How would you say this line?
Really, for times sake, he said, Ive gotta get this thing done.
Can you help me out?
Were already behind schedule, so do you wanna write it with me?
I said, Absolutely.
I think we started that afternoon I drove over to his house.
It took Mario Kassar, and his mini-major studio Carolco, to finally get the wheels on T2 moving.
A friend of mine sent me the screenplay and said, Read this.
I read it, and I said, This is great.
Can I be involved?
He said, No, its at Orion.
But obviously, they ended up doing it, and they invited me to a screening of the movie.
I knew it was going to be a good, but he did a great job.
I said, James, just.
Next time, c’mon come to me with whatever I just want to work with you.
He had a one-picture deal with Orion he wasnt attached for sequels or whatever.
When James divorced, his ex-wife, Gale Anne Hurd, still owned half of the rights.
Then you had Arnold and James it was complicated.
They called me and said, Mario, can you try and put it together.
I wanted to do it so badly, even though it was a challenge.
Her agent in those days was Lou Pitt, who was also Arnolds agent.
Already the rights were $15 million or something like that, I dont remember the exact number.
She wanted a certain amount.
Then James came back with the effects hed done a 20-minute reel before hed made the movie.
He could show me the effects before he started shooting.
How the guy comes up from the floor, the finger goes through the eye.
We wrote out, effectively, a treatment which became the script.
The term Jim likes to use is a scriptment.
We spent a couple of weeks doing that, and that was the whole movie, really.
One of those filmmakers was Stephanie Austin, who was then a producer in Carolcos television arm.
Hed seen it, and he was impressed by it, and asked if he could meet me.
I thought, Why does a guy like Jim Cameron want to meet me?
I mean, Id been producing this little TV thing!
As you know, that turned out to be a ridiculous concept!
MARIO KASSAR:Its like your brains divided in two.
As they say, a success has many fathers.
But when a movie doesnt work, everybody disappears.
Youre competing with other studios products for those dates, and youve made certain commitments.
Those are monetary commitments as well.
The pressure was tremendous, literally from the first day.
It has to be a good movie, too.
Then we said, okay, now we need a villain.
Hed be a shape-shifter.
Thats just one example.
And theyd always say, yeah, we can do that!
Then they probably went into a minor panic, but they delivered on everything.
They never came back to us and said they couldnt do something.
Thats what was successful.
And it took us a long time to do we spent months and months on that show.
I think it was 52 shots or something like that.
So its not like I went into it blindly.
I think we were using every mainframe in northern California when we were doing the film!
The robotic arm, the heads.
It probably wouldve been impossible to do.
Everybodys working on the cutting edge.
Thats what sort of knocked people out about it.
But its not like there was a backup if the CG failed.
There really wasnt for that.
He was taking a huge chance, we were taking a huge chance.
As production geared up, composer Brad Fiedel began work on T2s score.
I was really able to develop the full library, at that point, of sounds.
So I was cutting edge with the music technology the same way Jim was with the CGI technology.
It seemed to blend well.
So we made that decision, and I think it served the film well.
Then, one day, a relatively unknown actor went in for an audition.
ROBERT PATRICK:I was a complete unknown.
My agents told me that they were looking for someone who could create an intense presence.
Theyre not going to let me read the script.
But the whole auditioning thing was new to me as well, at the time.
I had only been in Hollywood for a short time; Id done a bunch of Roger Corman movies.
Id done a couple of plays.
I was doing a play when I got this audition.
So I was good on my feet and ready to ad-lib, improv, come up with some stuff.
It was one of those situations where I was the right guy at the right time.
Essentially what you see in the film is what I created in the audition.
They had previously cast Billy Idol.
He got injured, and I had been described as a cross between David Bowie and James Dean.
And that was a physical thing that Jim was looking for.
It was really the way I looked that got their interest.
I was a stunt guy.
I had a certain athleticism that lent itself for the role.
It was just one of those feelings that you have.
DENNIS MUREN:Robert was good.
He came up here thats actually behind ILM in Orange County.
It was then that we started to realise how incredibly difficult it is to do a person.
I dont think any of us quite knew that before how one person is different from another.
Its based on their weight and inertia all sorts of things.
Robert was great, too.
He said, verify none of these photos get out, because itll be very embarrassing!
That may have been close to the beginning of what we were doing.
