July
27
Comic-Con: McG Runs Terminator Show and Tell
The franchise reboot of Terminator looks pretty strong under McG's direction. (It comes out May 22, 2009.) That the filmmaker is eager to prove himself with this picture can only be a good thing. His career is an odd one: many TV series and music videos led to his first film, Charlie's Angels, and its sequel, followed by the male weepie We Are Marshall. So McG (nicknamed after his mother's maiden name, because there were too many Joes in the house) is ready to rock.
He ran the panel like a paratrooper/cheerleader, even calling Christian Bale in Japan, and frequently asking the crowd to roar its approval. (It's become a sign of success to manipulate the audience into playing footage twice.) McG is in mid-shoot in New Mexico, where he likes the bleak desert, he told me later when I asked him about the film's Road Warrior influence. Playing to the fans, he said, "the whole thing began by listening, everyone wanted to look at the future, not T4. It's post-Judgement Day."
McG surrounded himself with credible talent, from Dark Knight's Jonah Nolan, who did a rewrite, to the dark Knight himself, Bale, ILM and the late animatronics wizard Stan Winston, whose designs "are all over this picture," McG said. "We have a lot of hardware," he said, displaying the bare-bones Cro-Magnon model T-600 Terminator, and plans to dedicate the film to Winston.
The footage had no VFX except for one claw shot. "We wanted it to be tactile," said McG. "We're using color stock with a lot of silver, as you'd traditionally treat black and white film."
Set in a 2018 post-apocalyptic future after a nuclear blast, this saga begins 11 years before the first Schwarzenegger Terminator film, which was set in 2029 with the T-800 model. Skynet doesn't yet exist. There's a war on between humans--men and women, blacks and whites fighting side by side-- and the machines. But they are rough and rugged giant tankers, transports and aerotanks chugging through the landscapes harvesting humans and crashing all comers.
"Sci-fi is over," said McG. "We live in a world where you clone sheep, texting on blackberries has spell check as you go, if you have a bad shoulder they give you a mechanical one, if you're depressed you don't talk about mom and dad, you manipulate dopamine levels. Be careful if you create life, because the life you create may come back and bite you in the ass."
Jim Cameron, who reminded McG that he followed Ridley Scott's Alien with Aliens, suggested his own Avatar star, Australian actor Sam Worthington, who needed to be able to hold his own with Bale. "I had to go toe-to-toe with fucking Batman," said the actor at the panel. McG described a Bonnie and Clyde dynamic for Conner and his wife Kate, Bryce Dallas Howard, "who he listens to as much as any general in the field. They roll through thick and thin."
As for the issue over the rating McG said, "We're putting the picture first at all times." He said that Warners and Sony have both given their blessing to go with R or PG-13, whichever works best. And the new trailer will go out ahead of Quantum of Solace.
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The Terminator is pointing his gun in the wrong direction...
Posted by: Edward Wilson | July 27, 2008 at 09:57 PM
Making a Terminator movie without James Cameron is like making an Indiana Jones movie without Spielberg - pointless.
Posted by: Mark | July 28, 2008 at 01:05 AM
damn that T-800 was huge! ;O
Posted by: BloodSpiller | January 27, 2009 at 04:19 AM