Nicolas Roeg: On Truffaut, Words and Images

Fahrenheit 451 (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

There are things that Truffaut did in those early movies that left a lasting impression: the opening expository section of ‘Jules and Jim’, where time and space is abolished and the images flow like music across the screen; the series of shots from ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (another underrated picture) where the camera moves in close-closer-closest on a character in imminent danger, which I admit I've duplicated many times in my own films. And the character played by Charles Aznavour in ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ who keeps almost acting but never does until it’s too late, had a profound effect on me, and on many other filmmakers – Martin Scorsese.

Francois Truffaut’s underrated adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), was regarded by the director as his ‘saddest and most difficult’ filmmaking experience, mainly due to tension in the relationship between Truffaut and leading man Oskar Werner. 

Truffaut wrote the English-language script in collaboration with Jean-Louis Richard. Critics have assumed that Truffaut’s limited grasp of English accounts for the film’s awkwardness – its dialogue is often clumsy and its performances weirdly stilted. It’s a curious film, lively and surreal in tone, filmed in a pointedly modernist style that only underlines how uncomfortable the viewing experience is. Despite its flaws it’s a strangely compelling film that vividly engages with Bradbury’s themes of knowledge, control and the media.

The film’s cinematographer was Nicolas Roeg who went on to become a distinguished director in his own right. Roeg had previously worked on Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and later Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) before moving into direction in 1968 in collaboration with the painter and writer Donald Cammell on Performance.

The glacial, futuristic surface of Fahrenheit 451 later re-emerges in Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) which starred David Bowie, with its harsh, alien vision of the barrenness of modern life.

Shortly after Francois Truffaut died in 1984, Nicolas Roeg spoke to Richard Combs about working with Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451, for an article published in Sight & Sound magazine:

I’ve always felt that, although Truffaut was greatly revered and admired, at the same time, in terms of film and how much he loved film, he was underestimated. Because he was known to be a literary man, someone who was enormously fond of literature, he was adopted by a very literary set. But in fact his love of literature was separate from his love of film. I think that’s why, many times, he has been underestimated as an essentially visual person. I enjoyed working with him tremendously on Fahrenheit 451, which was a film very much to be ‘read’ in terms of images. I suppose he was the first director, the first film person, with whom I’d enjoyed having a conversation about film, or the hope of film. There weren’t many about in those days.

I remember there was a lot of criticism of Fahrenheit to do with François’ knowledge of English. The critics complained that it was so stilted. But that had all been quite deliberate. He hadn’t even wanted to place it as an English film, or to suggest that the language was necessarily English. The script was written first in French, deliberately, so that it could be translated into English, then translated back into French, because he wanted to lose the English idiom completely, then finally translated back into English. He wanted it set - and I thought this was a marvellously futuristic idea – in a time when people had lost the use of language. After all, the whole premise of the film was to do with losing a literary background. And that was completely missed by the critics.

There was even one little clue which Truffaut put inside the film, because he didn’t want this to be mistaken. There was a scene where Montag and Clarisse are sitting talking; they can see the fire station, and a man comes up and puts a note through the letter box. Montag explains why that is, people reporting on each other. Clarisse says, oh, he’s just a common informer; and Montag says, informant. Stilted things, stilted phrases: that was absolutely putting the dot on the ‘i’. We’ve even seen that sort of thing come to pass. Language is flattened slightly. You see it in films: in the 1930s and 40s in America they used words in films that they wouldn’t put in a script today. I don’t know whether it’s an apocryphal story, but apparently when George Cukor did a remake of Old Acquaintance as Rich and Famous, they did research into the title, and hardly anyone in America knew what an acquaintance was.

François was aware of that, and he realised that images were things to be read. Like the scene where Montag is sitting in bed with comics. Those comics were very carefully designed; they were a form of shorthand, so that the news could be read in pictures. The beauty of the language wasn’t what was important. It was like a rather intimate film where language means a lot, but we no longer have the language. So you virtually have to read the pictures. It implies there will come a time when people will still have all those emotions, but you have to read through other indications, other signs. It was a sign language once, and maybe we’ll go back to that.

