James Cameron’s story idea forTerminator 2: Judgment Daycame with the help of a specific substance.
The song helped Cameron, 66, come up with the idea of giving his heroine, Sarah Connor, a son, John.
“I thought, ‘You know? The idea of a nuclear war is just so antithetical to life itself,'” Cameron recalled. “That’s where the kid came from.”
Cameron calledLinda Hamilton, who had portrayed Sarah in the original 1984 film.
“I called her up and I said, ‘Look, they want to pay us a lot of money to make a sequel. Are you in or are you out? But just between you and me, I don’t really want to do it if Sarah doesn’t come back and I don’t want to recast Sarah, so you got to say you’re in,'” Cameron said. “And she and I weren’t involved. We hadn’t really hung out all that much since the first film. She was making a movie somewhere down South.”
Terminator 2was released in 1991; Cameron and Hamilton were married from 1997 to 1999.
Cameron said Hamilton had just one request if she were to reprise her role as the mother of the future resistance leader, John Connor.
Steve Granitz/WireImage
“She said, ‘Yeah, in principle, I’m in, but I want to be crazy,'” Cameron recalled. “I said, ‘Well, what do you mean, crazy? How crazy?’ She said, ‘Crazy, like I’ve been driven crazy.’ I said, ‘Like you’re in an insane asylum, like you’re institutionalized?’ She said, ‘Yeah, sure. Let me play crazy. Let me go nuts.’ I said, ‘All right. Well, you’re going to get my version of nuts,’ and she said, ‘All right. I’m down.'”
Cameron added the franchise is about humans having “zero compassion.”
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“Terminator, ultimately, isn’t about machines,” he said. “It’s about our tendency to become machines.”
James Cameron.Jeff Spicer/WireImage
The resistance sends back their own less-advanced Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to protect John.
The film became a massive hit and is regarded as superior to the first film. It grossed $520 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing film of 1991 and of Schwarzenegger’s career.
In October 2019, Hamilton, 64, told PEOPLE she spent three months getting fit forTerminator 2: Judgment Day.
“InJudgment Day, it was just the beginning of the fat-free diet,” she said. “I ate no fat for all those months. More than a year. I would never do that again, because the brain needs fat, the body needs fat. But we didn’t know any better.”
source: people.com
