Starlog magazines were always terrific. No, not terrific. The absolute best. Both professional and massively interesting, digging into an interesting content way before extensive audio commentaries, coffetable books and Making Of DVD extras were the thing.. Starlog has a great history with Jim Cameron's Terminator films, they were the first ones to cover the first movie. At the time Terminator 2: Judgment Day opened, and then some time after, and then a year after, and then years after, they continued to bring fantastic content about the film. Here, in their issue #168 from July 1991, is their first one on the subject.
It's a multipage feature written by Marc Shapiro, who will be the guy to cover T2 extensively for Starlog. Shapiro reports from two sets - he was there on the 105th day of shooting, when they were shooting the first meeting between The T-800, John and the T-1000 in the hallways of a mall. He talks to Jim Cameron, Robert Patrick, producer BJ Rack and cinematographer Adam Greenberg.
Cameron talks about various elements of the film, but doesn't want to spoil anything plot related, other than Sarah's transformation. He mostly discussed the pressure he has from multiple angles to deliver a movie that will blow everybody away.
One of the producers, BJ Rack, described T2 as "an older and wiser take on the first film". Adam Greenberg discusses lighting every character differently, and trying to keep T-800 in steel blue while the T-1000 in warm colors: "We're using a lot of heavy blue shadings at one end and warm colors at the other."
Robert Patrick doesn't have much time in between the takes but offers his explanation about his take on the T-1000, his fluid movements, his animal focus.
Shapiro describes the shooting of the scene with great detail, from multiple takes on Eddie Furlong's reaction to being surrounded by both pursuers, to lessons on the bullet dance given to the guy playing the hallway victim of the T-1000.
The second set Mr Shapiro visited was actually Sarah's dream sequence with Kyle Reese, which was eventually deleted from the theatrical cut. And here's the reason why those old magazines are great - they're full of things you can't read anywhere else and that would have been lost with time. One of the things I'm talking about is the fact that Michael Biehn actually forgot that he was shooting that day and overslept. A nice little piece of movie trivia. Also described is how much prep was needed just to film Sarah running down the hazy hallway in her dream.
