a different interview, Cameron described his dream as “a metallic torso holding kitchen knives dragging itself from an explosion.” Cameron told GQ that he knew what the image in his dream meant and when he woke up, he began working on the endoskeleton, saying, “The pieces fell into place around that seminal image.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger auditioned for Kyle Reese in ‘The Terminator’
Kyle Reese is the protagonist in The Terminator franchise and a soldier for the human resistance working under John Connor. Actor Michael Biehn played Reese in the 1984 film The Terminator, but according to Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted the part. The director said, “Arnold came in to talk to me about the character of Reese supposedly,” noting the actor’s “enthusiasm for the script in general.”
However, according to the Titanic director, Schwarzenegger kept talking about the script from the antagonist’s perspective and gushing about the cyborg. “We didn’t talk about Reese as much as I would’ve expected somebody pitching themselves for that character would have,” Cameron said.
He said Schwarzenegger’s unique face drew him in, and the “raw power” the actor exuded made him the perfect Terminator instead of Reese. Cameron had initially envisioned the Terminator as “an infiltrator”, but when he saw Schwarzenegger, his perspective shifted, and he wrote him as “this kind or armored tank.”
‘The Terminator’ resulted in a multi billion-dollar franchise
The Terminator follows Reese, a member of the human resistance who travels back in time to fight Skynet’s cyborg assassin and prevent him from killing the resistance leader, John Connor’s mother, Sarah. The movie takes place in 1984 in Los Angeles, with the post-apocalyptic future taking place in 2029.
The Terminator was released on October 26, 1984, and exceeded pre-release expectations topping the US box office for two weeks. The movie eventually earned an impressive $78.3 million on a modest $6.4 million budget, resulting in five more movies. The 1984 film is credited with launching Cameron and Schwarzenegger’s careers.