François thought the stranglehold of the written word was going to be equalled, if not superseded, by the idea of images. I guess it takes a long time; he thought it was coming quicker. But in some ways one forgets how quickly things have changed. For instance, he wanted no written signs, and in the fire station there was nothing written. It was very difficult to work those signs out. But think about how road signs have changed. Once when you drove down the road you’d have to read dozens of things – road bears to the left, school ahead – but now they’re just children with a stripe through them, so we can drive anywhere in Europe. At the same time that was a very filmic thought: the essence of film. I’m sure that was why he was attracted to the story.

I’d hate it to be forgotten just how much of that kind of a filmmaker he was. Not just charming stories and enchanting acting. For instance, he wanted to make a film with small children, babies, just to get their expression at the point when words aren’t quite understandable. We had a scene in Fahrenheit with a baby lying in his pram in the park, and the fire chief turns him over and finds a book underneath. Another aspect of that is the scene at the end with the book people – who are all wrong. The veneration of literature – which he loved – is all wrong. The boy who is reciting from Stevenson, reciting after the old man, has got it wrong. And there are twins who announce themselves as Pride and Prejudice, Part One and Part Two, but of course there isn’t a Part One and Part Two in Pride and Prejudice. All these things were missed by the very people who had revered him as a literary filmmaker.

It’s the same thing with acting. Oskar Werner – who tragically also died a few weeks ago – was at the time, as I remember, just starting to enter a successful, commercial stage of his life. And he was rather concerned about his image. It appeared to be, or I surmise, that Oskar thought this was a film he was doing for François, because he owed him something or he liked him. But at that stage of his career he just wanted to get it over with. To play the part of Montag, you have to be completely dedicated to the thing. So he didn’t enter fully into the film. But François won in the end; he had to, again by the use of film, by juxtaposing one thing with another. Whatever meaning you tell me you are putting into that performance, I shall change it by making you look at a rubber duck. If you look seriously at this man when I want you to be smiling, because I want you not to understand what is happening, I shall use that serious look. I shall make you be looking at a rubber duck while he is talking. So that you will look seriously as if you don’t understand.

Every single piece in the construction of the film was visual. I remember when the art department brought a beautifully made model of a fire engine into the office of Cyril Cusack, who played the fire chief. It was like the model that a ship’s captain would traditionally have had in his cabin. But François said, no, no, go to a toy shop and get me a toy. Because that sort of skill is already gone from the world. It was a toy world in which all the skills had been lost. When we discussed the look of the film, he said, I don’t want it to have a reality, I want it as a Doris Day film, with little shining colours. We had great trouble, because at that time people were going for a tremendous realism. I was ordering huge brutes, to make it high key, glossy, like Technicolor.

He also wanted a certain sense of awkwardness in behaviour patterns. After all, things change subtly. I’ve always noticed that films set in any sort of future very rarely draw on the present. But just imagine someone a hundred years ago trying to predict the present. I live in a house that’s a hundred years old. Its internal functions are different, the carriages outside are different – but it’s a mixture. Things don’t all go away. That’s why we began Fahrenheit with those aerials and things on top of suburban houses, although inside the houses are sliding doors – which don’t work… Changes are so subtle: relationships, manners, our behaviour. I thought it was quite a frightening film in that respect. But it’s very difficult to read that. It’s easier to see something you can be totally in awe of. Something which is part of your life and has taken on another aspect is much more difficult to believe in.

François was rather sanguine about the failure of Fahrenheit, critically and commercially. One time when we were having dinner he said, it must have been a bad film. I asked why? He said, nobody went to see it. In terms of his filmmaking, I don’t think he pulled back after that at all. But Fahrenheit might have been a stretch which he was not given the chance to do again. And he wasn’t a man to explain himself. He’d rather go on: a futuristic present-day person. He was wonderful about the past. He told me how he hated costume pictures where they tell you these were the clothes they wore from 1490 to 1498, and then these clothes were worn from 1498 to 1502. He said, I like to have a lot of clothes, sort of turn of the century, and just put them in a basket and have the artists try some of them on. After all, the jacket I am wearing is 15 years old. I am not always in fashion.

– ‘Looking at the rubber duck: Nic Roeg on Truffaut and the making of Fahrenheit 451’ (Sight & Sound, Winter 1984/85). For original article go here

Andrei Tarkovsky: Into the Zone

Stalker (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Stalker (1979), Tarkovsky's fifth feature film and the final one he shot in the Soviet Union before defecting to the West. Following his voluntary exile, only two more fiction works were planned: Nostalghia, shot in Italy and released in 1983, and The Sacrifice, shot in Sweden (1986). The director died of cancer in 1986, just outside Paris, at the age of fifty-four. 

