Culture news “It’s America, I just have to buy some!” James Cameron almost had a big problem while filming Terminator because he didn't know anything about guns
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Whatever film directed by James Cameron, there is always a large list of anecdotes, and Terminator, the director's first feature film to enjoy immense worldwide success, is no exception to the rule. To achieve such success, James Cameron had to overcome some difficulties and there is one that could have posed a problem: guns. However, there was something very simple that allowed him to resolve the situation.
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Terminator, a film full of anecdotes
In more than forty years of career, James Cameron has not necessarily been the most prolific director. Conversely, he preferred to take care of all of his creations to impose his feature films in the great history of cinema. As a result, the Canadian filmmaker managed to put his mark on the box office, film after film. It was in 1984 that it experienced its first great success with the release of the film Terminator, one of the greatest sagas of science fiction. Without knowing it, at that time, James Cameron had already sounded the alarm, particularly on the subject of artificial intelligence.
Beyond bringing themes that echo current technological developments, the Terminator film quickly constituted a great challenge for the director, on several scales. The first was to offer an easily identifiable and striking face, a step successfully taken up by James Cameron since we cannot help but associate the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger with the emblematic T-800, and all it only comes down to an unexpected meeting between the two men. After removing a thorn in his side by finding the ideal casting, James Cameron ran into another problem: guns, a subject that became another source of anecdotes about the filming of Terminator.
A filming in the United States which made the task easier for James Cameron
Looking back, James Cameron explained, during a masterclass as part of the inauguration of the exhibition “The Art of James Cameron” at the Cinémathèque, that he had an ambiguous relationship with the film Terminator. On the one hand, the Canadian director admits to being rather proud of this feature film since it is the only time where production deadlines were respected, in particular because James Cameron had properly prepared the ground for this filming . The only downside, initially, was the subject of firearms. Relatively inexperienced at the time, James Cameron, of Canadian origin, admitted that he did not know much about it.
In Terminator, it's obviously about technology, but also about action, explosions and guns. What saved the day for James Cameron on this point was the fact of having filmed in the United States, and more precisely in Los Angeles in 1984, when it was planned to begin a few months earlier, in 1983, on the Toronto side. James Cameron said it himself: “I knew nothing about weapons”, but he quickly understood, because of this relocation, that “it's America, I just have to go buy them”. However, as we said, if this situation made his task easier, James Cameron regrets having in some way “fetishized” these same firearms. Looking back, considering the events that can sometimes unfold, the director feels that it “turns his stomach” and does not know if he could make this film again the way he did.