Original subtitles

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JAMES CAMERON: What we have here is the entire first future war

sequence storyboarded from end to end.

So what I was thinking is, we take the movie

and look for the commonality.

So here in the storyboard, I imagine

that Reese kind of lays his head down

on the side of the car door and goes to sleep,

and then this is a dream, as opposed to what we wound up

doing in the film, which is that he's waiting--

sitting, waiting in the car.

And he looks over and sees the construction vehicle.

We do this kind of instant transition to the future,

but we don't know we're in the future yet.

But we are.

We're now on a--

the vehicle that has treads in the future,

it's called a hunter-killer, and we tilt down,

there are a bunch of skulls on the ground.

So clearly we've done some kind of dreamlike transition,

but we haven't seen the moment where he fell asleep.

And we don't even know that that's happening yet.

And now or in the future.

So if you look at-- at the storyboard for that,

it looks like this.

Here's the vehicle with the treads

near the skulls down below.

Here's a fairly abstract shot looking up

at the hunter-killer.

And then if you progress the film,

here's that-- here's that shot.

Now I'm not seeing the spotlight or the searchlight.

And then we see Reese in the ruins.

He's established coming up here.

It wound up being a little bit different,

but, you know, here we establish Reese in his future world.

You don't have to follow the storyboards exactly.

So here's the hunter-killer crushing the skulls,

and here's the hunter-killer crushing the skull.

So there are certain images that survived

through the process and certain ones that were either winnowed

out and we wound up not doing.

For example, the way I imagined it

is that it's all very abstract at first,

and we see Reese introduced by his legs

running as he's getting shot at by this machine,

and we think he's gotten killed, but he's

hiding behind a column.

I wound up not shooting that.

I don't remember exactly why at this point.

Maybe because we didn't have time,

maybe I felt it just wasn't necessary.

But where we get into a similarity to the sequence

again is him taking cover.

Ah.

So here, we introduce this young female resistance fighter,

and then that moment is here.

Now you can see that the camera wound up reversed.

Probably just simply because of the way the set laid out,

you know?

And where the key light was.

And me not having the time--

and it really didn't matter.

And so Reese signals to her, and this

is him signaling to her here.

And then they run together.

He signals and they run.

But first they crawl, then they run.

So I think the fact the idea of him crawling

through the wreckage is actually indicated

in the next storyboard while we see the--

the hunter-killer in the background.

So it was all fairly well thought out ahead of time,

but the important thing about storyboards is

they're-- they're not--

they're not an absolute blueprint,

they're a departure point.

And what you shoot in the moment is what becomes the final film.

So you can see that the idea of seeing the-- seeing

the hunter-killer up through the wreckage as it

towers over them, I believe that-- that concept

was retained.

Ah, there it is.

So maybe-- maybe in the cutting we

decided it was better to put that shot a little bit later,

but you can see, there's a fairly close correlation

between a concept, which is that there's

some post-nuclear holocaust wreckage in the foreground

and this big chrome machine with these lights,

and it's kind of Reese's POV as the little rat running

through the maze and seeing it up above,

and that's more or less what you have right here.

So this was very useful to the miniature unit

when they were trying to build on this.

So they knew they had to build a model big enough

that they could put a foreground piece and it would hold focus.

So they wound up building quite tall models.

I think it was almost four feet tall of the hunter-killer.

So they get a lot of information from these.

And then we see Reese take shelter behind something.

Now they're running through open space here.

That's accounted for here.

So we get the same idea.

So again, this is just an idea for a shot.

This is the execution of it, but what's locked in?

The edgy lighting, the spotlights,

the emphasis on the kind of blue night light,

the cold feeling of it.

The bright magnesium-like explosions on the ground.

So those ideas were already embedded in the-- and these are

sort of a combination of storyboards and design

drawings, really, because they're-- they're giving a lot

of information to the model unit.

There's a big shot where they cover a lot of ground,

and they run-- they run across a large area.

So here, you can see little tiny figures running.

Big machine in the background and ruins.

And-- and then they reappear in another plate.

So a plate is a live element.

Sometimes the background element, sometimes it's

a foreground element.

In this case it's a foreground element of our characters.

In this case, there are actually two plates.

There's one over here before they go behind the car and one

over here after they come out from behind the car.