Stalker was his second attempt at science-fiction subject matter, following the space adventure Solaris (1972), though it is nearly indistinguishable from both that earlier film and The Mirror. The film is an adaptation of the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady (1925–91) and Boris (1933–2012) Strugatsky, which Tarkovsky read shortly after it was published in the literary magazine Avrora in 1972. The casual observer may wonder why he was drawn to this particular tale. Unlike high-art sources such as Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, it is firmly rooted in the hard-boiled end of the literary spectrum; it is rife with slang and violence, as well as characterization and sentiment to match. Yet beneath the surface, and more specifically in the psychology of the character who would become the film's eponymous protagonist (in relation to his wife and their mysteriously damaged daughter, Monkey), there is a difficult-to-define tenderness of outlook more in keeping with the director's usual preoccupations: a humanistic belief (if one can put it that strongly) in the sacrament of marriage. Although the book's central vision is dystopian, this may have contributed to its appeal. Certainly, there were numerous reasons to be dystopian about the Soviet Union at the time. 

Having said that, the film is a loose adaptation of the novel. The Zone's basic premise—that it was created years ago by an alien incursion and is full of mysterious dangers that have been explored illegally over the years by freelance agents known as stalkers (who occasionally offered themselves as guides to gullible tourists)—is common to both book and film. However, the book contains numerous additional incidents, characters, and digressions, and, unlike the film, it unfolds over an extended period of time. Tarkovsky's work necessitated a rigorous simplification of the story line. For example, the book's multiple incursions into the Zone are reduced to a single encounter, while the Stalker's companions, the Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and the Professor (Nikolai Grinko), are director inventions (though they contain composite elements from the original). At the heart of the Zone, and only accessible to those who have survived the invisible terrors of the "Grinder" (a seemingly endless tunnel filled with jagged stalagmites and stalactites), is the legendary Room, entry into which is said to grant the wayfarer the fulfilment of his deepest desires. (In the novel, magic is associated with an object—a "Golden Sphere"—rather than with a destination, but the two concepts are otherwise identical.) Viewers of the film, as well as readers of the book, may have varying perspectives on how "deep" a concept we are confronted with here, when viewed through the lofty lens of philosophy or religion. Yet "innermost desire" is saved from glibness by the sheer complexity of its distribution throughout the film: what those deepest desires are (whether altruistic or cynically selfish) is never finally pin-pointed to any of the three characters in a coherent manner.

Tarkovsky creates an immersive world that is rich in material detail and has an organic feel to it. As a religious allegory, a reflection of contemporary political anxieties, and a meditation on film itself, Stalker surrounds the viewer in a series of possible interpretations.

“Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1980) came second, behind Blade Runner, in a recent BFI poll of its members’ top movies. In outline, it’s one of the simplest films ever made: a guide, or Stalker, takes two people, Writer and Professor, into a forbidden area called the Zone, at the heart of which is the Room, where your deepest wish will come true. It is this simplicity that gives the film its fathomless resonance. If Tarkovsky’s previous film, Solaris, seemed like a Soviet 2001, was Stalker Tarkovsky’s take on The Wizard of Oz?

“The starkness of its conception did not prevent the production traumas that seem integral to the creation myths of other favourites: the likes of Apocalypse Now and Fitzcarraldo. Plans to shoot in Tajikistan had to be abandoned because of an earthquake. Having relocated to an abandoned hydroelectric power station in Estonia, Tarkovsky was dissatisfied with the cinematography and decided to shoot a pared-down version of the script all over again – in the same place. The price paid for this pursuit of an ideal is incalculable. Sound recordist Vladimir Sharun believes the deaths from cancer of Tarkovsky (in 1986), his wife Larissa and Anatoly Solonitsyn (who plays the Writer) were all due to contamination from a chemical plant upstream from the set.

“The film itself has become synonymous both with cinema’s claims to high art and a test of the viewer’s ability to appreciate it as such. Anyone sharing Cate Blanchett’s enthusiasm for it – "every single frame of the film is burned into my retina" – attests not just to the director’s lofty purity of purpose, but to their own capacity to survive at the challenging peaks of human achievement. So a certain amount of blowback is inevitable. David Thomson included Stalker in his pantheon of 1,000 memorable movies, but was dubious about the notion of the Room. Perhaps it’s "an infinite, if dank enclosure in which an uncertain number of strangers are watching the works of Tarkovsky. Equally, it may be that as malfunction of one kind or another covers the world, we may have a hard time distinguishing the Room, the Zone, and the local multiplex.”

