Original subtitles

[DANCE MUSIC]

[OMINOUS MUSIC]

JAMES CAMERON: In this scene, what you

have is the convergence of three separate plotlines.

So that was a structural motif that was used for that film.

We follow in a third-person omniscient way,

jumping back and forth, between three storylines--

Sarah, introducing her and getting to know her

and presumably like her to some extent.

And then we see the Terminator arrive through time.

We don't know it's through time, but we sort of know

he's come from somewhere, and see him start

hunting down and killing--

brutally killing people with her name.

So even though they haven't met, and the two storylines haven't

converged yet, there's already an interrelationship

between those two storylines.

Kyle Reese comes through time same way.

Although his arrival is much messier and rougher on him

than it is on the Terminator, we can

make the assumption he has come from the same place.

He is from whatever that world is.

So there's already a connection between the two of them.

And we don't know if he's a good guy or another bad guy.

He certainly acts very, very sinister.

But I think we innately sense that he's probably

a protagonist.

And he goes through getting weapons, getting clothes,

doing the same things the Terminator does, just

in a different way.

He's more furtive.

He doesn't hurt anybody.

The Terminator just bulldozes through whatever

to get his objectives.

So they're contrasted to each other.

So even though they're clearly both soldiers,

they're both sinister, the Terminator

is the more is the more disturbing of the two.

And they're both stalking Sarah.

Terminator's is moving toward her in this relentless fashion,

Reese is following her.

So is he-- we don't know if he's a protector,

or if he's a good guy, if he's a bad guy.

But we feel a relentless sense that the three storylines

are converging.

[DANCE MUSIC]

The music is pounding.

So she sits down.

She's nervous.

[DANCE MUSIC]

And--

[DANCE MUSIC]

--Terminator walks in.

[DANCE MUSIC]

The music tells me, I'm in the same club.

I'm at the door of the club.

He's there.

He's in the room with her.

The killer that we've seen brutally

kill two other people in his hunt for her

and kill the gun shop owner to get the weapons to do so

is now in the room.

So it's going to happen.

It's going to go down.

So we've just started the clock on our chess move.

We've just started the clock.

And the audience knows it.

And they know that this is the beginning of a thing, a set

piece, if you will, a scene.

It just started.

The second you put them both in the same room,

or in the same space, you've just

said to the audience, all right, guys, it's on.

Right?

Now what's going to happen?

So the jeopardy just shot up.

The jeopardy's been slowly building.

It just shot up to a new level.

[DANCE MUSIC]

Terminator moves in his very machine-like like fashion

searching.

Right?

The clerk tells the bouncer to stop him.

He just crushes the guy's hand.

He doesn't even look at him.

He just glances at him and then moves away.

Now he's in scan mode.

The hunter, killer, machine scanning like a surveillance

camera.

[DANCE MUSIC]

His eyes scan, then his head turns

to give him more compliance.

Then his eyes scan the other way.

Then he has to move his head.

It's unnatural.

It's not human.

It's machine-like.

It's like a surveillance camera scanning.

So that's something that we worked out together

in rehearsal.

Now here's Sarah.

You cut back to the victim, the innocent victim, Bambi.

You know?

Here comes the hunter tromping through the woods.

Here's Bambi.

It's intercutting.

The intercutting intensifies the sense of expectation

and builds suspense.

Something is going to happen.

It is inevitable.

He will find her.

He's very thorough.

So we've established him searching

in a very machine-like and thorough fashion.

And we've established her sitting there and essentially

helpless and worried.

Back to him scanning some more.

Same principle.

Back to her.

Rising tension by intercutting.

Right?

[DANCE MUSIC]

Here comes the big move.

She knocks the water bottle off her table.

And we go into slow motion.

We're telling the audience something.

The Terminator walks into the frame scanning relentlessly,

doesn't see her, misses her completely.

The timing was-- we had to do this shot a few times,

obviously, to get the timing perfectly.

The way he appears through the dancers.

The waitresses cross.

It's very stacked.

This is using a long lens.

If I had done this on a short lens, a wide lens,

I'd have seen too much background.

I wouldn't have been selective enough.

My waitress crossing in the foreground

would have been the size of the Hindenburg.

Sarah would have been a big.

Terminator would have been little.

The farther I move back, the longer the focal length I use.

The more I stack the shot, the more

I compress the space, the bigger he is.

