McG talks about Terminator 5

Terminator Salvation gets closer each day and we will finally get to see some of the War with Machines that has been mentioned since the very first film.

McG has a great interview with FilmJournal about the new film.

Toughness was crucial for the movie because, as McG is fond of saying, Terminator Salvation is, at heart, a war film. Set several years following the events of Judgment Day—when the machines rose up against their creators and launched a nuclear attack that transformed the world into the kind of apocalyptic wasteland described in Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road (which McG cites as a major influence)—the movie follows the initial attempts of humanity's designated savior John Connor (Bale) to assert himself as the leader of the resistance movement. "I always like a becoming story, so I wanted to see the becoming of John Connor," McG says of the film's narrative arc. "When we meet him, he is not yet the leader of the resistance. You have to figure that when he first crawled out of the mountain—after the radioactivity had cleared to the degree where it was safe to populate the surface of the Earth—who would listen to him? I'm sure there would be other survivors who said, 'Fuck you, kid, get in line.' So he has to earn it every step of the way."

I love the fact he mentions The Road as an inspiration for the look of the film. McG then goes on to talk about the war that has so often been mentioned.

Rather than restrict the action to green-screen-lined soundstages, many of the film's biggest sequences were shot in the New Mexico desert and favor practical special effects—including real explosions and bullets—over CGI. "I wanted all of the action based in reality with a respect for physics and I wanted it to have a tactile reality for the audience. That's why we did so much practically, to really convey the difficulty of a world under duress. I didn't want clean, shiny Logan's Run Terminators. I wanted Children of Men/Mad Max Terminators."

The more realistic action scenes should give the film a real gritty tough look all in keeping with the Terminator future.

The most interesting part of the interview in my mind is when McG goes onto describe what he would like to see in the fifth installment of the franchise.

McG is already looking ahead to the next chapter in what the studio hopes will be another trilogy. "I strongly suspect the next movie is going to take place in a [pre-Judgment Day] 2011," McG reveals. "John Connor is going to travel back in time and he's going to have to galvanize the militaries of the world for an impending Skynet invasion. They've figured out time travel to the degree where they can send more than one naked entity. So you're going to have hunter killers and transports and harvesters and everything arriving in our time and Connor fighting back with conventional military warfare, which I think is going to be fucking awesome. I also think he's going to meet a scientist that's going to look a lot like present-day Robert Patrick [who famously played the T-1000 in Terminator 2], talking about stem-cell research and how we can all live as idealized, younger versions of ourselves."

How good does that sound?

Leave a comment on this post below.

HOME