– Geoff Dyer.

The following interview with Andrei Tarkovsky was conducted by the renowned Italian scriptwriter Tonino Guerra in 1979.

TG: What does "Stalker" mean?

AT: It’s a made-up word that comes from the English verb "to stalk": to approach furtively. In this film this word indicates the profession of one who crosses the borders and penetrates a forbidden Zone with a specific objective , a bit like a bootlegger or a smuggler. The stalker’s craft is passed on from one generation to the next. In my film, the forbidden Zone represents the places where desires can be satisfied. The spectator may doubt its existence or see it merely as a myth or a joke . . . or even as the fantasy of our hero. For the viewer this remains a mystery. The existence in the zone of a room where dreams come true serves solely as pretext to revealing the personalities of the three protagonists.

TG: What kind of person is the Stalker?

AT: He’s a very honest man, clean, and intellectually innocent. His wife describes him as "cheerful." He leads men into the Zone to, he says, make them happy. He gives himself completely to this task, with total lack of self-interest. He believes that it’s the only way to make people happy. In the end his is the story of the last of the idealists. It’s the story of a man who believes in the possibility of happiness independent of the will and the capacity of man. His job gives meaning to his life.

As if he were a priest of the Zone, the Stalker leads men there to make them happy. In reality, no one can say for sure if anyone there is happy.

At the end of his journey in the Zone, under the influence of the people he is leading, he loses faith in the possibility of making all of mankind happy. He can no longer find anyone who believes in this Zone or in the happiness to be found in this room. In the end he finds himself alone with his idea of human happiness achieved by a pure faith.

TG: When did the idea of this film come to you?

AT: I had recommended a short novel, Picnic on the Roadside, to my friend, the filmmaker Giorgi Kalatozishvili, thinking he might adapt it to film. Afterwards, I don’t know why, Giorgi could not obtain the rights from the authors of the novel, the Strugatsky brothers, and he abandoned the idea of this film. The idea began to turn in my head, at first from time to time and then more and more often. It seemed to me that this novel could be made into a film with a unity of location, time, and action. This classic unity -Aristotelian in my view - permits us to approach truly authentic filmmaking, which for me is not action film, outwardly dynamic.

I must say, too, that the script of Stalker has nothing in common with the novel, Picnic on the Roadside, except for the two words, "Stalker" and "Zone." So you see the history of the origins of my film is deceptive.

TG: : Do the images that you’ve shot suggest specific musical accompaniment?

AT: When I saw the rushes for the first time, I thought the film wouldn’t need any music. It seemed to me that it could-that it must even - rely solely on sounds. Now I would like to try muted music, barely audible, behind the noise of trains that pass beneath the windows of the Stalker’s home. For instance, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony ("Ode to Joy"), Wagner, or even the Marseillaise’ In any case music that is more or less popular, that expresses the movement of the masses’ the theme of humanity’s social destiny. But this music must be barely heard beneath the noise, in a way that the spectator is not aware of it. Moreover, I would like most of the noise and sound to be composed by a composer. In the film, for example, the three people undertake a long journey in a railway car. I’d like that the noise of the wheels on the rails not be the natural sound but elaborated upon by the composer with electronic music. At the same time, one mustn’t be aware of music, nor of natural sounds.

TG: But will there be a central theme?

AT: I think the theme will be Far Eastern, a kind of Zen music, where the principle is concentration rather than description’ The main musical theme wiII have to be, on the one hand, purged of all emotion, and on the other, of all thought or programmatic intent. It must express its truth about the world around us in an autonomous way. It must be self-contained.

TG: Can you describe to me, image by image, the end of the film, as if I were blind?

AT: It would probably be great not to make films, but instead to simply describe them to blind people. A wonderful idea! One would only need to buy a tape recorder. "Thought expressed is a lie," said the poet.

TG: So, I can’t see. Tell.

