Although many consider it a masterpiece, James Cameron has enough distance from The Terminator to give it his honest review.
Marking the 40th anniversary of his directorial debut, the 3x Oscar-winning director looked back on parts of the 1984 film as “pretty cringeworthy” as he admitted the “production value” didn’t age well.
“I don’t think of it as some Holy Grail, that’s for sure,” he told Empire. “I look at it now and there are parts of it that are pretty cringeworthy, and parts of it that are like, ‘Yeah, we did pretty well for the resources we had available.’”
“Cameron added, “”Just the production value, you know? I don’t cringe on any of the dialogue, but I have a lower cringe factor than, apparently, a lot of people do around the dialogue that I write,” added Cameron. “You know what? Let me see your three-out-of-the-four-highest-grossing films — then we’ll talk about dialogue effectiveness.”
The Terminator grossed more than $78 million worldwide when it was released in 1984, launching Cameron and star Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s careers.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron on the set of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
TriStar Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
“I was just a punk starting out when I directed The Terminator. I think I was 29 at the time, and it was my first directing gig,” said Cameron. “Terminator was my first film, and it’s near and dear for that reason.”
The movie has since launched a franchise consisting of multiple films and television series. Last month, the animated series Terminator Zero debuted on Netflix, featuring the voices of Timothy Olyphant, Sonoya Mizuno, Rosario Dawson, Ann Dowd and André Holland.