It has been a continuing refrain of the Terminator franchise since the days of Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines that the excited filmmakers and studio types are looking to the future should the "first" movie be a success. That hasn't happened, but the failures to launch aren't daunting producer/writer James Cameron, who is expressing such hopes for the latest entry, Terminator: Dark Fate.
"We spent several weeks breaking story and figuring out what type of story we wanted to tell so we would have something to pitch Linda," Cameron tells Deadline. "We rolled up our sleeves and started to break out the story and when we got a handle on something we looked at it as a three-film arc, so there is a greater story there to be told. If we get fortunate enough to make some money with Dark Fate we know exactly where we can go with the subsequent films." That, of course, assumes that Dark Fate will connect with audiences properly.
The new movie does, however, have the dual advantage of wiping the story slate clean after the events of Terminator 2 and Cameron's involvement at a much more creative level than previous attempts to continue the franchise. For Dark Fate, he was part of the team that put the story and script together, convening the writers room that generated ideas for the movie and beyond, with Josh Friedman and Charles Eglee nabbing story credit and David Goyer, Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray on the script. And then Cameron took over again. "I focused on getting the script punched up. I didn’t feel like we went into the shoot with the script exactly where it should have been," he says. "There was a lot of momentum on the project, there was a start date, there was a lot of energy and a lot of "go fever," but the script wasn’t where it needed to be so I quietly worked on it in the background and shipping out pages. Sometimes I was shipping out pages the day before they shot a scene. I’m not sure that was 100% always helpful but overall I kept the characters on track and sounding right and being where they needed to be."
Cameron does say that he and his writers screened the other Terminator sequels to figure out what they didn't want to do: "One of the things that seemed obvious from looking at the films that came along later was that we would need to get everything back to the basics and that we would need to avoid the mistakes of making things overly complex and that we needed to avoid stories that jumps around in time and one that goes backward and forward in time. Let’s keep it simple in the relative unity of time. With the story, let’s have the whole thing play out in 36 hours or 48 hours. In the first two movies everything plays out in less than two days in each one so there’s energy and momentum."
Despite being the godfather of the franchise and making himself available in the early stages of the film, he preferred to be hands off (besides those rewrites) when it actually got shooting, not to mention that he was also busy on his raft of Avatar sequels. Deadpool's Tim Miller directed the movie, though Cameron still comments on its commitment to the R-rating. "Even going into the shooting we were like, 'OK let’s cover it both ways,'" Cameron concedes. "So we would have a scene where Sarah is completely unfiltered and with no mediation and then shoot it again where it was tamed down. But eventually we just said, 'To hell with this, it’s a waste of time.' I think the feeling was that everyone wanted to recapture the tone and the sensibility of the first two films, which I considered flattering."
For more from Cameron, head to Deadline. Terminator: Dark Fate will be out on 23 October in the UK. See the latest trailer here.