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JAMES CAMERON: Arnold Schwarzenegger sucked up

a whole bunch of our budget.

What we had left to make the movie wasn't a lot.

It was around-- around, as I said, around $4 million

for a-- for a pretty ambitious film of a lot of big action

sequences.

And, as anybody knows, night street photography

can be expensive, big action sequences are expensive,

big stunts are expensive.

Visual effects, creating a future world is expensive,

and doing prosthetic makeup can be expensive.

But, you know, I also knew that it

could be done on a shoestring because I'd

worked for Roger Corman for a few years

and we'd done all that stuff.

So, once again, the key was preparation.

So clearly these storyboards were

drawn in that-- in that six-month interval

after I knew I had Arnold and I had time to plan.

So this is clearly--

Arnold has been-- his likeness has been incorporated

into the storyboards.

So he enters the room.

He's a shadowy figure.

He turns on the light.

We see the effect of Reese's firing back at him

and the car chase and the crash and everything.

His eye has been smashed, it's swollen shut.

We're starting to realize that he's partially biological,

that he's a cyborg.

And-- but we don't know exactly why he's-- we don't know yet

why he's bulletproof.

We don't know he has this--

we don't know that he has this endoskeleton inside him.

We just know that he seems to be kind of bulletproof,

but we don't know why.

And we're being led to believe that he's

a biological organism.

He's bleeding, he's swollen, and so on.

So it's-- in a funny way, it's kind of a misdirect.

So he sits down, he looks at a place

where his arm was hit by Reese's 12-gauge shotgun.

And he's prepared himself in advance

in case he needs repairs.

He reaches over, picks up an X-Acto knife,

and it begins to cut his wrist open.

And then I even took the liberty of working with my friend

Stan Winston to figure out how we were going to do it,

because we wanted to see his hand moving, we wanted

to see the actuators, the hydraulic actuators moving

in his forearm.

And so we came up with the idea that he would--

he would hide his real arm.

He would have a false arm, and there'd

be a puppeteer underneath the table coming up

through a hole in the desk.

His hand was inside a sort of glove that continued this way.

It was actually quite a clever solution.

I incorporated that into the storyboards.

That's how Stan and I decided that we were going to do it.

So he cuts his wrist, and then he--

you know, we see him-- we see him working.

We don't see what he's doing, we don't see the surgery step

by step.

He puts down the X-Acto knife.

A little bit of blood on it.

And then we see the result of it.

Now I had elected that he basically kind of flayed open

all of the skin of his forearm and we all--

we see the mechanism underneath.

And this was meant to be the big reveal.

He's a cyborg.

He's a machine with some kind of fleshy outer coating.

When we actually did the scene, we

wound up with it being a more contained surgical site,

and I don't remember the reason for that.

Maybe they just decided it was easier to do

or maybe we were a little concerned

about our-- the graphicness of that for the rating.

So now let's take a quick look at the scene.

Let's see where the storyboard led us.

So I'll go back to the beginning storyboard here.

All right.

So we've got the character coming in a window.

The character appears, throwing their shadow on a window.

For a lighting effect, we went with a Venetian blind

so that we could get that kind of German expressionistic kind

of feeling with the shadows thrown by a Venetian blind.

There's a fire escape ladder here, fire escape ladder here.

Different orientation, but it's the same visual cue.

We're in a higher level of the building.

He's coming in the back way, so we

didn't have to go through the lobby and up the elevator.

He's come up the fire escape.

There's some kind of neon sign outside.

It sort of tells us we're still urban

and we're in some flophouse that's on-- on an upper level.

We can tell it's kind of a flophouse

because it's-- it's decorated in a very crude way.

He walks in as a silhouette.

We don't see much.

And he puts on the light, and we go to the close-up.

Light bulb is in frame.

This is tracking very closely to the storyboard.

Here's the storyboard.

Light bulb's in frame.

Naked light.

And we see his injuries.

And that's very much what we shot.

So we had a very clear intention with the scene.

We knew beat by beat what we were doing.

So stylistically we're right in the zone,

we knew what we were doing because we drew it up.

It starts with the art.

And so these-- these drawings are not only storyboards,

but they're also, in a sense, design drawings or style guide.

So go to the next-- next series.

He reveals the injury and he starts to do the surgery.

And that's literally the next cut.

So here, he sits down, and the reason we decided to do this

was to show the audience that there wasn't a hole here

with a puppeteer underneath-- to implant subconsciously

in the audience's mind that it is just a normal table.

He puts his hand on the table.

He reveals the wound.

And then he reaches for the X-Acto knife.

And I knew that that was a critical cutting

piece that we needed.

That's this shot.

So this was just a, you know, 100-millimeter macro

shot that we did deep in post-production.

I probably-- I probably did this shot for 20 bucks.

Shot it myself, you know?

