When James Cameron and his producing partner Gale Ann Heard set out to make The Terminator, they encountered so many setbacks that it's a wonder the movie ever got made. Cameron, who had a disastrous experience as an interim director on 1982's Piranha II: The Spawning, needed a film that would essentially launch his film career, but with little directorial experience, he was going to drop everything himself. to be difficult. Fortunately, he and Heard were able to raise the funds needed to film a version of Cameron's story about a cyborg assassin sent back in time on an assassination mission. But getting funding was just the first hurdle.

Cameron once Arnold Schwarzenegger got the lead rolehe had to wait for an actor to become available, which delayed production for six to eight months. Then, when it finally became available, it turned out that the Austrian actor had been contracted to shoot another project, leaving Cameron and co. to film Sarah Connor actress Linda Hamilton in her solo scenes. Unfortunately, Hamilton injured her ankle, which meant she was unable to film most of her scenes which involved a lot of running and physical activity. Meanwhile, the entire film's budget was slashed in its production, creating a hectic and chaotic shoot that somehow fizzled out. one of the best science fiction movies of all time.

But it turns out that these production delays actually ended up helping The Terminator become as iconic as it has been in the years since its 1984 debut. In fact, they helped the entire Terminator franchise establish a visual identity that has remained a part of the saga for its entire 40-year run.

In 1984's The Terminator, Los Angeles provided what has now become an integral part of the franchise's iconography. From the titular cyborg's arrival at the Griffith Park observatory to the downtown car chase, the city becomes key to the film's overall aesthetic, not only providing an oddly discordant contrast to its doom-laden tone with its sun-drenched ones, but also helping to reinforce an expressionist-inspired 'technoir' film style with its dark urban setting.

More importantly, every film from the first installment, with the exception of the 2019 Abyss "Terminator: Dark Fate" (the movie that made Schwarzenegger quit the franchise) is based in and around Los Angeles. In that sense, the City of Angels defined much of the franchise's visual identity, maintaining that strange unsettling juxtaposition between the tropical climate of southern California and the harsh nuclear winter of the city's future.

As such, it's hard to imagine the franchise without LA at its core. But it seems that The Terminator, and thus the entire saga, could have looked very different had it not been for one of those pesky scheduling conflicts and subsequent filming delays. Talking to Ringer moviesGale Ann Heard revealed that the film was originally supposed to be shot in Toronto, of all places. "It's interesting that we weren't supposed to shoot in LA," the producer said. "The original conception of the film was that we were going to shoot in Toronto and they were going to close some of the lanes of the major highway there."

However, before Heard and James Cameron could travel to Canada to begin filming, their star was called away to film the 1982 sequel to Conan the Barbarian, making filming in Canada completely untenable. Heard continued:

“Arnold had to do Conan the Destroyer for (producer) Dino De Laurentiis, which meant we had to start shooting in March. You can't shoot streets in Toronto when there's still ice and snow on the ground and that's actually why we ended up shooting in Los Angeles.

The first Terminator movie I saw was 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day , which opens with one of the most haunting single notes of any film score in history. An orchestral stab introduces images of Los Angeles freeways packed with cars reeling in the heat before the film cuts to a future version of the city where the freeways lay in ruins under the eternal darkness of a nuclear winter. That contrast between the two versions of the city made me immediately readjust and set the tone for the entire film. As Edward Norton's John Connor rides his bike through the unspoiled suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, you can't forget the nightmarish future that hangs over the entire film, giving it a dull sense of doom more haunting than any action movie. any business entity.

Without The Terminator being set in Los Angeles, it's unlikely that any of this would have happened, robbing the saga of something substantial. Gail Ann Heard in retrospect understood how integral LA was to the final film, telling Ringer Movies: “There are iconic images (…) I mean the Griffith Park Observatory and the Second Street Tunnel and downtown LA is a character in this. More than that, LA has become a character in the franchise as a whole, which will hopefully find its way back on track now that Netflix's "Terminator: Zero" proved the value of returning to the source material.

Meanwhile, it appears that since leaving the Terminator franchise. Arnold Schwarzenegger has developed an ambition to make a new Conan movie.