Before "The Terminator" catapulted James Cameron into the stratosphere of career success in 1984, he was mired in a professional slump he believed to be insurmountable. During Monday's episode of "On Purpose with Jay Shetty," the filmmaker shared the devastating feeling of being axed from his first directing gig on "Piranha II: The Spawning," which he initially perceived as the end of his career narrative.
Although later he discovered he had been "set up" and wasn't dismissed for his incompetence, Cameron recounted how he initially internalized the experience as a personal failure. "I believed at the time that I wasn't doing it well, 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, now 71, told podcast host Jay Shetty.
The director of "Titanic" revealed that he knew he needed to execute "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 with a hint of determination in his voice.
Cameron emphasized the need for an original piece that didn't require an enormous budget or complicated sets to produce. At the same time, it couldn't be a simple film; hence, he decided to leverage his expertise in design and visual effects. "The visual effects have to be very limited but 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 with a wry smile.
In the end, it was this practical approach that birthed the futuristic elements of "The Terminator," he explained. "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 with a hint of pride in his voice. "Would I have come up with that story if I hadn't had those constraints? I don't know. Maybe not, but it all worked out."