AT: In the foreground, a sick little girl, Stalker’s daughter’ She holds a large book in front of her face. She is wearing a scarf’ She is in profile against an illuminated window. Slowly, the camera pulls back and frames a part of the table. The table in the foreground with dirty dishes on it: two glasses and a teapot. The little girl puts the book down on her knees, and we hear her voice repeating what she has just read’ She looks at one of the glasses. The glass, under the force of her look’ moves towards the camera. The child looks at the other glass and the other glass also begins to move forward. And then the child looks at the glass at the edge of the table and it falls to the floor without breaking. We then hear a train passing very close by, making a strange sound. The walls shake more and more. The camera goes back to the girl in the foreground and in the midst of this crashing noise the film ends.

TG: Are you thinking about another film right away after Stalker?

AT: I would like to make the film that we decided to make together: Italian journey. But you can talk about that better than I can. I would like to make a film that would lose some viewers and gain others, new ones. I would like our film to be seen by different people than those we call film viewers.

 TG: I was told that you would like to change your style completely. Is this true?

AT: Yes, only I don’t know how yet . . . It would be great for me to make a film with the freedom of a beginner. To turn down big financing. To have the possibility to observe nature and men at my leisure, without haste. And the subject would emerge of itself, as the result of these observations and not necessarily planned down to the smallest detail.

Such a film would have to be made in complete freedom, independent of inspiration, of actors, of camera angles and shots. And with a discreet camera . . . It seems to me that making a film in this way would push me to go much further.

TG: What images do you think you’ve "stolen" from someone else, even though you’ve obviously transformed them into your own style?

AT: I’m generally very wary of this and I try to avoid it. I don’t like the suggestion that I may not have acted in such or such a situation with complete independence. Yet, lately, these references begin to interest me. In The Mirror for instance, there are two or three shots that are very clearly inspired by Brueghel: the boy, the small silhouettes of then, the snow, the bare trees, and the river in the distance. I created these shots very consciously and deliberately, not with the idea of copying or to show culture but to bear witness to my love for Brueghel, of my dependence on him, of the deep impression that he has made on my life.

In Andrei Roublev, there was a scene that might have been from Mizoguchi, the great departedJapanese director. I wasn’t aware of it until it was projected. It’s the one where the Russian prince gallops across the countryside on a white horse, and the Tatar is on a black horse. The quality of the image in black and white, the landscape, the opacity of the overcast sky had a strange resemblance to an ink-drawn Chinese landscape.

The two riders gallop after each other. Suddenly the Tatar cries out, whistles, whips his horse, and overtakes the prince. The Russian goes after him but cannot catch up. In the next shot, they have stopped’ There is nothing else. Just the memory of the Russian prince on his white horse trying to catch the Tatar and unable to do it’

It’s a scene that has nothing to do with the plot of the story. It attempts to express the state of a soul and to throw light on the nature of the relationship between the two men. It’s like a game that two boys play. One runs ahead and says, "You can’t catch me!" The other one takes off after him running as fast he can, but he can’t catch him’ Then right afterwards, they forget their game and stop running.

– Stalker, Smuggler of Happiness. Andrei Tarkovsky interviewed by Tonino Guerra, 1979

Approaching the Sequel: Syd Field Interviews James Cameron

(Terminator 2: Directed by James Cameron)

James Cameron was born in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Canada. He started out pursuing a career in physics but ultimately chose to follow his ambition of becoming a filmmaker. While working as a truck driver he wrote scripts in his spare time.

Xenogenesis was Cameron's debut short film. On the back of its science fiction premise, he was able to land a position with New World Pictures, the production company owned by acclaimed B-movie director Roger Corman. While at New World, Cameron worked on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and Piranha II: The Spawning (1987).  

In 1984, Cameron scored a huge success as the director of The Terminator (1984), a compelling story of a time-traveling robot from the future (memorably played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) hunting down the resistance leader in a conflict between human beings and machines. This was followed by Aliens, the sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), starring Sigourney Weaver, which became a critical and commercial success for Cameron.

While working on The Abyss (1989), Cameron encountered a number of setbacks. It was an arduous process to get to the set for the film. It took its toll on the actors and crew, who spent days filming on an enormous underwater set. Although audiences and reviewers were underwhelmed by the premise of scuba divers who discover aliens while retrieving a U.S. Navy submarine, the film did surprisingly well at the box office. Although the visual effects were outstanding, the film didn't win an anticipated Oscar. 

After helping create Kathryn Bigelow's action thriller, Point Break, Cameron got back on track by directing another blockbuster, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The picture broke new records with its visual effects, bringing in more than $200 million at the box office. 

