How ecstasy and Sting inspired a classic James Cameron movie
There are few filmmakers who have had half the impact that James Cameron has on the blockbuster movie, particularly those of the science fiction ilk. While Cameron’s work on the likes of Titanic is acclaimed, his efforts in the sci-fi genres, including Aliens, The Terminator and its sequel and Avatar, are some of his most impressive.
The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day are perhaps the most critical moments of Cameron’s excellent career, as the first film gave him his start in the industry. They tell of a cybernetic assassin, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, sent back in time to kill a woman who will one day give birth to a child that will save humankind in a post-apocalyptic future version of Earth.
There’s no doubt that Cameron’s second Terminator movie was more successful, though, cranking up the high-octane action perhaps at the cost of some of the philosophical and scientific insight that the original movie possessed. However, all that high energy had to come from somewhere, and Cameron once revealed that he wrote the ideas for T2 under the influence of drugs.
In an interview with The Ringer, several figures from Judgment Day discussed the origins of the legendary science fiction action sequel, including co-writer William Wisher, who stated, “We watched the first Terminator again, and we were thinking, ‘Where would these characters be?’ So we thought, ‘Sarah, she knows what the future is – no one will believe her. She’s probably spent some years hanging out with survivalists or paramilitary types’.”
Such questions also entered Cameron’s mind, but it took an ecstasy trip and a song by Sting to bring them to fruition, especially the return of John Connor. He said, “I remember sitting there once, high on E, writing notes for Terminator, and I was struck by Sting’s song, ‘I hope the Russians love their children too.’ And I thought, ‘You know what? The idea of a nuclear war is just so antithetical to life itself.’ That’s where the kid came from.”
Only a drug like ecstasy could bring around thoughts like “nuclear war is just so antithetical to life itself”, the kind of sentence that one can imagine two loved-up ravers uttering to one another at a wind-down afterparty. But for Cameron, it was essential to bringing his sequel into a new light.
It was also Sting’s song ‘Russians’, taken from his debut solo album The Dream of the Blue Turtles, which criticises the Cold War foreign policy of the time, that got Cameron thinking about nuclear war and the impact its threat has on society. He took that idea and transposed it into a form that suited the world of The Terminator. And what a result it was.
