James Cameron on 3-D ‘Terminator 2’: It’s a ‘thrill’

Director James Cameron has always embraced the newest technology available when making his movies. For his 1991 feature “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” Cameron teamed with Industrial Light & Magic to produce the liquid metal special effect that allowed the murderous robot from the future, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), to morph into multiple shapes.

There are only five minutes of computer-generated moments in the film but because the technology was so new at the time, it took 35 people working a total of 25 man-years at a cost of $5 million to create the special effects. It was one of the most aggressive uses of CGI to that point in movie history.

Cameron was so focused on new technology, he didn’t give a second thought to making the movie with the older film process of 3-D. That wasn’t in his plans in 1991. But technology has caught up to the way Cameron makes movies, and now “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” is being re-released theatrically in 3-D this weekend.

“It really just wasn’t in anyone’s consciousness because 3-D had been tried and failed in the ’50s. It had been tried briefly with a couple of esoteric titles in the ’70s like Andy Warhol’s ‘(Flesh for) Frankenstein’ and ‘The Stewardesses.’ But it was pretty much a dead art,” Cameron says. “It was really the advent of digital cameras that made it possible to create a 3-D camera system that was somewhat viable.”

That technology didn’t come around until the late ’90s, long after the original release of “Terminator 2.” Current 3-D technology has advanced so much that even movies that weren’t originally filmed in 3-D can be converted. How good that conversion looks depends on the way the movie was originally shot.

Cameron wasn’t thinking about 3-D at the time but when he looks back at the filming of “T2,” the director realizes that a lot of decisions he made in regards to the equipment he selected made it possible for “T2” to be transformed into the kind of 3-D quality he wants.

“I tend to always think – and compose – visually with depth in mind,” Cameron says.

For a moment, the director, writer and producer slips back to his college days at Fullerton College in Southern California where he had enrolled to study physics. Cameron is certain that those days studying physics before quitting school to focus on the film world have affected many of his decisions as he has set up shots over the years, especially choreographing action scenes. Even when he’s creating big action sequences, they all have to feel like they obey the real laws of physics.

As for how physics impacts his overall vision, Cameron talks about how there are the regular height and width concerns that create the standard look for a flat movie screen. Cameron takes his view of the film world a step further by making sure the scene has depth.

This is particularly noticeable in “Terminator 2” when Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) watches children in a playground with the Los Angles skyline in the background. The scene already looked like it went off into the distance, an effect heightened by the 3-D adaptation.

“Anytime you put a little bit of smoke in the air, it’s to separate your different planes of focus,” Cameron says. “When you use a longer lens you are drawing certain things up that are depth cues for the audience. At the time I was making ‘Terminator,’ I happened to like wider lens so I was composing foreground and background and using a lot of camera movements.

“There’s always a kind of lucid sense of depth in the image already.”

Cameron realized when he looked at “Terminator 2” to evaluate whether it would be a good candidate for 3-D that the film had been shot to make it a prime pick. He had done the same thing with his box office giant “Titanic” in 2012, turning to Stereo D to convert it to 3-D to mark the movie’s 15th anniversary. Cameron had been a critic of 3-D but the work of Stereo D changed his mind and he returned to the company to do the 3-D work on “T2.”

Before Stereo D started, Cameron went back to the basics with “Terminator 2” by taking the original negative and making a 4K digital transfer to make the images look as clear as possible. Cameron even called on the original “T2” director of photography, Adam Greenberg, to make sure the color work was as near to the original as possible.

The one thing Cameron didn’t have to worry about was the quality of the story of a robot from the future sent back in time to save the person who would one day lead humans in a war against the machines. “Terminator 2” has been constantly heralded as a great action movie but Cameron stresses that at the heart it is a “nuclear family drama.”

He adds: “For me, I was working back from an ending about the Terminator becoming the surrogate father, in a way, for the boy. And the ending is basically ‘Shane.’ If you can cry for the Terminator when the Terminator has to go away, then that’s what cinema’s all about.

“Cinema is about taking you to a place you didn’t think you were going to go even when you bought the ticket.”

And he wants that to happen again 26 years later. The focus was to make sure the new image to be shown on theater screens looks better than the original 70 mm print that was shown in 1991.

Cameron adds, “I think, given that most people know the film from video, this is on another level. There’s an entire generation of fans of this movie that only know it from video. They weren’t even born when the film came out.

“So, it’s a particular thrill as a filmmaker to re-present a movie into theaters all these years later.”