Original subtitles

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

I don't really love the term "villain."

Because I don't think people ever

think they're villains, even people that are doing

horrific things, cruel things.

They have their own rationale.

We may not agree with it.

And it may be warped or delusional.

But they have their own rationale.

They don't think they're villains, for the most part.

So I like the term "adversary."

So an adversary can be nature itself.

It could be the tornado in "Twister," for example.

But generally, we like human adversaries.

Because, first of all, they're more fun.

And we see interesting interpretations by actors.

So you can go from a relatively simplistic adversary,

like the Terminator, who basically is just death.

He's just unstoppable.

He's just very clear.

And you take a very simple concept

and you execute it in a disciplined way that

becomes extraordinary, because of the perfect synchronicity

between the actor, Arnold, and his character,

and the way that that was realized,

and the fact that he's an unstoppable force.

And it's stated by one of the characters.

It can't be bargained with.

It can't be reasoned with.

It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear.

And it absolutely will not stop--

ever-- until you are dead.

JAMES CAMERON: You've just made him

a very, very simple character.

So that's kind of the opposite of subtlety.

That's simple in extremity, which is kind of terrifying.

Because humans are complex, and there's always the chance

that we could maybe talk our way out of it,

or we could negotiate, or we could buy them off,

or something like that.

Not going to work with the Terminator.

When I got the great opportunity to direct the sequel to Ridley

Scott's classic film, "Alien," where I went for the detail

was the Alien Queen.

The Alien Queen was not quite so simple a character.

Because there's an interesting scene

in that film where Ripley does negotiate with the Alien Queen.

[SNARLING]

JAMES CAMERON: She says, I've got the flamethrower.

There's a lot of eggs in this room.

I know you care, because you're a mother.

So already, that simple character

was made more complex.

Even though we never heard the Alien Queen utter

a line of dialogue, we knew exactly what

she was thinking, which was interesting and fun.

Who was the villain in "Titanic?"

The fiancee?

I mean, I think he was an interesting character.

There were a number of people who were adversarial

to our main characters.

But really it was fate.

It was circumstance.

It was destiny.

So to say that there was a "villain" in that film,

I think the villain was death.

[BELL RINGING]

The villain was the death that you

knew was there from the beginning from the moment

you bought a ticket to go see a movie called "Titanic,"

where thousands of people died.

You could say, us against nature, but it was really--

nature wasn't the enemy.

It was human mismanagement that created a catastrophe.

So that's a villain in its own sort of category.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

The introduction of the adversary

is I think as important as the introduction

of the protagonist.

We need to invest in the adversary, as well.

We have to imbue that adversary with power.

We have to feel that they are a worthy adversary, that this

is someone who can be very threatening-- maybe threatening

to everybody, or maybe just specifically

threatening to our character.

If we don't believe in their power, their lethality,

or their ability to do harm to our character,

then we're not invested in the story.

So we have to spend time with them.

And I believe that any character you're

spending time with in a movie should be interesting.

They should be unique.

They should be different.

They should be quirky.

Or they should be fascinating in some way.

So Arnold's Terminator character was introduced essentially

appearing in a ball of lightning from somewhere else.

Just-- [POP NOISE] --he's just there.

And he's crouched in this kind of almost Greek God

sculptural way in a cloud of smoke, rises out of that,

and all of a sudden you're interested.

Like who is this guy?

Why is he naked?

And who is he?

What's he do?

And then he walks forward, and he looks out over the city.

And there's-- to me, even that shot is an implied threat.

He's about to go out there into that city

and do something harmful.

You just know right away he's there to do bad.

And then that question gets answered within the next minute

or so, where he encounters these guys hanging out

up at Griffith Observatory and kills them

all for one simple thing--

Your clothes.

Give them to me.

Now.

JAMES CAMERON: He needed their clothing so he could blend in.

So he could perform his mission.

So you start to very quickly declare that he's relentless.

He's mission-focused.

He has-- he kind of stands out.

He doesn't blend in.

So his attempt to basically kind of camouflage himself

is always going to be challenged.

I think the more an actor tries to make a villain "scary,"

the more they fail.

Sometimes it's the absolute banality of how they talk

and how they express themselves, and the fact

that they seem real, they seem to be

a real person makes it scarier.

Because it seems more plausible.

You know?

I think that it's important to resist the desire

to do Dracula, or Darth Vader, or the Terminator

unless you're really confident that you

can sell that in an extraordinary way that

hasn't been seen before.

I think quirkiness, nuance, detail, humor--

you create an adversary that's humorous,

now you're getting conflicting signals.

Because you innately like funny people.

But wait a minute?

This guy's a killer.

You make them compelling.

You make them not necessarily subtle, but detailed

and a little bit against the simple expectation.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

With the Terminator, I think you knew what was on his mind.

You even went inside his mind.

We did an interesting thing there,

which is we literally go inside the Terminator's processing.

You see what the outside world looks like to him.

And you see all the graphic overlays

of the processing that's going on.

So it's a metaphor for how his mind works.

He's working from a visual basis.

He's processing it.

He's identifying targets.

It's sort of printing out what his analysis of that target is.

And people were interested in that.

So once again, it's engagement.

It's making the villain subjective for a moment.

You're briefly in the Terminator's reality.

You're in the reality of a machine killer for a moment.

And I think that that's a very powerful tool.

Put your audience subjectively in the reality

of the adversary, and the adversary becomes real.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

In the case of the Alien Queen, I

was trying to create a character whose motivation I understood,

but who was terrifying and very other--

other from us-- and dangerous and terrifying in a very almost

subconscious way because of that.

So the Alien Queen, following on the motifs of the first film,

doesn't have eyes.

She's all mouth.

She has no eyes at all.

And so we think of the eyes as the window of the soul.

We think of the eyes as being an incredibly expressive part

of the face.

But the mouth is the way we communicate verbally.

And so much of our expression, really more so than the eyes,

is in our mouth.

So the Alien Queen had an exaggerated mouth.

She even had a mouth within her mouth that extended out.

So she didn't use language, at least not

a language we could understand.

Although, presumably, she had a way

of communicating in complex symbolic forms

with her other Alien warriors.

Because she basically hisses at them, and they understand what

she means.

Now when my mother used to hiss at me,

I understood what she meant.

But I think the implication was there was probably

some high frequency coded data in that hiss, and/or, who

knows, a telepathic connection.

Whatever.

But the point is we couldn't understand what

the Alien Queen was saying.

But it didn't matter.

[SNARLING]

[HISSING]

[NERVOUS EXHALE]