More ‘Terminator: Salvation’ Concept Art and McG Speaks on His Vision

Back in November, we brought you the first bit of concept art. Â  Check out that article here. Â  Today, we bring you even more of the cool stuff courtesy of Wired.

McG presented these pieces of concept art to  the Directors Guild of American screening room and talked about his vision for the film.   What follows are the pieces of concept art that were presented along with some excerpts of what McG spoke about.

“Nobody heard ‘Terminator 4‘ and said, ‘Oh that’s a great idea — I know, let’s get McG to do it!   This asshole who did ‘Charlie’s Angels’, and what kind of cock calls himself  McG?'”

“The first film shows Schwarzenegger’s T-800 coming from 2029 back in time. Â  ‘Salvation’Â  takes place in 2018, so you see the R&D that went into the T-800. It’s like the polio vaccine: You’ve got to go through a lot of lab rats to get to vaccine. In this film, humans are the lab rats. Skynet is testing on us to figure out how to make a photorealistic, leaner, smaller, more capable machine — the T-800.”

“Artificial intelligence was so foreign during the glory days of ’70s and ’80s science fiction -– ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Alien’, ‘Terminator’. Â  In this day and age, it’s here! You spell a word wrong on your BlackBerry, it spells it right for you. You got a bad knee, they put a titanium one in there. If you’re depressed, we’re not going to talk about your mom and dad, we’re going to manipulate your serotonin re-uptake inhibitor and you’re going to feel better in two weeks. I’ve always loved stories about ‘That which makes us great will be our undoing.'”

“It’s critical to push the visual effects forward in this film. Â  In ‘Terminator 2′, when Robert Patrick’s head came apart, that’s pushing it forward. So we hired Charlie Gibson who’s won two Academy Awards and did Gore Verbinski’s last four or five movies. He’s up there at [Industrial Light & Magic] cooking up a few things that I can say in fairness will go beyond viewers’ expectation.”

“I didn’t want to feel like the guy who gave birth to the ‘Terminator’  is against what we’re doing, so I go to see James Cameron  to kiss the ring and tell him what I was trying to do.   He’s cordial but says, ‘I’m not going to endorse your movie. I reserve the right to hate it. But I wish you well, and if you’re going to make a ‘Terminator’  I’d prefer you make a good one to a bad one.'”

“To get some credibility back into the ‘Terminator’Â  mythology, we had to show the fans we really mean business by getting a great John Connor. Â  To me the choice was very simple: Christian Bale.”

“I met Bale at a pub in England while he was shooting ‘Dark Knight’.   He said, “I’m not interested in action, I’m not interested in pyrotechnics, I’m interested in story. If you can get the script to a place where actors on stage could just read it, naked, and it would be compelling for two hours because the characters change and evolve, then we’d have something to talk about.” We had a respectful conversation, I gave him Cormac McCarthy’s  The Road, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to read but his answer was: “Until it’s on the page, I’m not doing it.”

“I went to Jonah Nolan, who co-wrote ‘The Dark Knight’,  and A) he has a good dynamic with Christian, and B) he’s a very intelligent guy who puts story and character at the forefront. So after Jonah worked on the script, we got Christian on board.”

“John Connor doesn’t come into the picture saying, ‘Follow me and everything’s going to be cool. Â  He’s just one of many soldiers when we meet him. It’s like ‘Spider-Man‘ where you’re Peter Parker: ‘Hey I’m just a lowly high school photographer,’ and he learns with great power comes great responsibility. Or the hacker in ‘The Matrix’: ‘They call me Neo, who cares?’ ‘quot; No man, you’re the one, you’re going to lead us!’ Of course Luke Skywalker, on and on, all those Joseph Campbell archetypes. So this is the story of how John Connor becomes leader of the resistance. He has to earn it.”

“I wanted the sound of the resistance to be very delicate, reminiscent of Gustavo Santaolalla’s analog guitar, so I thought of putting Gustavo together with Thom Yorke of Radiohead for the machine sound. Â  But their schedules were too tough, so then Danny Elfman articulated his sonic vision for the picture. He’s a huge ‘Terminator’Â  fan. I wish I could show you his house. Elfman lives in a haunted house that has strange prosthetic limbs from the turn of the century hanging on the wall.”

“A lot of people make CG movies where actors are emoting to poles with tennis balls on top of them.   That’s the last thing I wanted to do. I don’t like dealing with cartoons, so to speak. I wanted real robots for the actors to interface with so you could get that grittiness and realism. There’s an archetype shape to the T-800. We needed body types to suggest the robot that would combat John Connor, and Roland Kickinger  is a good body type. His shoulders are huge, his waist is narrow. The [Industrial Light & Magic] guys used their calipers to measure shoulder spatial differences and said he’d make a good body double. Roland as an individual is not in the movie.”

“Imagine it’s 1944 and we sneak into Hitler’s Germany and find all these V-2 rockets  with nuclear tips they’re not supposed to have.      We’d go back to the powers that be and explain, ‘This is a huge problem; it’s going to change everything.’ That’s what happens with Connor –-he’s got to raise the curtain and defeat Skynet because the launch of the T-800 means curtains for everyone.”

“Is Skynet smart enough to use the best parts of ourselves against ourselves? Can we trust the machine? Â  Therein lies the rub and that’s what act three is all about. The ending of this film is elliptical. It’s going to make a lot of people mad and you’ll see lot of people scratching their heads. It’s not disposable, where you forget about it before you even get to the parking lot. It’s going to make you think.”

Source: Wired