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Terminator Salvation is the sequel fans have been waiting for since Terminator 2. Finally set entirely in the future, it shows the war against the machines with John Connor fulfilling his leadership destiny. McG made a lot of efforts to tell the story the fans wanted to see, and he’s happy to share his ideas with them as well.
Crave Online: You only got permission to use Arnold’s likeness about a month ago. If you'd gotten it sooner could that scene have gone on?
McG: I didn’t want the scene to go on. I just wanted it to be a tip of the cap. There are a great many elements in the film that are designed to be respectful of the passionate fan and that being the number one moment.
Crave Online: Did you make a list of touchstones you wanted to hit?
McG: Absolutely. You want to do that in such a way that you want to being respectful of earlier pictures but not just cribbing entirely from them so you’re just saying, “Let’s just reboot this one.” It’s a delicate rhyme. How much does it take of Sarah Connor talking to her son John in regard to what to do in the war against the machines? The GnR scene, that’s from the Aquaduct sequence so it makes sense that he would have an old cassette tape that would have You Could Be Mine on it. And little things like that right down to where Kyle Reese gets the holster for his shotgun. You see Marcus teaching him, “Grab it. Magic.” Then you see him do that right in the first Terminator, down to the Nike Weapons and those are the shoes he likes because he feels he can survive is a little more likely wearing them. So we want to do things like that all the way through, to the obvious of “I’ll be back.” And “Come with me if you want to live.” It’s finding balance
Crave Online: How did you come up with the different color palette for the future?
McG: I talked to a bunch of futurists at MIT and Cal Tech regarding what would happen if the world blew up. What happens to the ozone layer? What happens to the patina of the Earth? We studied Chernobyl and the whole idea of life after people. What we did is we ended up using some dead stock from Kodak. We left it in the sun too long to damage it so it lost some of its nuance and characteristics. We used old lenses, the primo, not the primo but the ultra-speed lenses from Panavision which are more likely to flare and they bulk-up in the blacks and that range of the spectrum a little bit. And then we bathed the film in more silver than one would traditionally do it, and then in the digital intermediate we took that idea even further. So every step of the way we were trying to make moves to create a look, and it doesn't assault you but it just makes you cock your head a little bit to one side and say, “What's off about this world?'” Of course what's off about the world, the suggestion is it blew up and there was a global nuclear holocaust that changed the way things smell and look and touch and taste.
Crave Online: You set up for a sequel and there’s already talk. What are your plans at this point?
McG: Well listen, we've always talked about it but we’d never be so bold as to say that there’ll be a sequel. It’s up to the audience to speak to the notion of there being a sequel, but we've arced out a story that we've been exploring for another picture and a picture after that. But like I said, a lot of people go and make movies and think, “Oh, the sequel, this, that, the other,” and then the audience doesn't respond and they're left with nothing. So if people jump up and down and say we want more of that story, what became of Connor, what's happening in the world of Skynet, what's going on with the elements that were left undone, then we’ll discuss making another picture.
Crave Online: How did you handle continuing the paradoxical story without creating any new ones?
McG: Yes, we went round and round on this whole thing. I think put most simply, what we all felt comfortable doing was just honoring the triangle of the mythology that we most fundamentally understand. John Connor has to send Kyle Reese back in time to save and protect Sarah Connor, and ultimately impregnate her to give birth to John Connor to save us all. Which is a mouthful and it's very difficult, but is that not indeed the core understanding of what Jim did a long time ago and people seem to respond to it. So it’s always going to be tricky and if you’ll notice we stay away from time travel in this picture. Because if you handle it indelicately it becomes an Austin Power’s picture of, 'Whoops, let’s go back five minutes further and just change the result.' But the idea was the first three pictures are contemporary pictures with terminators coming back in time and our film takes place during that dark age that was never thoroughly explored between Judgment Day and indeed 2029, which is the first known point of the T-800 coming back. Here we see how Skynet, through farming human beings, is building towards that realistic-looking T-800 just like we went through a lot of lab rats to get to a polio vaccine.
Crave Online: Did you really say that your penis is bigger than Michael Bay’s?
McG: Well the funny thing is, is I have an Irish curse and I think we’re all familiar with exactly what that means. What's really unfortunate about that is somebody says, “Whose robots are bigger?” To which I thought, “That is a ridiculous question.” And I thought it would be made clear, I'm being very forthcoming with saying, “Oh why don't we meet at the Spartacus Steps at midnight,” and I was trying to channel my inner Ricky Gervais to try to get the irony out there. Of course that was lost immediately and people sort of gravitated to two spoiled brat directors thinking they have big c*cks. Nothing can be further from the truth and therefore I’ll be silent for the balance of this meeting.
