James Cameron discusses the minor alteration he’s made to Terminator 2: Judgment Day 3D.
With Terminator 2: Judgment Day due for theatrical rerelease in a remastered 3D edition on August 29th, director James Cameron has discussed how he used the opportunity to correct a continuity error that has bothered him since the film’s original release in 1991. Don’t worry, he’s not doing a ‘George Lucas’ on us and adding needless extra bits of CGI throughout the film.
The director explained to Digital Spy;
“I kinda resist the urge to go back and change things. It’s a very slippery slope. Where do you draw the line? The film is a snap shot of what was possible – just barley possible – at that time. Trying to make it a contemporary film is really kind of… Pointless. It’s not really necessary either, because the film works.”
But he did reveal the one change that he’s made;
“Just one, but I had to fix it. When the tow truck crashes into the canal, the windshields pop out, but they are clearly back in right after that. They’re even part of the story – the T-100 knocks one out with his hand to see better. So we digitally fixed it. But you know, if I could’ve digitally fixed it at the time, I would have. So I consider that to be valid.”
Cameron also revealed that although the effects in the film are revered by many he was conscious that he didn’t overuse them at the time;
” I think its biggest virtue is that the CG effects were used sparingly. That was a real helicopter flying under a real bridge. It was a real tanker truck crashing into a real steel mill. There was no fucking around back then. From a safety point of view some of that stuff would probably be digital now, but we’d still hang our hat somewhere. If you can still get a tow truck and crash it into a canal, I think we’d probably still do that. There’s always the temptation to go a little further, to push the physics and I think that’s where a lot of films get out on the short end of the limb. They start to lose connection with a reality. There was a lot of virtues in our limitations back in 1991″.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day 3D gets a very limited theatrical release in the US on August 25th and the UK on August 29th, the 20th anniversary of the film’s fabled Judgment Day.