Cameron also wrote and directed the 1994 movie True Lies, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, grossing over $378 million globally and winning two Oscars for its visual effects. 

Cameron next conceived the idea for Titanic, a movie about star-crossed lovers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) stranded onboard the doomed Titanic ocean liner. The film received critical praise and went on to make over $1 billion dollars at the box office, and was nominated for 14 Academy Awards. During his work on the film, Cameron won three Oscars for his work as director, for the editing of the film, and for best picture.

In 1992, screenwriting teacher and author Syd Field approached writer-director James Cameron for an interview. The following excerpt is from the discussion on the origins of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 

He paused for a moment, took a sip of coffee, and said that ‘from a writing standpoint, the things that interested me the most were the characters. When I was writing Ripley for Aliens there were certain things known about her and her experience, but then we lost track of her. In the sequel I was picking her up at a later point and seeing what the effects of those earlier traumas were. With Ripley there was a discontinuity of time, but experientially it was continuous for her because she just went to sleep, and when she woke up, time had gone by.

‘It was much different, much more interesting with Sarah. I had to backfill those intervening nine years, so I had to find efficient ways of dramatically evoking what had happened to her. The tricky part was having it all make sense to a member of the audience who didn’t remember or hadn’t seen the first film. Basically, I had a character popping onto the screen in a certain way, and therefore had to create a back story for that character. I told myself I had to write the script just like there had never been a first film. The sequel had to be a story about someone who encountered something nobody else believes, like the opening scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where Kevin McCarthy swears he’s seen something shocking, and nobody believes him; then he starts telling the story.

‘In Terminator 2, the first time we meet Sarah, she’s locked up in a mental institution, but the real question is, is she crazy? The advantage of a sequel is that you can play games you can’t play in the original. For example, I know the audience knows the Terminator is real. So they’re not going to think she’s crazy. But the question still remains: Is she crazy? Has the past ordeal made her nuts? I wanted to push her character very far.

‘The strange thing that happened in the wake of the film is that a lot of people made the mistake of thinking I was presenting Sarah Connor as a role model for women. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I wanted people to invest in her emotionally, to feel sorry for her, because she had been through such hell. And people made a straight-line extrapolation from Ripley to Sarah.

‘They’re very different characters. Ripley’s been through a trauma, but she has certain innate characteristics of leadership and wisdom under fire; she’s a true hero. Sarah’s not really a hero. She’s an ordinary person who’s been put under extreme pressure, and that makes her warped and twisted, yet strengthened, in a sad way. It’s like you don’t want this to happen to her. The initial image of her had a big scar running down the side of her face, and we actually did makeup tests with scars, but it would have been a real nightmare to deal with a scar like that in production on a day-to-day basis. I really wanted her to look like Tom Beringer in Platoon (Oliver Stone). And Linda was up for it, because the last thing she had done was play Beauty in Beauty and the Beast for three years. It’s a tribute to her as an actor that she was able to pull off that severity without the help of any makeup whatsoever.’

In theater the main ingredient of modern tragedy is an ordinary person who is in an extraordinary circumstance; the situation creates the potential for tragedy. Sarah Connor is no hero; she’s an ordinary person who just happens to be placed in extraordinary circumstances. The situation has the potential for tragedy, but in this case, the Terminator, the Schwarzenegger ‘character,’ becomes the hero.

That was another major problem Cameron had to confront in the sequel. ‘There’s a strange history that happened with the first film,’ he explains. ‘A year or two after The Terminator came out, people remembered the film fondly. They remembered Schwarzenegger from the other roles he had played, like Commando or Predator (Jim Thomas, John Thomas), where he was running around with a machine gun in his hand, spraying bullets everywhere, like he had in The Terminator. But there was this curious blurring of distinction that he was the bad guy in The Terminator.

‘That made me very nervous,’ he says. ‘I knew the ‘bad guy being the hero’ could get me into some pretty dangerous territory, morally and ethically. I absolutely refused to do another film where Arnold Schwarzenegger kicks in the door and shoots everybody in sight and then walks away,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. ‘I thought there must be a way to deflect this image of bad guy as hero, and use what’s great about the character. I didn’t know exactly what to do, but I thought the only way to deal with it would be to address the moral issues head-on.’

