James Cameron says parts of ‘Terminator’ are ‘cringeworthy’

James Cameron first made a name for himself with 1984’s The Terminator — but he doesn’t see it as an unimpeachable masterpiece.

The Titanic filmmaker candidly reflected on the quality of his breakthrough movie in an interview with Empire commemorating the 40th anniversary of the sci-fi classic. “I don’t think of it as some Holy Grail, that’s for sure,” Cameron said. “I look at it now and there are parts of it that are pretty cringeworthy, and parts of it that are like, ‘Yeah, we did pretty well for the resources we had available.'”

Cameron’s issues with the film lie with “just the production value” due to the film’s low budget. On the other hand, the Avatar filmmaker completely stands by his dialogue, despite fairly frequent criticism directed at his wordsmithery. “I don’t cringe on any of the dialogue, but I have a lower cringe factor than, apparently, a lot of people do around the dialogue that I write,” he said.

The director thinks his movies’ popularity should shield him from that kind of criticism. “You know what? Let me see your three-out-of-the-four-highest-grossing films — then we’ll talk about dialogue effectiveness,” he said. His 2009 film Avatar currently stands as the highest grossing film of all time at the global box office, while its 2022 sequel Avatar: the Way of Water stands at No. 3, and 1997’s Titanic holds the fourth spot.

Elsewhere in the interview, Cameron also explained that casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular murderous robot proved to be a masterstroke — despite the fact that the Austrian bodybuilder didn’t match his initial conception of the character. “I think a lot of filmmakers, especially first-time filmmakers, get very, very stuck in a vision, because of insecurity,” he said. “I’m proud of the fact that we weren’t stuck enough to not be able to see how it could work with Arnold, because it wasn’t our vision. Sometimes, when you look back from the vantage point — at this point 40 years — we could have made a great little film from a production-value standpoint, and it would have been nothing if we hadn’t made that one decision that captured the imagination of people.”

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In Entertainment Weekly‘s oral history of The Terminator in 2014, Cameron reflected on hesitantly meeting with Schwarzenegger to play Kyle Reese. “I went to lunch to pull ‘creative differences,’ but I actually liked him,” the filmmaker recalled. “I was studying him at the restaurant, just watching the light from the window on his face and thinking, ‘Holy crap, what a face! Forget the Reese thing. Arnold would make a hell of a Terminator.'”

Schwarzenegger had loads of ideas about how to make the antagonist more interesting, but didn’t want to play the part himself. “I could visualize very clearly what the Terminator should look like. And so when I met Cameron to talk about Kyle Reese, I gave him all these points: This is what you should do with the Terminator, this is how the Terminator should act,” the actor told EW in 2014. “I said, ‘No, no, no — look, the guy has 17 lines.’ I didn’t want to do that. I was building my career, being a leading man and not being a villain. But Cameron said that he’d shoot it in such a way that all the evil stuff that I do will be totally excused by audiences because I’m a cool machine. And so cool that some of the people will cheer.”

Cameron didn’t actually have to adjust his plans for the film much once Schwarzenegger came aboard. “We didn’t change a line of dialogue,” he told EW. “I didn’t change my storyboards, but all of a sudden he was this big formidable guy — a human bulldozer, like a panzer tank. Originally, the Terminator was supposed to be this anonymous guy in the crowd, you know, the killer could be anybody. Arnold stands out in a crowd. But it gave the film power in a way I hadn’t anticipated.”