Original subtitles

SARAH CONNOR: The survivors of the nuclear fire

called the war "Judgment Day".

They lived only to face a new nightmare:

the war against the machines.

(STONE CRUNCHES)

(EXPLOSIVES WHISTLE)

(LASERS FIZZ)

In late 1989, James Cameron was troubled.

Writing into the night, running on coffee and ambition,

he was faced with a conundrum.

What would frighten a Terminator?

What would make the indomitable Arnold Schwarzenegger

quake in his leather boots?

How do you turn a cyborg assassin from the future

into the underdog?

(METALLIC SQUELCHING)

(GUN COCKS)

It took a while for the second film to be made.

There were a number of legal wrangles,

as well as James Cameron waiting

for the technology to catch up with his ambition.

His scale of ambition was huge,

and a lot of the things that he had in his head

simply couldn't be achieved.

So the time lapse - the waiting -

almost played into his hands

because, by the time he was able to make the film,

he was able to do the things that he wanted to do

because technology had caught up.

But that, of course, did result in then

it being on a far grander scale in every aspect, particularly budget,

and it was, at the time, the most expensive film ever made.

Cameron knew in his bones

he couldn't simply repeat the same routine.

The question was - how do you outdo James Cameron?

With Terminator 2: Judgment Day,

he brilliantly chose to invert the formula.

He made Schwarzenegger the good guy.

A new version of the monotone T-800 fresh off the production line

is sent back in time, like his predecessor.

Only this model has been reprogrammed

to protect the young boy who will one day save the future.

He is a machine hero,

the Tin Man with a heart.

Come with me, if you want to live.

It's OK, Mom. He's here to help. It's OK.

(ANXIOUS PANTING)

(APPROACHING FOOTSTEPS)

(THEME MUSIC)

ARNIE: I want to thank each and every one of you...

(WOMAN SCREAMS) ..for coming here today...

(WHOOPING) MAN: We love you!

..because the first Terminator was such a tremendous success

in the movies and video and cable and network

and all the different areas

because of great fans like you.

(CHEERING AND WOLF-WHISTLING)

But I also told you,

I'll be back.

(WHOOPING AND CHEERING)

The man...

The main man is back!

(WHOOPING AND CHEERING)

When it first came to crafting a sequel

to his smash-hit science-fiction slasher movie, The Terminator,

Cameron imagined a film more epic and dazzling in every way -

all the things he could only dream of doing

when he made The Terminator.

James Cameron wanted to create something

which was going to surprise audiences

and outdo the original.

And he was able to do so

with the help of a production company called Carolco,

who were very cash rich at that time.

They were an American independent,

but they had realised fairly early on

that they made most of their money from action flicks.

So, in 1982, they had a lot of success with First Blood

and then in 1985 with the Rambo sequel.

So they were very much in the market

for sequels of high-concept sci-fi action and thriller movies.

So they managed, with some difficulties,

to extract the rights to The Terminator

because they were owned by another production company

and also co-owned by James Cameron's ex-wife,

who was a co-producer and co-writer on the first film.

So they managed to extract the rights to that franchise,

and then they managed to get James Cameron on board

by offering him $6 million

- the whole budget of his last film -

simply as his salary for this film.

And so that's when the wheels started turning for Cameron

to really look at what else he could do

with that much larger scope and budget.

James Cameron had, in effect, given away so much of The Terminator

that I don't think he'd really thought about doing a sequel.

It wasn't something that was part of his project.

But once Carolco came through with the money

and, as he said, had his full attention,

he initially just scribbled down on a yellow legal pad:

The Terminator and John Connor

as a friendship -

and he realised that the idea would be to bring them together.

Now, the original Terminator had essentially been

within the genre of almost a slasher flick.

A lot of the camera angles, a lot of the storytelling

is very similar to, say,

well, not quite a Friday The 13th,

but maybe A Nightmare On Elm Street, quite a sophisticated slasher flick.

So we have a relentless killer, who cannot be stopped,

coming after a girl and someone trying to save her.

The idea of a nuclear apocalypse is very much backdropped.

It's just the situation that is happening in the future

that brings around our slasher flick today.

And Arnold Schwarzenegger, this Panzer tank of a man,

crashing through contemporary Los Angeles in his search to kill -

that's your plot, really.

With Terminator 2, it's a complete flip.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had become a huge star

with the first Terminator film,

having made a couple of Conan movies before that.

