Before Avatar became a box office monster, James Cameron‘s most successful franchise was The Terminator, born from a 1984’s movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular robot and Linda Hamilton as the killer’s primary target, Sarah Connor. Almost four decades later, Sarah has become a symbol of feminine strength, but as Cameron explains in an interview for GQ, the character changed significantly over the years, mainly due to Hamilton’s commitment to the part.
Remembering the development of the first Terminator movie, Cameron underlined how he chose Hamilton for the part of Sarah Connor because she seemed talented enough to play both sides of the character. In the first movie, Sarah is just your regular everyday girl, but she soon has to gather the strength to fight Schwarzenegger’s bulky assassin. As Cameron remembers:
“With Linda, I felt strongly from her audition work that she could do both poles of the character. She could do the kind of, you know, ‘valley girl, just going about her life’ kind of character, but make her interesting. Because she had to be interesting. She had to not be somebody you would just dismiss. And then she had to have the strength and the courage for the final scenes. Very fortunately, she had that in spades in a way that was never really realized in the first film.”
As Cameron reflects on the Terminator franchise, the filmmaker admits that Sarah could only become such a warrior for the sequel thanks to Hamilton’s dedication. As Cameron puts it:
“We didn’t really see it until Linda trained and prepared herself for the second film. And then a whole new version of Sarah Connor emerged. And that’s, I think, when she became a kind of feminist icon. She really flourished in the role. And you saw a whole another level, not only of her as an actor but of Sarah as a character, as a planner, as somebody who’s incredibly disciplined and focused, physically strong.”
Hamilton surely became an action star after Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and that’s also due to her physical training. At first, Cameron says it was easy for Hamilton to put on the muscle needed to play a survivor. In his words, “I always joke that Linda could just walk by a stake of weights and she’d gain muscle. Even when she trained lightly, she’d get quite buffed.” However, the director admits Hamilton worked hard to transform Sarah into the legend that she now is. As Cameron says, “she trained really seriously for, I wanna say about five hours a day. Weights and movement, and weapons training, and all that sort of thing.”
How Arnold Schwarzenegger Helped Shape The Terminator
Hamilton was not the only actor who helped to shape The Terminator. Schwarzenegger also changed the director’s initial idea for the killer robot. At first, Schwarzenegger auditioned to play Kyle Reese, a part that ultimately went to Michael Biehn. However, Schwarzenegger was so excited about the project that Cameron quickly began to imagine him as the Terminator himself. As Cameron tells it:
“I couldn’t get over how unique [Schwarzenegger’s] face was, how it almost just projected this kind of raw power. And my conception of the character had been that he was more of an infiltrator. But then my perspective shifted and I would say that it kind of pivoted on a dime. All right, if I cast this guy, how are they not all going to see him coming? How does he not stand out in a crowd? How do they not all look at him? And I thought, ‘you know what, don’t worry about it because he would make an amazing terminator.’ Because I just saw him as like this kind of bulldozer, this kind of armored tank. And he could just move through a crowd. If anybody was in his way, he’d just push them out of the way and you’d just accept it. It didn’t even have anything to do with the guns, it was just that kind of raw strength, a kind of a machine strength.”
Cameron’s next movie, Avatar: The Way of Water, will be released in theaters on December 16, 2022. Check out the filmmaker’s full GQ interview below.