And then there's another big plate

in the background that's of the-- of the miniature, right?

And then some optical lasers are put across the foreground.

And you can see that that concept exists

in the storyboard and it's in the description

of the storyboard here, that that's one plate.

The car is the breakpoint, and that's another plate.

So the other thing that I think it's

important to remember about "The Terminator"

is that it was done at a time when we didn't have CG at all.

So we were using tools like miniatures,

front screen projection, rear screen projection.

So this is a cheap, low-budget, but high epic--

you know, attempting to be epic on a low budget

and doing it with rear projection.

So literally, this was a rear projection,

this was a rear projection, and that was a rear projection, all

on a big miniature set.

And that's how that was done.

To me, the power of rear screen projection

was that you could hand-hold the camera,

and you could even zoom in or move around

and made it feel very subjective.

It didn't suddenly have to become a lock-off,

because a lot of visual effects suffered from,

all of a sudden you knew you were watching a visual effects

shot because the camera locked off so that they

could composite in things.

It was all very crude.

And nowadays it's not a problem.

You just shoot-- shoot it handheld

if you want a blue screen shot, and you just

make sure you've got your tracking dots around

and then they can extract that camera move

and apply the same camera move to the background.

So you're in a car, and you're supposed

to be driving down the freeway.

There's nothing outside the window but a blue screen.

And the camera operator sitting in the right seat-- well,

I say this in New Zealand here, they'd be sitting in the left

side--

shooting-- shooting the actor driving.

And the camera's kind of shaky and you

pan over and look out the window and you come back.

And there's nothing there but blue.

But it's relatively easy to add a background

plate of what's outside that--

outside that window these days.

It's-- it's not a big deal.

I wound up with six months to sketch out

all of the key scenes and to really refine all the designs

and be ready.

And when I got to shoot that film, every second counted.

We had 42 days, and a lot of them were nights.

And even on a guerilla filmmaking schedule,

I'm working 14-hour days, it was a lot of material

to shoot in that amount of time.

But I was ready.

I knew what to shoot.

I knew every shot that I needed.

And I was just a machine.

Just going from shot to shot to shot, you know?

It's critically important to know your film

before you shoot your film.

And everything starts with the art.

Spend a good part of your time just

looking at how things really are with an artist's eye,

like you're going to try to paint it.

Like Vermeer.

You know.

There were thousands of years of painters before Vermeer,

and Vermeer suddenly figured-- he looked at light

the way it came in a window and the way it lit a scene

or lit a figure of a woman standing at a counter.

And all of a sudden he saw what that light did.

How bright the source was, the fact

that you didn't see the source, you just

saw the effect of the source, how it bounced around,

how it lit her, how it lit the wall, how

the bounce from the wall lit her.

And all of a sudden he was able to do something nobody

had ever done before, which is paint light the way

it really worked.

And he just did it with the wetware.

He didn't have any software, he didn't have any computers,

he didn't even have a camera.

It didn't exist yet.

But he saw how light worked.

So, I happened to be an artist.

Great.

A lot of-- some-- some other directors are artists.

Ridley Scott's a good sketch artist,

Guillermo Del Toro is a very accomplished artist.

Great.

If you're not an artist, study art.

Learn to draw on a very rudimentary way,

and I don't care if it's balloon heads

with smiley faces on them.

Learn to draw so that you force yourself

with a pencil and paper to think compositionally.

Do I want the character in the middle of the frame

or do I want them on the left side of the frame,

leaving the rest of the frame open in a cinemascope aspect

ratio like Sergio Leone used to do?

What style am I going to do?

What's my compositional style?

So that you can have that conversation.

First with yourself, then with your director of photography,

and then subsequent to that, in the moment on the set.

I like this, I don't like that, pan more right.

Study art so you understand perspective,

so you understand light, so you understand

these ideas of what's going on in that frame.

Because figurative art, painting has all been about the frame.

What's in and what's not.

And filmmaking is all about what's in the frame

and what isn't in the frame, and what you need in the frame,

and what you can safely exclude from the frame

and get by inference.

You don't have to see the sun to know it's there,

it's coming in the window.

That's an extreme example.

You don't have to see the other characters to know

they're still in the room when you cut to a close-up.