He'd understood that

Cameron already sort of got the wind under his sails

with The Abyss and Aliens,

and so he was...

They sort of came together. There was a confluence of ideas that

at some stage when special effects were improving

that Cameron would actually make the sequel.

After the success of The Terminator and Aliens,

at the end of the '80s, this young Canadian,

veteran of Roger Corman's B-movie studio,

was the leading genre filmmaker in Hollywood,

but he championed a brand of science-fiction realism.

However many cyborg assassins or alien infestations,

his films never felt far-fetched.

Cameron had a gift for centring his films in human terms,

real people confronting future technology that is plausible.

Over the years, it was Arnold Schwarzenegger

who kept the idea of a Terminator sequel alive,

pushing his old friend to make

another action movie in the same mould.

After all, it was the role that made him a superstar.

The villainous machine with a mixture

of a bodybuilder's balletic grace

and the actor's blackly comic delivery

had become a cult favourite.

Irony now ruled the box office.

But he was taken aback when Cameron suggested

he was now the good guy,

while remaining the icy-cool killing machine,

This science-fiction sequel can lay claim to being

the most revolutionary film since The Jazz Singer introduced sound.

It transformed an industry,

for Cameron chose to create his liquid-metal Terminator

using computer-generated imagery.

(CRACKLING)

(METALLIC SQUELCHING)

(THUD REVERBERATES)

DENNIS MUREN: ILM had been around

for 15 years or so, doing some really cutting-edge effects.

Jim had already done about 52 storyboards

for what he wanted to do with this character.

I'd never seen anything like it in a film.

If we could make this guy that didn't exist,

this character out of chrome,

that could be phenomenal.

Hi, I'm here with John Rowe at Buckinghamshire New University,

and we're here to talk about Terminater 2: Judgment Day

and the revolution in special effects that came with it.

So, John, tell me a little bit about

the scale that James Cameron had in mind

for this sequel to The Terminator.

Did they know they were going to get there?

I mean, in terms of processing power

and what it required at Industrial Light and Magic,

it must have been a sort of step into the unknown.

Yeah, it's totally revolutionary.

I don't think... I mean, that's the great...

That attitude and that mindset still persists to this day.

I think if... When anybody comes up with a story idea,

no matter how fantastical,

if it is something that cannot be filmed physically,

then there are obvious places that you go to look.

You can either ask the art department,

you can ask the cinematographer

or you can ask the visual-effects people.

They tend to be the main three places

that you look for solutions to your story problems, if you like.

And the moment it's no longer art department and cinematography

and it can't actually be filmed,

then you have to talk to a visual-effects supervisor

or a specialist to say:

can I actually do this?

And those were the conversations that James Cameron had

with Dennis Muren to go,

"OK, what's the limit that I can go to here?"

bearing in mind a lot of this hadn't been done before.

And using the skills he had and his amazing perception, he said,

"Well, you can go this far, but no more."

And what's interesting is James Cameron accepted that

and then said, "Well, let's go to there."

There's a story about Dennis Muren picking up the phone

and James Cameron explaining what he wanted.

And he's like, "Can you do it, Dennis?"

And Dennis was like: sure. Put the phone down and went,

"Right, what do we do, everybody?"

It's like they were inventing as they went.Very much so.

(GLASS FRAGMENTS TINKLE)

(BRAKES SCREECH)

(FIRE CRACKLES)

(TYRES SQUEAL)

(MOTORCYCLE REVS)

It was shortly before Christmas 1989 when James Cameron's phone rang.

Mario Kassar was on the other end,

flamboyant head of Hollywood independent Carolco.

The producer had bought the rights to The Terminator,

and wanted to know what it would take for Cameron to direct a sequel.

The answer for that would ultimately be a budget for $100 million,

at the time the most expensive film ever made.

And he needed a villain that would make Arnie look vulnerable -

not a bigger Terminator,

but the ultimate stealth machine

made of intelligent mimetic liquid metal -

a new, virtually indestructible killer assassin.

(FIRE CRACKLING)

(METALLIC HISS)

It was impossible for this work to have been done two years before,

but actually it was even impossible

for this stuff to have been done a week before

because we were learning things that fast.

This shot is typical of what's gonna come in this movie.

You're gonna see shot after shot after shot

with no cutting, no tricks. It's all there.

It's got the shot at the beginning that you see something like fire.

