We Are Movie Geeks

The Terminator is back! In case you’ve been living under a rock, TERMINATOR: GENISYS opened in theaters this weekend. Last week, WAMG had the chance to sit down with franchise star, and former Governor of California Arnold Schwarzeneggger about being “back”, time travel, and his positivity for the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. Joining him were stars Emilia Clarke (Sarah Connor), Jai Courtney (Kyle Reese), Alan Taylor (Director), David Ellison (Producer), Dana Goldberg (Producer), Laeta Kalogridis (Writer), and Patrick Lussier (Writer). Check out some of the highlights from the press conference below.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, one of the great things about this movie is how we get to see different versions of your character. How has your approach to the character changed over all these years, especially since in the first one it started off kind of like a sci-fi horror movie?

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Well, in Terminator 1, it was very clear that they are just a machine that destroys human beings, and anything that was in the way, you know, I will wipe out, in the most brutal way without, you know, any feelings or any kind of remorse, because my mission was to protect the machines, and to find Sarah Connor and to basically be successful with my mission. In this movie, it becomes a little bit more colorful, because now I am again back to destroy Sarah Connor, I’m still this vicious cold machine that is programmed to destroy Sarah Connor and nothing will get in my way, except in this story something does get in my way, which is another Terminator, one that has been around for a longer period of time. It’s also the T-800 model but he was programmed to protect Sarah Connor and the human race, so there’s obviously a major conflict between the two when they meet, and that’s what creates then this huge epic battle. And then of course the Terminators, depending on how long they have been around, some of them are just straight Terminator, as the one from 1984, but then the one that has been around longer, he has already adopted certain human behaviors, subtle. And so from a acting point of view, you have to be really be, you know, very wise the way you use that, and how you, you know, get that across, that he has human behaviors and he does have certain feelings and stuff like that, but also creates great comic relief when the Terminator tries very hard to be like a human and he fails miserably. You know, so you see also that in the movie.

 

This is for Emilia and Jai. How helpful was Mr. Schwarzenegger with the weaponry and stunt work involved with the movie?

EMILIA CLARKE: He was very helpful. I definitely needed like a lot of help. So yeah, yeah, he was very helpful. I know that I spent most of my training just hoping that he would be, uh, impressed. Getting a good response from him was kind of yeah, the most helpful thing, to give me the confidence to continue on.

JAI COURTNEY: He’s the only man I’ve ever come across who can fire six rounds, six shotgun shells off without blinking. [LAUGHTER] It’s really hard to achieve.

I have two questions, and one for Arnold. If you could really go back in time to 1984, what would you like to relive over and over again, and what would you like to change before it happens?

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Well, I don’t know if I would be that interested in 1984. I think that if I have a chance to go back, [Yeah.] why not just go back all the way in history, you know, to the times of the pyramids, or to the Roman days? I think there are so many great historic times until now, that I would like to get a little peek of those periods, rather than just 1984. Why limit yourself? If I have the chance to time travel, might as well go all out. [LAUGHTER] What’s your second question?

Is there anything in your past that you would like to change before it happens?

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: I’m perfectly fine with my life. I’m very happy. [LAUGHTER] I want to keep it that way.

Sort of playing off of an earlier question for Emilia and Jai, doing the stunt work, naked, was that a little more freeing and did Governor Schwarzenegger show you the perfect way to pose when you land?

JAI COURTNEY: Freeing, yeah, no, that’s the word. It’s totally liberating doing stunts naked.

EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Naked in a harness was fun, doing stunts, that was good. That was interesting.

JAI COURTNEY: I don’t know, Arnold, did we get into naked talk? We can now.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: I think they’re fun, because they’re embarrassing, they’re fun, and it leads to funny conversations and funny dialogue and great humor and everything like that, so you know, it’s inevitable. You have to do it because that’s what the movie shows, and there’s at certain times you can cover things up and there’s certain times you don’t and you can’t, and so what? You know, I don’t think there’s anyone here that anything to hide.

JAI COURTNEY: Didn’t have a choice.

EMILIA CLARKE: Had a couple – had a few things I tried to hide.

ALAN TAYLOR: You have to shoot it carefully. We had a wonderful AD named Phil Patterson who would always get half naked whenever there was a nude scene.

ALAN TAYLOR: He was very supportive.

ALAN TAYLOR: Yeah, so Emilia was wandering around looking beautiful and then there was Phil, not looking quite so beautiful, but a team player.

EMILIA CLARKE: Solidarity.