For the screenwriter, the challenge is to find a way to deal with this situation so it springs out of the story context and is based on the reaction of character. The dramatic need, the dramatic function of the Terminator is to terminate, to kill anybody or anything that gets in its way. Because he is a cyborg, a computer, he cannot change his nature; only a human or another robot can change the program. So to change the bad guy into a good guy requires changing the dramatic situation, the circumstances surrounding the action. Cameron had to find a way to change the context yet keep Terminator’s dramatic need intact.

‘The key was the kid,’ Cameron explains. ‘Because it’s never really explained why John Connor has such a strong moral template.

‘For me, John was pushed by the situation where he sees the Terminator almost shoot the guy in the parking lot. I think everybody invents their own moral code for themselves, and it usually happens in your teens based on what you’ve been taught, what you’ve seen in the world, what you’ve read, and your own inherent makeup.’

John Connor intuitively knows what’s right ‘but can’t articulate it,’ Cameron continued. ‘John says, ‘You can’t go around killing people,’ and the Terminator says, ‘Why not?’ And the kid can’t answer the question. He gets into a kind of ethical, philosophical question that could go on and on. But all he says is, ‘You just can’t.’

‘I thought the best way to deal with this was not be coy about it and hope it slides by, but to tackle it head-on, make this a story about why you can’t kill people,’ continued Cameron.

He paused a moment, stared at the blinking light on the telephone. ‘What is it that makes us human?’ he asked. ‘Part of what makes us human is our moral code. But what is it that distinguishes us from a hypothetical machine that looks and acts like a human being but is not?

‘Essentially you’ve got a character associated with being the quintessential killing machine; that is his purpose in life. Devoid of any emotion, remorse, or any kind of human social code, he suddenly finds himself in the strangest dilemma of his career. He can’t kill anybody, and he doesn’t even know why. He’s got to figure it out. He’s got to, because he’s half human. And he figures it out at the end. The Tin Man gets his heart. ‘Once I clicked into that, I saw what the whole movie was going to be about.’

Every screenwriter knows that there are four major elements that make up the visual dynamics of screen character. One, the main character or characters must embody a strong dramatic need.

Dramatic need is what your main character wants to win, gain, get, or achieve during the screenplay. What drives your character through the obstacles of the story line, through the conflicts of plot? In the case of Sarah Connor, John Connor, and the Terminator, the dramatic need is to destroy the future by destroying the one vital computer chip that will determine that future. To destroy that computer chip they will have to destroy the creator of that chip, Miles Dyson, along with the manufacturing entity, Cyberdyne. They will also have to destroy the Terminator 1000, sent back from the past to protect the future. It is this dramatic need that pushes the entire story line through to its completion.

In some screenplays a character’s dramatic need will remain constant throughout the entire story, as it does in Terminator 2. In other screenplays, the dramatic need will change based on the function of the story. In Witness, for example, the dramatic need of John Book changes after Plot Point I. The same thing happens in Thelma and Louise. If the dramatic need of the character changes, it usually will occur after the Plot Point at the end of Act I.

The second element that makes good character is a strong point of view, the way your character views the world. Point of view is really a belief system. ‘I believe in God,’ for example, is a point of view. So is ‘I don’t believe in God.’ So is ‘I don’t know whether there is a God.’ All these are belief systems.

What we believe to be true is true. For Sarah, nothing can alter her belief that the future is already here. On August 29, 1997, the nuclear holocaust will be unleashed and sweep across the planet like some wild wind destroying everything in its path. That we know from The Terminator. This inevitability defines Sarah’s point of view and motivates everything she does.

The third thing that makes good character is attitude – a manner, or an opinion. People express their attitudes, or their opinions, and then act on them: Dr. Silberman has the opinion that Sarah Connor is loony and acts on that. And he’s not ready to change that opinion, no matter what she says or does, at least not for another six months of her incarceration.

The fourth component that makes good character is change: Does the character change during the course of the screenplay? If so, how does he or she change, and what is the change? Can you trace this character arc from beginning to end?

In discussing Terminator 2, Sarah ‘does not change that much,’ Cameron said, ‘although she goes through a kind of epiphany after she experiences her character crisis [the moment when she cannot kill Miles Dyson]. But her crisis happens relatively early in the story.’

But what if your character is a robot? If you consider the prospect of an emotional change occurring within a robot, you find there’s an immediate contradiction. A robot cannot change unless it has been reprogrammed by someone or something outside itself. In this case, as Cameron has mentioned, there will be a major change within the Terminator. At the beginning of the screenplay, Schwarzenegger’s dramatic need is simple: to protect and save John Connor. That is the first directive of the warrior machine, to preserve itself so it can function.

