I'll be the last person to invest in any upheaval between filmmakers as much as those keen on what sci-fi auteur James Cameron has to say this week pertaining to Wonder Woman - except that I absolutely had fun seeing it this summer and I'm looking forward to the sequel. For this, we turn to more pertinent news regarding the current progress he's now making with director Tim Miller on the future of the forthcoming Terminator trilogy finale.
Cameron is currently at the helm for a slate of Avatar sequels through 2025 but is also assisting Miller for the ambitious new Terminator trilogy starring actor Arnold Schwarzenegger whose title portrayal of the time-traveling cyborg killing machine from the future made him a household name between 1984 and 1991 with The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. He'll be joined once again by actress Linda Hamilton who will reprise her role as Sarah Connor as seen in battle ready succession in the 1991 sequel with a story that will pass the torch unto a new heroine, upon news reported last Wednesday.
Upon revealing a July 26, 2019 release date, Cameron and Miller took to The Hollywood Reporter to share their insight on the reboot, why they chose this project over others, a few of its developing properties, and much, much more:
CAMERON: "There's a pride of authorship in anything that you do, and when David and I started talking about this, it made sense for me to see if there was a way to bring it into this century and to relevance. I look at what's happening now with the emergence of artificial general intelligence equal to or greater than humans', and you've got Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking and others saying that this could be really bad for the survival of the human race. What was science fiction in the '80s is now imminent. It's coming over the horizon at us. And there's been a resurgence of fear and concern about nuclear weapons and so on. So all of these apocalyptic elements are out there. The first two Terminator films that I did dealt with the angst around that and how we reconcile it for ourselves in a fantasy context. So I got excited about the idea of finding a story that made sense for now."
On the approach:
CAMERON: "This is a continuation of the story from Terminator 1 and Terminator 2. And we're pretending the other films were a bad dream. Or an alternate timeline, which is permissible in our multi-verse. This was really driven more by [Tim] than anybody, surprisingly, because I came in pretty agnostic about where we took it. The only thing I insisted on was that we somehow revamp it and reinvent it for the 21st century."
MILLER: "The [first] films are more relevant today than they were when he made them. A lot of it seems like prognostication because it's coming to be — the world we live in right now."
On casting Hamilton:
CAMERON "...Linda and I have a great relationship. We've stayed friends through the thick and thin of it all. And she is the mother of my eldest daughter. [They were married from 1997 to 1999.] So I called her up, and I said: "Look, we could rest on our laurels. It's ours to lose, in a sense. We created this thing several decades ago. But, here's what can be really cool. You can come back and show everybody how it's done." Because in my mind, it hasn't been done a whole lot since the way she did it back in '91."
MILLER: "As strong a character as she was, as meaningful as she was to gender and to action stars everywhere, I think it's going to make a huge fucking statement to have her be the really seasoned warrior that she's become."
The new reboot hails from Skydance and Paramount, the latter who will distribute with Fox representing the film internationally. Cameron, who is producing, has a writers' room with Miller in which also included are David Goyer (Blade trilogy, Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy), Charles Eglee (TV series Dark Angel) and Josh Friedman (TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles).
Read more at The Hollywood Reporter
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