And the more I'm able to look through a number of dancing

bodies and sort of graphic forms that

are out of focus to see him.

He's the plant of focus.

She's not.

She's not.

Right?

So this is selective.

This is being highly selective, leading the audience's eye

in a selective fashion, by using composition, lighting, focus.

He misses her.

She comes back up.

She didn't see him--

not that she even knows what he looks like.

Innocent victim, again.

We're just reminding the audience who

our protagonist is, and the fact that she

doesn't know what's coming.

And it just missed her.

But we have another escalation.

In her eyes, in that moment, and it's

aided and abetted by a little flush of light from the dance

floor as two dancers part.

In slow motion, she sees something.

Now I haven't seen what she sees yet.

She could be seeing the Terminator.

But why would she be alarmed at the Terminator?

She's never seen the Terminator.

She sees something, and we see it in her face.

And this is a beautiful piece of editing by Mark Goldblatt.

He holds on it just enough frames for you

to see her see something.

And we don't know what it is.

And these are magical shots when you're able to get them.

When the character-- she's not doing anything.

It'd be very hard to express it in a storyboard.

It's something changes.

And what she sees is Reese, the person that she knows,

that she's seen stalking her.

Now she is afraid of this guy.

She doesn't even know about the other guy yet.

Reese's eyes come up.

[DISTORTED DANCE MUSIC]

And he sees something.

He sees her.

Their eyes meet in a mirror.

It's a love story.

Their eyes meet across a crowded room.

It's a love story with shotguns.

Another long lens shot that this suggests-- and to this day,

I don't remember if this is supposed to be Sarah's hair

or not.

But I'm shooting over her, and it's a stacked shot.

Or there's just some random foreground.

I think it's a bit of random foreground.

But it's a long lens shot.

So it suggests that her brain has

excluded the entire environment in between her and him

and gone--

[BIG WHOOSH] --like that into--

and this is how lens choices are very subjective.

If I were to duplicate my experience right now,

my subjective experience right now,

my vision stretches out to where my hands are.

Way out here.

And way down here and way up here.

If I were to duplicate that with a lens,

I'd need to be on like a 10 or 12 millimeter fisheye lens.

It would look ridiculous.

It would look highly distorted.

But I'm seeing all this.

But it's not what my brain is focused on.

And it's not what I would remember.

So lens choice is about the memory you

would have if you were there.

So if I saw something really interesting,

my focus, my attention, would go--

[SMALLER WHOOSH] --just to that thing, a very tiny amount

of my visual field.

If I walk into a new room, a place I'd never seen before,

my attention gets much wider.

I want to take in the whole space.

I want to feel where I am.

I want to feel the environment around me.

Right?

That's how we perceive.

That's how we go through life perceiving.

And you look at the whole picture,

and then you see something interesting.

Maybe you walk into a big room that's a party.

And maybe across the room you see

somebody you recognize in your attention goes--

[QUICK EXHALE] You just went from an 18 millimeter lens

to a 175 millimeter lens.

You just did it in your head.

And it's not that we have such a mechanism, but we do.

It's in our visual cortex, in our processing.

And if you remember that moment six months later,

you would remember it that way.

I walked in, I saw the whole place, boom.

I saw Bob.

And I focused on him, and I crossed the room.

Now I'm in a tracking shot going over to Bob, or whoever.

So the point is that cinematic language maps

to human perception.

But if you want to really resonate with an audience,

you resonate based on how a million years of evolution

have programmed our brains and our visual cortexes--

cortexes?

--to be the way they are.

So we're now in Sarah's reality, looking across the room

and zooming in-- not literally zooming in-- but switching to--

I think this was shot on 135 millimeter lens.

And she's looking at him.

And then she doesn't want him to see her, so she looks away.

Meanwhile, Terminator has completed his scan.

This is intercutting.

It's all done in slow motion.

She's moving in slow motion.

The dancers are dancing in slow motion.

It's taken on a dream-like aspect.

On the Terminator's turn, the source music,

the pounding '80s synth dance music

starts to fade away and get very echoey.

And the score, which is saying the--

which is saying the narrative, the driving force, comes up.

[DANCE MUSIC]

Club music's jamming.

[DANCE MUSIC]

A low beat starts to come in here, a threatening energy

on his eyes.

[DISTORTED DANCE MUSIC]

And there's that heartbeat underneath.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

And by the time the Terminator turns, the Terminator's motif,

if you will--

the clanging, metallic rhythmic, relentless sound comes in.