ALAN TAYLOR: Yeah.

To the Governor, I wanted to ask you, first of all, what was it like when you saw yourself fighting yourself, your younger self, on screen? And secondly, do you have any comment on the Supreme Court ruling today on gay marriage?

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Well, first of all, I think that the body builder that they picked for me to fight with was really an extraordinary kind of a champion body builder. He had terrific muscles and so that was a great idea to use that approach. But even after three, four days of doing this fight scene and being thrown around and doing all the crazy stunts and this epic battle, I was always wondering while I was doing, you know, how are they going to do this face replacement, how are going to do this technologically, kind of you know, head replacement, and how do you make the body exactly like my body? You see, because his body was extraordinary but it was not exactly like my body was, right? Everybody’s different. So, you know, always in my mind was that. I mean, how’s this going to work out? And so I really never knew the entire movie. There was various different fight scenes, with John Connor, with others, that were just huge battle scenes, but I mean, it was kind of not clear how this is going to work with the visual effects. And then when we saw it just through weeks ago, the finished movie for the first time, because I made it very clear, I don’t want to see it when just going through stages. I want to see it when it’s finished so we can really see how it works. And so I looked very carefully at the technical aspect, when I watched it the first time. And then after that, I watched it a few more times, just, you know, from another point of view, of how does the story work. But I looked at the technical stuff and I just thought it was seamless, and the technology has advanced so much, that it was really extraordinary to get this kind of entertainment and storytelling, that you can do that today, because in the old days you had to do kind of, you know, split screens and all kinds of things, and you could tell that it was not the same, you know, it was not like two Arnolds fighting, two Terminators fighting, they’re different ages and stuff like that. But in this movie, it totally worked. And so I was really impressed. And I thought it was smart that from a scheduling point of view, they did that scene pretty much on the beginning of the movie, because I did not realize that it would take one year – and maybe the producers, you guys, can answer how many people worked on that scene for one year, from the time we shot it, all the way to the end, because it barely got finished on time.

DAVID ELLISON: Yeah, it was hundreds of visual effects artists, and the entire team at MPC, and you know, our hats are really off to our visual effects supervisor, Yanik Serge and Shari Hanson. Creating a walking, living, breathing synthesbian has always been a holy grail to achieve in visual effects and we absolutely think they’ve achieved it for the first time in this movie. And to give anybody an idea of how down to the wire it was, we had to finish the movie at midnight in color correction to deliver the film on time. And we got the last two shots at 11:30 and finished at 12:03 a.m.

Wow.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: So I mean, that is really amazing when you think about that – one year, you know, that many people working on it, but you know, with the technology that is available now, the CGI and all this, it can be done, and now you have the money for it, obviously, and you have the time, and really pace yourself, and do the prepping in such a way that you start early enough with the scene, so that you do have the time so you can finished the scenes. So that was the extraordinary thing. And when it comes to the Supreme Court, I’m very happy that they made the right decisions on that, because we in California, of course, we’re always a step ahead. We made the decision already a long time ago. Our Supreme Court of California that is unconstitutional to deny people that are gay, or same sex couples, the marriage, everyone has equal rights, so this is the right way to go, and I think it’s a great celebration for America. So sometimes I have to say that the judges, and our judiciary system, makes better decisions than the politicians. Sadly, that they are not really having the balls sometimes to lead, and work together on those issues. [APPLAUSE]

Emilia? I thought you were such a lovely choice as Sarah Connor.

EMILIA CLARKE: Thank you.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Hallelujah.

Were you intimidated to step into Linda Hamilton’s shoes? How aware were you of her performance going into this? And did your work on Game of Thrones help you in any way with this role?

EMILIA CLARKE: Yes to all of your questions. Yes, I’d grown up watching the Terminators and being continually inspired, especially by Linda’s incredible performance. So I jumped at the chance to be able to take on this role. And then it was kind of after that fact, the daunting realization of the enormity of the part, kind of sunk in. But yes, it’s just been an absolute joy as an actress to be able to take this on. And yeah, there are many elements of my work in Game of Thrones that were incredibly helpful to try and kind of harness the like inner badass. But the difference between the two is that in Game of Thrones I do a lot of delegating, and then here in this movie I really had to get down and dirty and like do a lot of the stunts and the gun work and everything, so yeah, its similarities, but Sarah Connor is a whole other kind of badass.

Hi, my question’s for Arnold Schwarzenegger. I have two questions. Is your character T-800 aged in this film, it’s very interesting point of view. What’s your thought about age? And the other question is: your character is a machine, but how about yourself, the relationship with machines, technologies?