Out of it comes something you've never seen before,

which is this chrome character walking,

reflecting all the fire around him.

No cut.

It's impossible. You've never seen it.

So let's have a look at some of the extraordinary moments

of visual effects in the film, and maybe you can talk us through

exactly what has been achieved with each of these shots.OK.

Well, this is a very iconic image of T-1000 emerging from the flames.

And he's walking towards the camera,

the camera tracks with him and he morphs into human form.

So the character is CG, obviously when it's silver,

and the process they've gone through

is to composite that three-dimensional image

into a live-action backplate.

The flames are real...

The CG character is not.

And what they've very cleverly done

is match the lighting of the flames onto the CG character,

as it comes towards the camera.

So the tricky bits there are the lighting and the movement again.

To my eye, the transformation from silver man

into Robert Patrick the actor is still seamless.

It does work very well. You're right.

But I think, by modern standards,

it's a little bit crude now, but at the time...

It hadn't been achieved before then.

So you can't knock it. I mean, it's amazing.

What he's achieved is absolutely incredible

with the technology that was available at the time.

They had created a new technique here to do this.

It's not something that existed before.

I mean, that is problem-solving taken to a ridiculous level.

I need a minute here.

You're telling me that this thing can imitate anything it touches?

Anything it samples by physical contact.

Get real.

Like, it can disguise itself as a pack of cigarettes?

No, only an object of equal size.

Why wouldn't it become a bomb or something to get me?

It can't form complex machines.

Guns and explosives have chemicals, moving parts.

It doesn't work that way.

But it can form solid metal shapes. Like what?

Knives and stabbing weapons.

His idea was to create a completely different kind of Terminator -

an advance on the original T-800, as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And this, he came up with the idea of a creature made of liquid metal,

a sort of mercury on legs -

absolutely extraordinary concept.

It was a challenge not just to

the actor who would eventually play him,

but also to the special-effects department,

including both Industrial Light and Magic's

computer-generated imagery,

but also Stan Winston Studios

who were creating the puppets

and all the in-camera special effects as well.

All of this had to be combined into putting together

a being on the screen that was utterly believable,

and that had never been done before.

It's sort of fascinating that he started in a place

where most of us would say,

"Well, that's sort of a folly. That's so ambitious."

The technology to do that, basically early CGI,

was not necessarily totally there.

So there had to be almost an R&D element,

and their team kind of grew from about five people to about 25 people

because of the amount of work it took to get this T-1000 right

and to make his sort of translucent, quicksilver quality

of melting into things and emerging out of things

and growing different limbs

feasible on screen.

(FOOTSTEPS SQUEAK)

Now, this is the famous scene where

the T-1000 rises up from the asylum floor.

Oh, yes. Another very iconic image.

(COIN JANGLES IN VENDING MACHINE)

(METALLIC SQUELCHING)

(STEAMING COFFEE HISSES)

Let's leave it there.

But of course the clever part about it, story-wise,

is how you now realise that T-1000 can change shape into anything.

It is explained in the film

that it can't be tiny, like a packet of cigarettes.

It has to be the same sort of size,

and he can't be something mechanical with moving parts inside,

but he can turn himself into sharp objects,

like a massive sword arm or a... and so on.

But that original... That start point for the shot,

where we see the tiled floor,

in hindsight, again, if you look at it now, you go:

actually, that's very clever, the way that they have chosen

to start from that point on the floor

and then have the character build up out of the floor.

Because if you think about it mathematically,

inside the computer, you start with a piece of geometry.

So, of course, that's well hidden by the tiles on the floor.

And so, they've created a piece of geometry

which changes shape, to form a human shape,

and then superimposed it optically

over the piece of film that they've shot in the corridor.

Fantastic. You make it sound so easy now,

but I'm sure at the time it was... It's still not very easy.

None of this stuff is easy... (LAUGHS)

..but the thought process for working out

the effective way of using what is available at the time

and then covering it up, so that it looks seamless or it looks natural,

I mean, it's very clever.

(FOOTSTEPS CLICKING)

Robert Patrick is critical to the success of Terminator 2

for a number of reasons - the first one being

it was not technically possible

to have an entirely CGI-animated Terminator-1000,

because they barely had the technology to do 42 shots.

They could not have made the film without a real person.