But what's in the frame and why is it in the frame?

And that's a question that I ask myself a hundred times a day

when I'm composing a shot.

To this day.

There's nothing automatic about any of it.

All of those decisions are fresh decisions

and they have to be made every single day.

So study art.

Study photography.

Still photography.

Black and white photography.

Understand light, understand how it works.

Those are great-- those are great basics.

Before you ever pick up a motion camera, study perspective.

Study aerial perspective.

What makes things look far away?

So the most important thing as a filmmaker in general

is your power of observation.

What you learn about people by observing them.

And participating with them.

But there's a part of your mind that's always observing.

Even interactions where you're directly involved, even

in a heated argument or in a torrid love affair

or whatever it is, there's a part of your mind

that's a video camera that's recording and making notes.

Because ultimately you're going to have to create something

in a highly artificial environment surrounded

by lights and people like we are right now,

looking through cameras, and you're

going to have to create a bit of reality that

is credible to an audience.

And it's especially true in visual effects.

You have to understand how light works.

You have to understand what things really look like.

Now that's if you're trying to make a realistic visual effect.

Some-- some people aren't interested in reality,

they might be going for some--

some kind of heightened or stylized look, or maybe

it's a Pixar animated film and the characters

don't really exist and everything is kind of

heightened or stylized.

That's great, but know the rules before you break the rules.

And these days with--

with visual effects, with the quality

that's available right now, there's

nothing that can't look 100% real.

It's not-- it's not about the tools,

and not about how expensive the tools are.

It's about how good the power of observation

is of the people manipulating the tools.

And obviously that buck finally stops

on the desk of the director, because the director's

got to approve the shot or not.

And it's going to cost you a ton of money if you literally

say,it doesn't look real, try it again.

And any filmmaker should feel comfortable

being able to do that.

And then you have control.

It's safer.

You can control the lighting.

It can always be exactly the right time of day

with the sun in exactly the right position.

But you have to be very-- you have to be

observant of the natural world.

The key to visual effects, I believe,

the one great fundamental is observe reality carefully.

If you don't effects but you want to do an effects film

and you want to do it on a low budget,

get really chummy with some aspiring visual effects

people that have been noodling around with this stuff,

maybe doing it--

maybe doing it at a boutique effects house

where they've actually been hands-on and done shots,

maybe working on their own with apps

like After Effects and things like

that where you can do relatively simple composites.

Tracking-- tracking software is readily available

now so that you can track images.

You can do composite work.

You could even set up your own facility if you wanted to.

You could probably put five or six seats

in of Maya and Nuke and things like that

and just be able to do basics.

So you've got a network.

You've got to have like-minded colleagues.

You have to build your little revolutionary army.

You don't just spend all your time

knocking on doors trying to have lunch with people that

are way above you in the food chain,

you're wasting your time.

You've got to work at a peer level.

There's no sort of inside knowledge that so--

that's a magic bullet that's going

to leap you up three levels in the film industry.

You have to work your way up through those levels

and you have to do it by learning the craft.

So it's a chicken and egg problem.

Who's going to give you the budget?

Well, probably nobody.

So you have to figure out how to do it

for basically almost nothing and build

the skill set that is scalable once you do get a little money.

You've already done it.

You've already done examples of it.

I'd already done, working for someone else,

working for Roger Corman on super low-budget science

fiction films, I'd done examples of all the types of shots

that I had in mind for "Terminator."

So I was taking what I knew, I was meticulously

planning how it was going to be done,

and-- and what that allowed the-- the-- the effects

people to do was to budget very close to the bone.

Because normally, visual effects budgets,

they have to pad them up because they don't know

what the director really wants.

And that lack of precision translates to additional costs,

like a lot.

They'll put in a big fudge factor.

It might be 30%, it might be 40%, because they don't know.

But here, they could literally budget almost to the dollar

how much it was going to cost them

to do these shots because I had been so precise in my--

my previs.

And that's what allowed us to do the film for basically

$4 million below the line.

So I felt I was presenting a package

to a low-budget producer that was actually

attractive and made sense.

There was logic behind every decision that was made.

There was logic to shoot the vast majority of the film

on the streets of LA with available light,

and to only dip our toe into the exotic environment that

required the visual effects sparingly.

Pick our battles.

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