During the story there is a change in the Terminator’s ‘character,’ and his dramatic need changes to fit the moral beliefs of John Connor. And we know the Terminator cannot change his need, he ‘cannot self-terminate’; he needs John Connor to do that for him. This means that the Terminator has to disobey his own built-in program.

To do that, Cameron said, ‘he must make a command decision, and it is the only true act of free will that he has in the entire film.’

Wait a minute. A robot with free will? Even though that’s a contradiction, it’s the basic issue that concerned Cameron in approaching the sequel. If you look at the two films you’ll see there’s a thematic continuity that runs between them, because both deal with the conflict between destiny versus free will.

If these films are about anything, Cameron maintained, it’s an exploration of the eternal conflict between destiny and free will. How do you get that to work? I asked him.

Cameron took another sip of coffee, put down the cup, and asked, ‘At what point is everything we do in life preordained in some way?’ In other words, if we can go forward in time and look back on it, if we can jump around in time, then isn’t everything we do in our life already part of a movie that’s already been shot? Or is there a way you can change it? Can you get it to a certain point on the decision tree and then go the other way?

He paused for a moment, thinking. ‘Basically, what I did in Terminator 2 is say that everything is meant to be a certain way. At least to that point in time where they’re sending somebody back from that future. But can you grab that line of history like it’s a rope stretched between two points, and pull it out of the way? If you can pull it just a little bit before it rebounds, and cut it exactly at that moment, then you can change it and go in a different direction. Like catastrophe theory. If you do that you get a future that no longer exists at all, except in the memories of the people that are here now. They have a memory of a future that will never happen, which is curious, because it defies our Newtonian view of the world. But it is possible.

‘That became my point of departure,’ he said, smiling slightly. ‘It’s like the Terminator’s been born from the forehead of Zeus but he’s an anomaly in our time because he’s the only one who has memories of a time that will never exist. He becomes an integral part of the ongoing fabric of the world, and it’s his existence here that prevents that particular future from ever popping into existence. In a spiritual sense, it would be like a manifestation of God changing the path.’

I took a sip of coffee, and as I put down the cup I casually mentioned that there seemed to be a spiritual awareness creeping into the American screenplay. As we study the forces of destruction to our environment; sense the wanton violence raging throughout the land; experience the decay of the cities, the dissatisfaction with politics and politicians, the failure of the American Dream, the helplessness of the homeless, it seems we’re becoming more and more aware that a spiritual aspect is missing from our lives. There’s a longing to incorporate into our lives some kind of spiritual perspective about the moral order of the universe.

Cameron agreed, then continued, ‘There’s a million ways to look at all these different paradoxes and ellipses. As a matter of fact, in the first script I wrote a scene where Sarah is driving along, talking to herself on the tape machine, and she says, ‘But if you had done this then this would have happened, and if you did that then that would have happened and then you wouldn’t have even existed, and I could go crazy thinking about it. I just have to deal with what’s in front of me.’

‘Ultimately, it gets back to morality,’ Cameron concluded. ‘Because if the universe can’t be explained, if everything can’t be known, then we’ll never know what’s right or what’s wrong. We can only know what we feel is right and wrong, which is why I like the idea of the kid spontaneously creating a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s the same way in River’s Edge (Neal Jimenez) when the little kid is about to shoot his brother, and he suddenly realizes he can’t, you don’t do something like that. Even if nobody’s ever told him, he knows it.

‘As I got ready to write the screenplay,’ Cameron said, ‘I kept asking myself, What’s the real goal of this movie? Are we going to blow people away and get them all excited? Is that it? Or is there a way we can get them to really feel something? I thought it would be a real coup if we could get people to cry for a machine. If we could get people to cry for Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a robot, that would be terrific.

‘That was the fun of the whole thing. It wasn’t all the chases and special effects and all that stuff, though I get off on that on a day-to-day basis. I love sitting at the KEM [the editing machine] and making cuts and getting the action working, but when I look back I feel the real thrill was being able to contour a response that was totally opposite from what we got the first time. And to just have fun with that. To play against the expectations. You’ve got to do that in a sequel.’

And that’s where we begin.

– ‘Approaching the Sequel’ by Syd Field. From Four Screenplays (New York: Dell Publishing, 1994), 90–97.