But they also needed a real person who was incredibly different

in their physicality to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

They needed... He wanted to set this person up

as being the extreme opposite of the T-800 -

someone who was fluid, who moved in a particular way,

who could... This idea of the East versus West,

the different kind of energy to the great hulking T-800.

But also he had to be a character

who was so amorphous in his appearance that,

when he first arrives

on screen, you have to believe he's a goodie.

He goes into a police uniform and a police car

and, for a while, when he's in the police car

and he's got to serve and protect and he's in the police uniform,

you believe that he's the good guy. He's there to be the hero.

He's very similar to Kyle Reese in the first film.

But then, as soon as you realise that he's the bad guy,

you notice there's just something slightly off about his face.

It's almost like he has elfin ears

or he's slightly not quite human.

Now, that's phenomenal.

There's an actor there who can be, on one hand, the hero,

and just as the scene changes, you look at him again

and you suddenly see, no, he's clearly bad.

It's an amazing performance.

So Robert Patrick, to me, is one of the most unforgettable villains

of any film of this kind, certainly.

He just keeps coming, and of course

that's the terror of the entire...

of both the first and the second film.

I think it can't be understated

how much Terminator 2 transformed the film industry,

particularly around technology and special effects and CGI.

The head of Industrial Light and Magic at the time said

that, without Terminator 2, there would've been no Jurassic Park,

and without Jurassic Park there wouldn't...

And you continue all the way down the line

to things like Lord Of The Rings.

That whole... I guess all the R&D

that was involved in getting to the point in Terminator 2

where you could have those... you could achieve those effects

meant there was no going back.

People started to see what was possible.

If you were going to pick a group of people

who would be able to solve these incredible problems,

then Dennis Muren and the team at Industrial Light and Magic

were the people to go to at the time,

having had great success with The Abyss,

which was, as far as I'm aware,

really the first CG character on the screen.

To go from that to then creating the T-1000 character

with the mercury look

was a natural progression in terms of CG,

but still had never been done before.

It was absolutely incredible what they achieved.

From a visual-effects person's point of view,

to pick water in the first film

and shiny surfaces in the second film was madness.

These are two of the hardest things you can do.

So the scale of ambition was huge.

Get out.

Arghhh!

(PROPELLOR BLADES WHIRRING)

Come with me, if you want to live.

It's OK, Mom. He's here to help. It's OK.

(ANXIOUS PANTING)

(APPROACHING FOOTSTEPS)

(FOOTSTEPS CLICK)

Now, this shot is just extraordinary, isn't it?

The most remarkable shot in the whole film.

(METALLIC GURGLING)

(METALLIC HISS)

DENNIS: My favourite shot is the one where

the T-1000 walks through the bars.

When you shoot the background for it, it's actually fairly simple.

We had Robert stand there, walk up and do his performance,

and then had him walk away

and had the bars just by themselves, and then took the bars away

and he walked in there and then did the whole performance again -

walked and pretended they were there and walked on through.

And with those three pieces of film

we could make the computer graphic image

that you see in the film.

It turned into an amazing shot.

(METALLIC CLINK)

(GUN CLANKS)

Go.

The clanking of the gun, to me, just sells the scene.

It's perfect storytelling. Yeah.

Which is often the way with the most successful visual-effects shots,

because of course sound is half of everything that we do in filmmaking.

So, often, that is the key to selling a VFX shot

is a sound effect that kicks in just at the right moment

and really sells the idea that what you're seeing is real.

And how would you describe

James Cameron's storytelling in relation to special effects?

He has changed the way that stories are told. There's no question.

I mean, the types of story that he tries to tell

couldn't be told without visual effects.

And he has taken it to a level that nobody dreamed possible

with every single film that he's done, every project that he's done.

In so many situations, so many other movies over the years,

you can see an advancement in technical process

where something is tried for the first time,

is successful - and everybody shares that information.

What I love about visual effects is the fact that

people don't hang on to their ideas. They're happy...

Visual-effects people love showing off

and they like to show people how they've done things.

And so this becomes an accepted practice.

It becomes a norm. And so,

having seen characters like this in liquid form

for the first time, there have been many copies.

Give me a five.

SARAH CONNOR: Watching John with the machine,

it was suddenly so clear.

The Terminator would never stop.

It would never leave him,

and it would never hurt him.

Never shout at him or get drunk and hit him,

or say it was too busy to spend time with him.

It would always be there

and it would "die" to protect him.

Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years,

this thing - this "machine" -

was the only one who measured up.

In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.

Cameron has become the most successful director of all time

because his films touch on universal themes.

He makes love stories.

This is the tale of a boy

and the Terminator guardian angel he comes to love.

Their relationship is funny, touching

and ultimately heartbreaking.

As they seek to escape the T-1000 and avert future catastrophe,

rescuing Sarah Connor from an asylum,

a family unit is formed.

With Cameron, not only do you get

these extraordinary advances in special-effects technology,

these kind of leaps and bounds in storytelling,

you get a very strong emotional core.

He once said that all his films are love stories,

and I kind of understand that. And in this case, it's a love story

between a boy and a Terminator and the forming of a family.

Very much so. It is. It's the...

It's a broken family being reunited and held

and brought back together again

and Arnold Schwarzenegger playing that father figure,

the father he never had.

He's very dismissive of his stepfather -

his foster father. Yeah.

And so he now has somebody that,

because he has such high standards, that he expects a man to be -

there is an example of somebody he can actually look up to for once.

But also I think there's that lovely moment where he realises

that the Terminator has to do what he says,

and that is a beautiful moment.

Because then he goes, "Great, don't kill anyone."(LAUGHS)

(ANXIOUS BREATHS)

Jesus, you were gonna kill that guy.

Of course, I'm a Terminator.

Listen to me very carefully, OK?

You're not a Terminator any more, all right?

You got that?

You just can't go around killing people.

Why?What do you mean - why? Cos you can't.

Why? Because you just can't, OK?

Trust me on this.

Cameron needed to find the perfect 12-year-old to play John Connor.

It was a tall order. As he put it:

This punk kid becomes the Julius Caesar of a dystopian future.

Arguably, he is the protagonist.

They finally found Edward Furlong at a Boys and Girls Club in Pasadena.

He had a twitchy intensity

and his cocky assurance was a front for a troubled background.

He was raw, certainly, never having acted before,

but he had real chemistry with Schwarzenegger on screen.

I think Edward Furlong is great in the movie

because he has to go through, in a way...

The journeys of each of the three main leads

are very, very different, but they follow a similar kind of arc

in different directions. It's an exploration of humanity

and an exploration of family love.

So, at the beginning, John Connor is absolutely uncontrollable.

He's a wild kid.

And he has to, in his interaction with the machine,

in his attempt to teach the machine to be more human,

he gradually understands how HE can be more human.

So he loses the hard shell

and becomes the kid who says, "Stop killing people.

You can't kill. Be good."

Being human is about forgiving, letting go,

and that's how he learns himself to forgive and let go,

and that's how he learns, finally, to appreciate his mother.

Look, I'm gonna go get my mom,

and I order you to help me.

Cameron was determined he couldn't do the sequel

without Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor.

But the actress had one condition before she would accept.

"I want to be crazy," she told him.

It made logical sense.

Sarah Connor knows the world is going to end,

and no-one believes her.

The actress got into incredible shape.

Hamilton would push to do her own stunts,

learn to pick her handcuffs

and strip an automatic rifle while blindfolded.

Linda Hamilton in the first Terminator film

is very much a victim.

She is a waitress who is on the run from the implacable Terminator.

In order to reprise her role

in Terminator 2, she said, "I'll definitely do it,

but I want the character to be crazy."

It was as if she was suffering from PTSD.

She had been incarcerated.

She'd had the terrible experience

of having to deal and see off the Terminator in the original film.

She had built herself up into

this sort of basically survivalist commando.

When it comes to Terminator 2, she has spent years

preparing for the apocalypse. She knows it's coming

because she's met the apocalypse in the form of the Terminator.

And she's been training.

She's been trying to convince people that doom is coming.

And of course no-one believes her. They think she's crazy.

So she's physically superb. She's trained.

And indeed, Linda Hamilton trained and trained and trained and trained,

but also in the film,

she's seen as completely mad and is in an asylum, essentially,

where she's still working on her training

and has to be busted out to come to her son's aid.

So she is logically where you'd expect

someone who's had that sort of experience to be.

Her mind was almost broken by what happened in the past.

Now, in the future, all of her nightmares are coming true.

(FAINT OPERATIC SINGING)

(CHILD SQUEALS)

(MOUTHS)

Mama!

(MOUTHS)

(METAL MESH RATTLES)

Hey, let's do this one.

