James Cameron: Interviews

Approaching the Sequel

50 Approaching the Sequel Syd Field/1992 From Four Screenplays (New York: Dell Publishing, 1994), 90–97. Reprinted by permission of Syd Field, author of Screenplay, The Screenwriter’s Workbook, and The Screenwriter ’s Problem Solver. Where the Writer Begins Writing a film sequel is always difficult. If you think about the sequels that are successful—the Rocky series, Lethal Weapon, or Aliens, to name just a few recent examples—they always start with the same characters and generate a new story line. They break new ground. Most film sequels are not successful because they try to put the characters into the same, or similar situations. Look at Die Hard 2. Basically it was the same type of story, but instead of setting it in a building like Die Hard, they set it in an airport. The action, with only a few modifications, was exactly the same. I’m sure the template of structure was identical. “If it works well,” the old Hollywood saying goes, “do it again.” How did Cameron approach the sequel to Terminator 2? After all, there were seven years of intense legal battles between The Terminator in 1984 and Terminator 2. Carolco, the producing company, and Orion, the distributing company, both claimed they owned the sequel rights, and fought for years until they reached an agreement. How did you bridge that kind of gap? I asked him. He paused for a moment, took a sip of coffee, and said that “from a writing standpoint, the things that interested me the most were the characters. When I was writing Ripley for Aliens there were certain things known about her and her experience, but then we lost track of her. In the sequel I was picking her up at a later point and seeing what the effects of those earlier traumas were. With Ripley there was a discontinuity of syd field / 1992 51 time, but experientially it was continuous for her because she just went to sleep, and when she woke up, time had gone by. “It was much different, much more interesting with Sarah. I had to backfill those intervening nine years, so I had to find efficient ways of dramatically evoking what had happened to her. The tricky part was having it all make sense to a member of the audience who didn’t remember or hadn’t seen the first film. Basically, I had a character popping onto the screen in a certain way, and therefore had to create a back story for that character. I told myself I had to write the script just like there had never been a first film. The sequel had to be a story about someone who encountered something nobody else believes, like the opening scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where Kevin McCarthy swears he’s seen something shocking, and nobody believes him; then he starts telling the story. “In Terminator 2, the first time we meet Sarah, she’s locked up in a mental institution, but the real question is, is she crazy? The advantage of a sequel is that you can play games you can’t play in the original. For example, I know the audience knows the Terminator is real. So they’re not going to think she’s crazy. But the question still remains: Is she crazy ? Has the past ordeal made her nuts? I wanted to push her character very far. “The strange thing that happened in the wake of the film is that a lot of people made the mistake of thinking I was presenting Sarah Connor as a role model for women. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I wanted people to invest in her emotionally, to feel sorry for her, because she had been through such hell. And people made a straight-line extrapolation from Ripley to Sarah. “They’re very different characters. Ripley’s been through a trauma, but she has certain innate characteristics of leadership and wisdom under fire; she’s a true hero. Sarah’s not really a hero. She’s an ordinary person who’s been put under extreme pressure, and that makes her warped and twisted, yet strengthened, in a sad way. It’s like you don’t want this to happen to her. The initial image of her had a big scar running down the side of her face, and we actually did makeup tests with scars, but it would have been a real nightmare to deal with a scar like that...