When James Cameron and his producing partner Gale Anne Hurd set out to make “The Terminator” they encountered so many setbacks it’s a wonder the film ever came to fruition. Cameron, who’d had a disastrous experience serving as an interim director on 1982’s “Piranha II: The Spawning,” needed a movie that would essentially launch his filmmaking career, but with little directing experience, getting anything off the ground by himself was going to be difficult. Thankfully, he and Hurd managed to scrape together the funds needed to shoot a version of Cameron’s own story about a killer cyborg sent back in time on a murderous mission. But getting the funding was just the first hurdle.
Once Cameron cast Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role, he had to wait for the actor to become available, which held up production for six to eight months. Then, when he finally became available, it transpired that the Austrian actor was contracted to shoot another project, leaving Cameron and co. to shoot Sarah Connor actress Linda Hamilton in her solo scenes. Unfortunately, Hamilton injured her ankle, which meant she was unable to film the bulk of her scenes which involved a lot of running and physical activity. Meanwhile the budget for the whole movie was stretched thin across its production, making for a tumultuous and chaotic shoot that somehow yielded one of the best sci-fi movies of all time.
But it turns out these production delays actually ended up helping “The Terminator” become as iconic as it has in the years since its 1984 debut. In fact, they helped the entire “Terminator” franchise establish a visual identity that has remained part of the saga for its entire 40-year run.
The Terminator almost looked much different
In 1984’s “The Terminator,” Los Angeles provided what has now become an integral part of the franchise’s iconography. From the titular cyborg’s arrival at Griffith Park Observatory to the downtown car chases, the city became crucial to the film’s overall aesthetic, not only providing a strangely incongruous contrast to the doom-laden tone with its sun-drenched suburbs but also helping to bolster the movie’s expressionist-inspired “tech noir” style with its grimy city environs.
More importantly, every movie since that first installment, barring 2019’s abysmal “Terminator: Dark Fate,” (the film that made Schwarzenegger give up on the franchise) has been based in and around Los Angeles. In that sense, the city of Angels came to define much of the visual identity of the franchise, maintaining that oddly unsettling juxtaposition between the tropical climate of southern California and the harsh nuclear winter of the city’s future.
As such, it’s difficult to imagine the franchise without LA at its core. But it seems “The Terminator,” and therefore the entire saga, could have looked very different were it not for one of those pesky scheduling conflicts and the subsequent shooting delays. Speaking to Ringer Movies, Gale Anne Hurd revealed that the film was originally supposed to shoot in Toronto, of all places. “The interesting thing is we weren’t supposed to shoot in LA,” said the producer. “The original conception of the film was we were going to shoot in Toronto and they were going to close down some of the lanes of the major freeway there.”
Before Hurd and James Cameron could travel to Canada to begin shooting, however, their star was called away to shoot a sequel to 1982’s “Conan The Barbarian,” which made shooting in Canada completely untenable. Hurd continued:
“Arnold had to go do ‘Conan the Destroyer’ for [producer] Dino De Laurentiis, which meant we had to start filming in March. You can’t film streets in Toronto when there’s still ice and snow on the ground and that is actually why we ended up shooting in LA. It was the year, I think, of the Olympics so it was actually a lot more deserted than usual.”
LA came to define the entire Terminator franchise
The first “Terminator” movie I saw was 1991’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” which opens with one of the most haunting single notes of any film score in history. The orchestral sting introduces images of LA freeways rammed with cars wavering in the heat before the film cuts to a future version of the city where the freeways lay in ruin beneath the perpetual dark of nuclear winter. That contrast between the two versions of the city had me immediately transfixed, and set the tone for the whole film. All the while Edward Norton’s John Connor is riding his dirt bike through the pristine suburbs of the San Fernando Valley you can’t forget the nightmarish future which hangs over the entire film, lending it a nagging sense of doom more haunting than any action movie has any business being.
Without “The Terminator” being set in LA, it’s unlikely any of this would have happened, which would have robbed the saga of something essential. Gale Ann Hurd understood in retrospect how integral LA was to the final film, telling Ringer Movies, “There are iconic images […] I mean Griffith Park Observatory and the Second Street tunnel and downtown LA is a character in this.” More than that, LA has become a character in the franchise as a whole, which will hopefully find its way back on track now that Netflix’s “Terminator: Zero” has proven the value of returning to the source material.
Meanwhile, it seems that since forsaking the “Terminator” franchise Arnold Schwarzenegger has developed an ambition to make a new Conan movie.