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Well, first of all, I thought that, again, the writers came up with really a great way of – an organic way to show the aging of Terminator, because Terminator cannot go into the time travel at a certain point because his hand is exposed, you know, the flesh is gone, the metal is exposed and therefore you cannot time travel, whereas the others can. So all the other characters time travel and within seconds they’re there in the future, and I have to go the old fashioned way, I have to go the slow way. So I age, of course, you know, decades, as time goes on, from 1984 to 2017, you know, my hair turns gray and I age and stuff like that, and so this was a wonderful way of explaining, you know, how the Terminator ages, how the flesh ages, the human, flesh, but the skeleton underneath is still the same, functions the same, is the same size and everything like this. As a matter of fact, Alan asked me to gain 10 pounds in order to have the same size as the skeleton always had in 1984, so I gained that weight, trained twice as hard, trained heavier and stuff, really, to get more muscle size and so on, to keep that same frame and wear the same kind of size clothing and all this stuff. But other than that, I aged. So I thought that that concept and the way it was written was really terrific because this way we don’t pretend that I am kind of the weightlifter 40 year old guy, but I am what I am, which is I have aged. And so that worked really well. I myself don’t feel any older, you know, so I think because I’ve stayed in shape and I exercise every day. So when I started the movie, you know, I did the prepping two months before, I worked with the stunt coordinators, I worked with the director, and with the special effects people and with everybody, and we exercised and trained for it, so that we could do the movie and do all the stunts that were necessarily and then whenever there were stunts that were dangerous, then the stunt people took over, and then did the stunts, you know, for me. So that’s the way it worked and I was delighted to be able to do the movie without getting exhausted or feeling old or tired or anything like this. I felt I was in great shape and I felt really young.

What about your thoughts on technology...

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: I embrace technology, and I just think that in 1984 when James Cameron wrote about the technology, everyone thought it was totally way out there and it was science fiction. But now, you know, we have now become – we got to the time where it is almost reality, of what he talked about. I mean, it’s like the machines have taken over, except they have not become self-aware, like in The Terminator, so this is really one thing that we have to watch out for. But I think technology’s good, it can be abused as everything else, but I think it is good and I hope that we will continue getting smarter and getting more interesting intelligence and, you know, that we are going in the direction of artificial intelligence or hybrid intelligence, where a part of our brain would get from the Cloud the information, and the other half is from you, so all of this stuff will happen in the future.

Not self-aware yet.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Exactly.

This one’s for the writers. How did you guys find the balance of quoting – some of the quotes – you know, the iconic quotes from the first movie and intersecting scenes, versus also pushing forward and sort of creating a new narrative here?

PATRICK LUSSIER: I think it was a combination. You know, when we started the process, the first scene that we came up with was actually the scene where Arnold fights Arnold, and everything sort of branched out from that, forward and back. We knew we wanted these core group of characters. We wanted Sarah Connor, we wanted Kyle Reese, we wanted John Connor, and how they were going to build. We wanted to, you know, the moment that you’ve seen in the trailer is the “I’ll be back” moment. We knew we wanted that but we knew we didn’t want it early in the film. You know, if we were going to use it, we had to earn it, and make it so that it had a real significance and an emotional significance. So everything was, you know, a massive love letter to what James Cameron created, and so out of that was just trying to find the balance of where to slide it in. A lot of it was you felt it, you just felt your way through it. And whenever we sort of fell wrong, the actors and the producers and everybody would lean up, and you know, we made a point of not overdoing it.

Hi, this is for Emilia. Just continue on, I mean, the legacy of Sarah Connor is so huge. What was really important to you though in bringing that character to life and your take, and also did Lena offer you any advice?

EMILIA CLARKE: Well, I think some of the most important things to me in reprising this role is that it was such a daunting thing to be taking on. My kind of, yeah, ego probably jumped at the chance to play it, and then the realization kind of crept in. But then getting to read our gorgeous script, the Sarah that we see in this movie is so different. The spirit is definitely still intact and I really hope that that scene, that you can see the essence of what Linda Hamilton created with Sarah Connor is there, but having such a different upbringing, having such a different childhood, really, the result is a girl who is ahead of the game from when we saw Sarah Connor at this age last. She’s there to save this guy, as opposed to the other way around, so there’s a lot of kind of really wonderful differences, and so that’s what was important to me, to kind of show the history of what Sarah’s been though, whilst maintaining the spirit of what we kind of created. No, sadly, I didn’t – I didn’t speak to her, but I can only hope that she was happy with what I managed to make of this.