(FENCE RATTLES)

Whee!

There we go!

(RATTLING INTENSIFIES)

(CHUCKLES)

(SPEECH MUTED) (HARSH RATTLING)

(CHILD SCREAMS) Argh!

James Cameron definitely gives the impression

of somebody that was sort of haunted by nuclear anxiety.

And he said that he was writing the first Terminator film,

and he was listening to Sting

and listening to Sting lyrics about the Russians.

So, there's definitely that kind of miasma of, like, nuclear anxiety

throughout his writing.

But with Terminator 2,

he again takes a step into the very ambitious.

And for a scene which only lasts a few moments

completely recreates the image of a nightmare of a nuclear blast,

which is really terrifying, you know,

and it's in Sarah Connor's nightmares.

But he went out of his way to do that.

Probably a lot of people will have said,

"Is that necessary?" And I'm sure it was very expensive.

But it was clearly something that preoccupied him

and something that he wanted to put upon the audience

as the stakes that the future of humanity

and the future of mankind are dependent on what happens

with this mother-son father-surrogate-son dynamic.

The relentless shoot ran for months,

moving between hundreds of Los Angeles locations,

like a vast military operation led by a single-minded general.

Cameron was an unstoppable visionary,

demanding everything and more from his cast and crew.

To his view, filmmaking had to be a heroic struggle,

a contest against Olympian odds.

Because Cameron - and he's not given enough credit for this -

is such a personal instinctual filmmaker.

In his youth, he grew up near Niagara Falls,

and he would hear the falls and the water

and he would run wild in the woods

over these enormous limestone gorges.

And right across his films, there's his childhood

being played out in these extraordinary ways, these visions.

He says he dreams a lot of his images up.

Well, this was a dream.

The whole concept for this film started,

as far as I understand, as a dream,

and it was then, when he started developing the idea,

the whole story came out.

But he must have been eating cheese. (LAUGHS)

It was a fever dream, he said. It was a fever dream. Exactly.

That came out of his head. I don't know where that comes from.

(MAN AND WOMAN CRYING AND WHIMPERING)

Oh, my God.

Now, listen to me very carefully.

Unleashed into hungry cinemas, Terminator 2 fulfilled its destiny

and became the biggest film of all time -

something that would become a habit for Cameron.

But it wasn't just about

the sensationalism of blockbuster making.

Cameron has the uncanny Hitchcock-like gift

for anticipating the audience reaction.

(GUNSHOT)

(METALLIC CLINKING)

(GUN COCKS)

(RATTLING)

I love that shot.

It's a witty piece of special effects.

It's lovely, isn't it? I mean, the subtlety

is what that's all about, without question.

And of course it helps you understand

more about the character and about what this...

The poly... The poly-mimetic alloy.

The poly-mimetic alloy. (LAUGHS)

I love that. The poly-mimetic alloy

is intelligent and it goes and finds itself.

But what I find fascinating about people like James Cameron

is that they really understand what the world looks like.

And so they have this ability to translate that

into very interesting storytelling

or fascinating or fantastical storytelling.

And again that very much goes with

where visual effects fit into the storytelling process

and how people go about realising these amazing effects.

Because you really have to understand what things look like,

because what we're talking about is an emulation process.

You are mimicking real life,

and you have to make things look like they are real.

So if you don't know what things look like in the first place,

it's quite a hard thing to do.

But in Cameron's case, he is particularly driven by realism.

Even though his films are science fiction,

and in many ways they're very far-fetched,

the way they're made and the way the story is told is realistic.

Very much so. Yes.

And there's a whole load of themes going on,

which, again, watching it back after so many years,

there's many themes within that which really drive home

the time and the place where the film was made.

Vital to the ethos of Terminator 2

is the iconography of Los Angeles:

familiar locations,

but transformed into a shimmering mythic rendition of the famous city.

It is a look Cameron christened "tech noir",

this atmospheric blue veil

that turned the city by night into a dream scape.

The city of Los Angeles has a number of roles in the film Terminator 2.

For a start, it is shot,

in fact, ironically, in a way to save money,

it is shot at night using natural street lights.

So the feel that you get

for what James Cameron later termed "tech noir"...

The idea of Los Angeles is a very well-established noir city

from way back in the 1940s.

A lot of noir films were shot there.

It's important to have those references to noir film

for James Cameron and to shoot it in the same way,

in many ways, with that sort of same look and that same feel,

so that the connection between

the different schools of noir were clear.

