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James Cameron has reflected on his 40-year film career which boasts classics including Titanic, The Terminator, and the highest grossing film of all-time, Avatar.
However, the Oscar-winning director admitted that he finds his breakthrough movie “cringeworthy” and explained the reasons why.
In an interview with Empire, he discussed the quality of his 1984 film The Terminator, which was his first huge box office success.
The film follows cybernetic assassin Arnold Schwarzenegger as he travels from the future to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) before her unborn son has a chance to save humankind. The Terminator spawned a movie franchise, launching the career of the Austrian bodybuilder in the process.
“I don’t think of it as some Holy Grail, that’s for sure,” he said. “I look at it now and there are parts of it that are pretty cringeworthy, and parts of it that are like, ‘Yeah, we did pretty well for the resources we had available.’”
Expanding on the reasons why he finds some parts of his film embarrassing, he added it was “just the production value” of the movie in hindsight.
“I don’t cringe on any of the dialogue, but I have a lower cringe factor than, apparently, a lot of people do around the dialogue that I write,” he said.
However, he defended the dialogue in the film, which includes the infamous threat “I’ll be back”, adding, “You know what? Let me see your three-out-of-the-four-highest-grossing films — then we’ll talk about dialogue effectiveness.”
Cameron also explained that Schwarzenegger did not initially match the vision he had for the character at the outset.
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“I think a lot of filmmakers, especially first-time filmmakers, get very, very stuck in a vision, because of insecurity,” he said.
“I’m proud of the fact that we weren’t stuck enough to not be able to see how it could work with Arnold, because it wasn’t our vision.
“Sometimes, when you look back from the vantage point – at this point 40 years – we could have made a great little film from a production-value standpoint, and it would have been nothing if we hadn’t made that one decision that captured the imagination of people.”
Former governor of California, Schwarzenegger, previously told The Independent that ex-NFL player OJ Simpson was almost cast for the role.
