Before “The Terminator” became a career-defining hit in 1984, James Cameron was trying to dig himself out of what he thought was a professional hole.
On Monday’s episode of “On Purpose with Jay Shetty,” the filmmaker spoke about how getting fired from his first directing job for the film “Piranha II: The Spawning” felt like the end of his career.
Although he later learned he had been “set up” and wasn’t fired for his incompetence, Cameron said he initially viewed the experience as a personal failure.
“But I believed at the time, I internalized that I was not doing it well, you know, and I thought, ‘Oh crap, now I’m worse off than if I hadn’t taken the job in the first place. Now I’m at negative 10. I could have just been at zero. Now I have to dig out of a hole to get to zero,'” Cameron, 71, told podcast host Jay Shetty.
The “Titanic” director said he knew he needed to do “something extraordinary or something different” to recover from this professional setback.
“I couldn’t wait for a directing gig to come to me. I had to create it for myself. And that’s when I wrote ‘The Terminator,'” he said.
Cameron said that he needed to create an original piece that didn’t require an enormous budget or complicated sets to produce. At the same time, it couldn’t be just a simple film, so Cameron decided to use his expertise in design and visual effects.
“The visual effects have to be very limited, but they have to be powerful, so that it’s not a ridiculous budget like a ‘Star Wars’ movie that I knew we couldn’t afford or nobody would hire me for,” he said.
In the end, that’s how the futuristic elements of “The Terminator” came about, he said.
“There was a logic to the story elements that I was playing with that was based entirely on being practical and trying to get a gig,” he said.
“Would I have come up with that story if I didn’t have those constraints? I don’t know. Maybe not, you know, but it all worked out,” he said.