The source music in the club is almost gone.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

So I'll pot that out so you guys can hear me.

And he starts his move.

He's seen the target.

He starts his move.

Now we see what he sees.

Now, at the time I shot this, I thought, well, maybe I'll

even go into what we called "Termovision," Terminator

vision.

I'll go fully subjective.

I'll have him analyzing the whole scene.

We tried it.

I didn't like it.

Because it broke the flow.

But we still know we're in his vision.

And we're pulling back in front of him.

And we're seeing her revealed.

It's all in slow motion.

So we're stretching time.

We're stretching time, because we've

put you in a state of dread.

We've done it with crosscutting.

We've done it by converging the three storylines.

We've done it with music.

And now we want to stretch that moment.

We want you to continue to feel that grit

as long as we can stretch it out in a nightmarish fashion.

In real life, something like this

might have happened in two or three seconds.

We want to stretch it out as long as we can.

Because once you've gotten the audience to a place

that they're enjoying, because perversely people actually

enjoy being scared, they enjoy being tense,

they enjoy having an emotional reaction.

They also enjoy laughing.

They enjoy crying.

They enjoy the warmth of a great relationship moment.

All those things.

But they're here to enjoy all of it in all its colors,

in all its dynamics.

Once they're enjoying something, you'll

let them stay there as long as you can.

You sustain the state.

So the slow motion is used to continue

to build tension by sustaining and crosscutting,

building the tension.

Something's going to happen right now.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

And her eyes see the Terminator.

Reese sees the Terminator.

He's the first one to take action.

It's in slow motion.

It's all happening in a dream state.

It's horrifying.

Can he get these idiots out of the way in time

before the Terminator puts the laser dot on her?

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

Yes.

Barely.

And it's split-second.

And I just want to compliment Mark Goldblatt

for doing a remarkable job on the cutting of this scene

and refining it down to one split-second shot.

I think Kyle Reese is probably on screen in the pivotal moment

of this scene--

we can find out right now--

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7--

[MOUSE CLICKING]

10 frames.

After all these long slow-motion shots,

it all pivots on 10 frames.

And now watch what happens next, here in real-time.

She falls out the way.

He starts shooting.

We pop back and forth.

These are 10 frame, 16 frame, 18 frame shots.

It all happens like lightning.

It even seems faster because of the fact--

the juxtaposition that you're coming off of slow motion

into action.

[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

So just to see it again.

We're building.

We're building in slow, nightmarish, dream-like moment

to Reese pulls the trigger.

Everything pivots on that.

And then it's just boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Shot.

Shot.

Shot.

Shot.

Shot.

Shot.

Cut.

It's 18 frames per cut.

And it doesn't stop again until we find out what

happened to the Terminator.

And he's on the ground not dead.

Is he dead?

And he's completely still.

So what the shot is saying is, he's dead.

Or is he?

No he's not.

I could have gone straight to him opening his eyes.

But it was more interesting to do the hand.

So now the whole thing just escalated to a new level.

We cut to Sarah to show that she saw the result of him

taking six 12-gauge rounds at close range

and falling to the ground.

She saw that he's getting up.

Because it's important later that she saw it.

[GUNFIRE, SCREAMING]

This is a case where a low angle--

a low wide-angle lens, an 18 millimeter lens

right on the floor, makes him seem huge.

Because now you want to give him the power.

Power has shifted.

Reese had the power for a moment, but it was ineffective.

Now the Terminator has ascended.

He's that which must be feared.

He's that which is implacable that can't be stopped.

So you want to make him big and powerful at this point.

Here's a shot that's, you know, I

could have done this on a different choice of lenses.

This is actually a relatively short lens

very close to the weapon.

And I found this out when I was storyboarding,

when I was photographing my friend Bill Wisher

and having him stick shotguns out of my car in the--

out in the-- out at the city dump,

that if I got a long lens, I saw a small gun

in the actor's hand relative to the size of their face.

If I moved in on a wider lens, I saw a big gun

that was right in front of me.

It was scarier.

So the instrument of death became as important

as the Terminator.

And he sort of becomes one with it.

And it's because the wide lenses seem to enhance

the power of the shot.

[OMINOUS MUSIC]

Everything you do, every decision you make, every lens

choice you make, everything that you ask an actor to do all

adds up to a total effect of a film.

[OMINOUS MUSIC]