I didn't waste time on my inserts

when I was shooting with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I picked my battles.

And I knew that I could pick up all kinds of stuff

later down and dirty on the cheap

just by renting a camera and a couple of lights,

and I think we--

I think we shot this on my desk at my apartment.

But, knowing that you have that cut, now

in the next shot we see, geez, it looks the same, right?

Except it's not.

We've gone to this other setup.

We've gone to this setup.

And now you could use and blend it.

He could put his hand down and then

you could literally blend to the-- the other practical gag

and it would be seamless.

But who cares?

It worked.

So he starts to cut that same arm

that you think is Arnold's arm that he just set down.

Now he's-- now he's hogging into it.

We cut to Arnold.

There's a known cutaway that was known ahead

of time, planned ahead of time.

He sets the knife down.

That's this shot.

There's Arnold working, there's the knife going down,

and then we're going to reveal what it is he's been doing.

And he reaches in with a pair of forceps.

Again, using inserts to create tension and a sense of detail.

And he's opened up his arm and we

see the actuators moving inside the arm

and we actually even punch in on it.

But the key to it was to hold in this tilt down where we're

coming off his face down, down his arm.

We have no reason to think it's not Arnold's arm,

and we see it moving, and through the hole,

we can glimpse the actuator.

So how'd they do that?

I mean, you've got to remember, this is 1984.

So I think anybody that studies a sequence can kind of see

how it's done now, but the point is,

that with a little planning, a little ingenuity,

working with the right people and Stan Winston--

he was just coming up at the time,

he became one of the top world-class prosthetics

and makeup effects designers, you figure it out.

You figure it out ahead of time, you draw it up,

and if it works in a drawing, it's going to work on film.

Because film is also about image replacement

and image retention.

So seeing Arnold put his arm down and then cutting back

to a very similar angle where it's not his arm, it's now--

it's now your effects gag, creates the impression that

it's still his arm, and when you cut it open, you're--

Arnold's cutting his arm open.

So once again, the emphasis here is on-- is on planning.

When we go to the next sequence where he operates

on his eye, very similar thing.

The payoff is the moment where he sticks the exact knife

into his eye.

Well clearly we're not having Arnold Schwarzenegger stick

an X-Acto knife into his eye.

So this is what we came up with.

That we'd have a puppet head that

was actuated by a puppeteer's hand inside the head.

And there'd be one person who was pretending

to be Arnold's right arm and a completely other person

was pretending to be Arnold's left arm.

And as memory serves, I think Arnold was actually

one of the people.

So we actually got his real hand on-- on one of them.

And so once again, the frame is--

it's what's outside of the frame you're not processing--

you're not able to process.

You're only given what's inside that frame.

So here he is cutting into his eyeball,

and this is the puppet head.

And here's-- here's one person's hand and here's the other

person's hand.

And you can see that they--

they map very well to each other in terms of--

of how the shot was done.

And you're led to believe that it's Arnold,

or at least you're not quite sure of how it's being done.

And then here, he's just faking it.

If you look very carefully, if I were to stop it on a frame--

and this is just kind of looking behind the scene,

there's no blade in that X-Acto knife.

We're not going to have Arnold screw

around with an X-Acto knife up next to his eye.

Safety was more important than us being seen.

And there was no digital way to put the blade in back then.

Now, you could have him poke himself

in the face with a-- with a bladeless X-Acto knife

and put the blade in later and even

see it come out of his skin or whatever,

it'd be very easy to do.

In those days I just took the chance

that people wouldn't see it.

And they don't see it.

Because they see what they expect

to see, up to a certain point, unless you really

play fast and loose.

There's even one shot earlier in the sequence that's even more

blatant, and it's this one.

He literally is just raising an X-Acto knife

that has no blade in it.

But we want there to be a blade there.

And I don't remember anybody raising a fuss about it

at the time.

Now, of course, with internet trolls,

it'll be all over the place within 24 hours.

Aha, those idiots.

But at the time, there was a willing suspension

of disbelief, because effects were cruder back in that day.

And as-- the farther you go back, the cruder they were.

The willing suspension of disbelief was greater.

Now, the willing suspension of disbelief

is not as great, so you've got to be even better.

But the good news is, the effects techniques are better

and they're cheaper.

So you meet-- you meet the demand.

It's a constant dance.

But, you know, just full disclosure,

there's no blade in the X-Acto knife,

and it's right there in front of God and everybody,

and people want to see that there's a blade there,

and so they do.

So once again, a very low-budget film

that was trying very, very hard to punch above its weight.

And when I see it today, you know, it more or less holds up.

There's a lot of little cringey moments, you know?

But I think it did manage to punch

above its weight for its-- for its time period.

And that's what you always want to aspire to,

I think, as a filmmaker working on a low budget.

Try to look like more than what you had.

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