Then for the next two or three weeks we got a lot of work.
We got the kitchen scene in the kids house we did that right at the beginning.
For Cameron, a renowned perfectionist, the frustrations were difficult to hide.
During production, Camerons outbursts Damn it!
Thats exactly what I didnt want!
STEPHANIE AUSTIN:Throughout the production, we tried to do things… We came up with lots and lots of crazy t-shirts yes, many of them with sayings of Jims.
It was that kind of atmosphere.
ROBERT PATRICK:It was high stakes.
It was a daunting thing.
I had to battle my own insecurities.
I had to stay committed to what I was going to do the performance, the physicality.
I worked my ass off, I trained four months before, getting into shake with Uzi Gal.
We developed on all these themes weve discussed.
It was like acting under a microscope.
There were a lot of frustrating things: marks I had to hit.
I had to keep my eyes here [points straight ahead].
I cant find the fuckin mark because I cant look at the fuckin mark!
I know but you gotta hit the mark!
It was that kind of thing.
Keeping myself under control.
These are the things I remember!
It was hard but very rewarding.
Jim is an intense man, who knows what he wants and hes gonna get it from you.
I just approached it from a military point of view.
There was no debate it was, Figure out how to fuckin do this.
And you do it.
And its gotta be interesting.
I was scared at a certain point.
In my head I was saying, God, am I doing enough?
There was also a part of me that was worried I was gonna get fired!
He had developed some ideas about how he would behave as the T-1000, with those darting eyes.
He really came in with the whole character.
So it wasnt just his physicality it was his technique.
He was almost like a snake or something.
You know, I can put a blade in him.
You know what Im saying?
Thats how it came about.
It wasnt that theres only one thing I want.
I want that fucking kid.
And how was I gonna get him?
How do we physically manifest that, and make people understand that thats all he wants.
Everythings focused on that every layer of the character.
Theres no distraction, no white noise with this guy.
Thats the theme you go with.
So every time he takes a hit, hes right back to the core.
That was the fun part about it.
All of that came rather quickly.
We were gonna just break that and make him a good guy.
Intuitively, we thought it was a great idea, but we wondered whether everyone would hate us!
So we committed to it; we said, yeah, people will like this.
The production of Terminator 2 went right down to the wire.
Turning inside out in the molten steel.
It was a nightmare, that one.
On no film can you predict exactly where you gonna need to change your original concept.
DENNIS MUREN:The original CG look for the chrome guy looked terrible.
Jim said he wanted him to look absolutely perfect clean and everything, and flexible and changing shape.
And I just thought, no, you dont want that, because its not going to look real.
You never see that in real life its going to look like an effect.
Thats what anchors it into the shot.
It was very, very difficult, and very tense.
I guess its worth it.
[Laughs] As if he had nothing to do with anything!
It was pretty funny.
It sounded like craziness.
Youre a Bedlam of instruments.
Thats what the sample sounded like.
And then I took it down into a speed and a pitch that was not recognisable.
Like, artificial intelligent monks chanting in a weird chapel or something.
Rarely can you do that.
Jim hears something and he likes it or he doesnt like it.
STEPHANIE AUSTIN:We were rendering these effects up until maybe two days before.
Wed get up in the wee hours to see another timing.
But it was family and friends it was people who worked at the ranch.
It gave us a good indication.
Ive rarely been in a room where there was that much enthusiasm.
People were stamping their feet and clapping for ten or 15 minutes.
MARIO KASSAR:People were flabbergasted by the whole movie.
Everything fit together so perfectly the effects werent just spaceships flying around and laser beams.
They were what I call organic special effects, and they were amazingly good.
After that, a lot of special effects started copying [Terminator 2].
ROBERT PATRICK:Look, it blows my mind that people still recognise me from the movie.
It blows my mind, the impact its had on people.
But Ive had police officers that look like me that are proud of that fact!
I dont deserve it, you know what I mean?
Its too much for me to even comprehend.
The actors are trying it, the directors are trying it, the camera guys trying to do it.
Sarahs this emotionally compromised character.
Which is the thing he wants the most in the world!
The look on his face is just, Oh my God!
I thought that was a hug!
Im never gonna get one from you!
And then people care.
At heart, its a dramatic film.
T2 is not an action film in my mind even though theres plenty of action in it.
