The 1985 Sting song James Cameron heard “high on E” that inspired ‘Terminator 2’
Creative inspiration can arrive in the most unexpected ways and from the unlikeliest of places. In the case of James Cameron and Terminator 2, all he needed was some ecstasy and Sting, naturally.
At the time, and in what’s become a recurring theme of the filmmaker’s career, Hollywood had never seen anything like Judgment Day before. The Abyss may have edged the CGI revolution closer to the forefront of the conversation, but Cameron’s sequel kicked the door clean off its hinges.
You could say the same about almost everything he’s directed since, but Arnold Schwarzenegger’s return as the titular cybernetic organism laid down several markers that the rest of the industry would race to catch up with, and the movie holds up every bit as well today as it did back in the summer of 1991.
Terminator 2 was the most expensive production in cinema history, not to mention the first to carry a budget in excess of $100 million. After clearing half a billion dollars at the box office, it also became the highest-grossing R-rated release of all time, the year’s top-earning title, and the third biggest hit ever.
While the follow-up deservedly took its place in history for its ambitious, innovative, pioneering, and cutting-edge CGI, its origins were decidedly more low-key. Cameron didn’t really have a choice in returning to Terminator, since the rights-holders told him that they were making the movie with or without him. He didn’t want to give his baby away, but he still needed an idea.
“We watched the first Terminator again, and we were spit-balling and thinking, ‘Where would these characters be?'” co-writer William Wisher recalled. “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.'”
That was all well and good, but the concept still needed to make sense within the context of the story. Fortunately, Cameron decided that getting high out of his mind on ecstasy might stir up his creative juices, and when Sting’s 1985 track ‘Russians’ from his debut solo album The Dream of the Blue Turtles reached his ears, he knew exactly how to do it.
“I remember sitting there once, high on E, writing notes for Terminator,” Cameron explained. “And I was struck by Sting’s song, that ‘I hope the Russians love their children, too’. And I thought, ‘You know what? The idea of a nuclear was is just so antithetical to life itself’. That’s where the kid came from.”
Just like that, the auteur had realised that the best way to approach Terminator 2 was as a mother/son story, with Schwarzenegger’s T-800 as the surrogate father of the dysfunctional family unit. Their common goal was to prevent the impending nuclear apocalypse, and who knows, maybe Judgment Day would have turned out differently had he not been off his tits and listening to Sting at exactly the right moment.