For Governor Schwarzenegger, can you take us back to the moment when you first became involved in the Terminator franchise, that you’d established yourself with Conan, and this was the thing that really made you a true international superstar. Can you talk about your feelings, before anybody knew what Terminator was, what you were thinking coming into the role and what it’s come to mean to you over the years?

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Yeah, I was approached to play Kyle Reese, by Mike Medavoy. He said, we have this great project with Hamdell and Orion, and it’s a, you know, kind of an action flick, it’s you know, kind of low budget. James Cameron, you probably have not heard of him but he has done one movie before, some little movie, so this is his second movie, and you know, as far as we are concerned that O.J. Simpson is going to play Terminator. And so this was kind of the dialogue. And I said, wow, that’s great. I said, let me get the script. And I got the script, I read it, and it was a really great script. And then I met James Cameron, and during the lunch period with him and with John Daly, you know, I started talking more and more about Terminator and how he has to train and how he has to prepare for this part, and how he has to act like a machine and how he has to deassemble, and put together guns blindfolded and how he has to practice shooting, and you shouldn’t blink, you know, and on and on and on. So the whole lunch went like that. And then in the end James Cameron said, “So why are you wanting to play Reese? You should be the Terminator.” And I said, “No, no, no.” I said, “Look, the Terminator only has 27 lines. [LAUGHER] I don’t want to go backwards with my career here, you know. I like Kyle Reese, and he really says a lot and he’s the hero, you know, and I just started out being kind of like the leading man and being the hero in the Conan movie, so I want to continue on like that.” And he says, “No, but the most memorable character really will be the Terminator. The way I shoot it is this way, and this way,” and he was explaining it, explaining the whole thing. And he says, “You should be the Terminator, and I will make sure that you don’t have to think about, you know, the villain’s aspect, because it’s a machine, so everyone is going to think that he’s a hero anyway because he’s going to do cool things.” And so you know, he talked me into it basically, so I said, “All right, forget about Kyle Reese. I’m going to be the Terminator.” And so that’s how that happened. And so it was, yeah, a small project, with [PH] Andel Hurt being the producer, and we went out and shot it kind of six weeks, seven weeks, and really the cheap way, and Stan Winston was helping us, you know, with the special effects and visual effects and all this, and it ended up, you know, what was supposed to be kind of a little B movie ended up one of the 10 top movies for Time Magazine, and you know, I was called the ultimate villain and then at the same time the ultimate hero. So all this great stuff started happening which no one of us knew would happen. So this was all kind of like exploding. And then there was a demand for a second one, and then we did the second one and that became the highest grossing movie of the year, in 1991, I think it was, or 1992, I’ve forgotten now. But I mean, in any case, so that was really the launch of this franchise and it became bigger, bigger, and bigger.

Hi. Yeah, for Emilia and for Alan, this is a bit of a reunion for the both of you, after working on Game of Thrones, and I’m curious, how did your relationship there sort of inform working on this movie, which as Emilia noted, is a very different role for you.

EMILIA CLARKE: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. Do you know?

ALAN TAYLOR: Let’s talk it over and get back.

EMILIA CLARKE: …exactly, exactly.

ALAN TAYLOR: I went through a kind of a learning curve on this, ‘cause I think going into it I thought it would be an easy transition, it would be sort of a seamless transition. She was this powerful warrior goddess who we knew could accomplish anything.

EMILIA CLARKE: Be fireproof.

ALAN TAYLOR: Be fireproof, be naked.

EMILIA CLARKE: This or that.

ALAN TAYLOR: And it wasn’t until we started doing the work and started, you know, delving into this very specific script that I started to realize just how different the demands were on her, and you really can’t underestimate the transformation she had to go through. You know, one way to put it is that she used to delegate and in this one she’s in the trenches, you know, holding the gun herself. But also the physical training, the guns training, the accent that she had to achieve, it really was a complete makeover. The great thing was that I think we started it with that familiarity that you only get from, you know, standing around in the mud in Croatia for a few weeks.

EMILIA CLARKE: Yes, exactly. Exactly. We already knew how to get on each other’s nerves, so we got ahead of the game there, which was great. That was really good.

ALAN TAYLOR: Yeah. It took a while for her to irritate everybody else, but I came in with a kind of chip on my shoulder right off the bat.

EMILIA CLARKE: In summation, it was brilliant.

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