The other crucial thing in Los Angeles

is that you have to have a city which has the capability

to deliver huge chases on freeways,

but also believably contain a state-of-the-art defence system.

Now, as it happens, of course Los Angeles DOES have

a strong connection with the defence industry.

It does have all of these things.

If you wanted to invent the perfect city for Terminator 2,

you would invent a city which was very much like Los Angeles.

And he didn't have to - he lived there.

CHRISTINA: Tech noir is a good way to put it, and in a way

it encapsulates again the...

not contradiction as such,

but the two sides of Cameron's approach,

which is quite tactile old-school storytelling

with emotional realism, with a sense of the past of filmmaking,

with a sense of how a narrative should move.

Quite traditional in that sense,

with a much more radical series of ideas

that are challenging about technology, about our humanity,

the philosophical questions about the future

and the dangers inherent in technology,

in AI, which is of course fascinating in its own way

because this is James Cameron we're talking about.

The kind of technology that he's been involved in

over the past 30, 40 years

has been intrinsic to how cinema has changed in many ways.

What's extraordinary is, considering it was created

as a fictional piece of work

and it was created with all kinds of things -

scientists researching in atomic energy authorities

in nuclear facilities who said,

this is without doubt the most realistic depiction

of a nuclear explosion they've ever seen in a fictional film.

Terminator 2 is more than just a great science-fiction epic.

It is a genuine... It offers a genuine emotional experience,

for all the reasons that we've spoken about.

The fact is that it has a human heart,

that it is basically about relationships.

The thriller element, the science-fiction,

the dystopian element, is sort of the framework of it.

It's the context of it.

But what you have at heart is a very human story.

OK, one of those central figures isn't actually human,

but he's sort of moving towards humanity

or moving towards some kind of emotion

that he didn't have to begin with.

Storytelling has always battled with the idea of describing

something which we have never seen or which we cannot see,

and telling a story through it and trying to make that convincing.

Now, whether that's just reading out a book

or whether you start to get into stage plays

and you start to get into the way the Victorians would try to create

a ghost through Pepper's ghost or try to get early monsters on films,

which would essentially be someone in a rug with a claw.

This ability to convey the unimaginable or the long dead

- all of these things that we can't see -

has been something that storytellers have been obsessed with.

And then James Cameron comes along and says,

"Actually, look. Look what I did. I've done it.

Only through 42 shots maybe,

but this computer can make anything."

And Hollywood descended on it.

I would imagine in my head, I'd like to think that

the following morning, after the film broke,

there was a queue of directors outside the offices

of Industrial Light and Magic with their scripts. "Can you do this?"

The one that really stands out for me is Jurassic Park,

because there's a moment in Jurassic Park

where Laura Dern looks at the dinosaurs.

And she is seeing, as a palaeontologist, for the first time,

all of the things that she's spent her whole life imagining.

And she's us at that point.

She is us looking at CGI and saying,

all of these things that we've read about in books

and we've imagined in our heads,

we can just put them on the screen now

and we can see them as if they're real.

And that's what changed.

Of course, the building of a film,

the construction of action sequences,

required a whole new level of thinking.

Very much so, and this is where you realise

that the VFX artists are a combination

of an artist and an engineer,

and it's bringing those two things together.

It's art and science working together

in solving problems, if you like,

technical problem solving,

that allows that thinking to become a reality.

And of course, James Cameron's father was an engineer

and his mother was an artist. He often says

he's the perfect combination of those things as a filmmaker.

He IS the perfect combination.

And that is actually what makes it interesting

to teach visual effects as a subject, because, of course

often it's the people who have interests in both areas

who make the very good visual-effects artists.

It's not unusual to find people

who have a pure physics background

working in visual effects

because you have to understand the physical world.

In the same way, it's not uncommon

to find mathematicians working in visual effects

because it's all computer based. It's all maths.

But if there was such a thing,

the ideal VFX artist would be

a combination of art, maths, physics.

We've really enjoyed being here. My thanks to you, John,

for taking us through the film in such incredible detail.

It was great fun. Thank you.

We should never forget that this film

is a superb piece of movie engineering,

gripping storytelling told at a thunderous pace

in which we never lose touch with the characters.

Hasta la vista, baby.

(GUNSHOT)

(FRAGMENTS TINKLE)

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