Here we begin September 1991, and here's another one from UK, and this one, for me, is a nice catch. This issue of UK's Film Review has one of the things I look for the most in vintage magazines, and it's great, now obscure and forgotten interviews. And this September 1991 issue not only has an interview with Linda Hamilton promoting Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but also has one with James Cameron!
Let's start with the feature article on Linda, since this one's first. Of course there couldn't have been an interview with her at the time (or really, almost anytime after) that wouldn't ask about her physical transformation, and understandably so, because while there have been strong females characters and action heroines before, no woman at the time had devoted herself so much to transform herself so strikingly and alter her image. Curiously, despite every interviewer asking about it (again, understandably so), she is surprisingly candid about it here. She mentions again how tough it was, and not even the physical part, but the psychological one of such regime. She mentions that T2 took a year out of her life and she basically gave up her social life. With no more than 6 hours of sleep for the entire shoot, and sometimes exhaustion so great she would sleep with her movie makeup on and come back to the set with it the next day, she mentions how sometimes she was close to panic.
The interview takes just one page (although in a UK magazine, magazine page is much larger than our standard US mag), but has no fat and fills like an extensive and very interesting interview thanks to the straight-to-the-point-after-point approach of it. She's also asked about the possibility of the third film, and she ends her answer with this statement: "My feeling is that Terminator 2 is very complete. I wouldn't do another one just for the money or the box-office"
Few pages later we get an interview with Jim Cameron, and this one's just as interesting, and also takes up a page. It starts with Cameron talking about his planned psychological drama which never materialized due to rights issues, and then nicely summarizes the theme of T2: "But my films are all about people really. I'm not actually worried about robots coming back through time. That's NOT what Terminator 2 is really about. It's about dehumanization". It's a statement he also repeated on the audio commentary for T2 years later.
This magazine is also important for the fact that this is, as far as I know, the first time that Jim Cameron said that the liquid metal terminator was a part of the original storyline for the first movie.
Cameron also restates that he wasn't initially eager to do a sequel and that Arnold was more interested in it, but he also mentions that it was the idea of Terminator as a protector that got him excited even before the film was planned: "Then, at some point, I came up with the notion of a good terminator - or, rather, a terminator that had been reprogrammed as a protector. And the idea wetted my appetite for a Terminator 2"
Interviews like these are always a treat to find in those vintage mags.
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