The Terminator - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of The Terminator or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to The Terminator

[carl]

(at around 58 mins) When The Terminator attacks Sarah in the police station, the cop states that there are "thirty police officers" in the station. If you count the cops that The Terminator kills on screen and the burst fire that he shoots for off screen kills, it adds up to thirty.

[victoria]

Debra Winger was James Cameron's preferred choice after he watched her in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982). Michelle Pfeiffer, Diane Lane and Carrie Fisher were all considered to play the part, and both Sharon Stone and Kelly McGillis auditioned for the role.

[addison]

The movie was released in the late 1980s in Poland under the title "The Electronic Murderer". The title was changed because there is a Polish word 'terminator', meaning roughly 'an apprentice', and so the title was changed to something more catchy and interesting to audience. By the time Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) was released, the original movie was widely available on pirate copies under its original title, and because of it in the early 90s in Poland the word 'terminator' was widely recognized as the character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of its original meaning, so all the sequels had their titles unaltered.

[kristina]

(at around 1h 13 mins) The "fog" in the scene after Sarah and Reese leave the bridge where they spent the night is actually bug spray, due to the big "fly scare" in the filming location at that time. The crew was going to wait until the spray dissipated, but decided to use it as fog for the effect instead. This is revealed in a DVD Easter egg, which can be found by pressing the right arrow in the languages section until the square on the right is lit up.

[lonnie]

(Please note -- also a spoiler for Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)) Two deleted scenes gave Skynet and the Future War some more background. The first was a scene where Sarah discovers that a company called Cyberdyne will be responsible for building Skynet and the Terminators. She tries to convince Reese that they should destroy this company, in order to prevent the dark future from ever happening. Reese tells her that his mission is conserving the future, not changing it. The second scene shows that Cyberdyne owns the factory where Sarah battled the Terminator, and one of their employees finding the Terminator's microchip (this event actually causes Skynet to exist in the first place). Both these ideas became major plot points for the sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Director James Cameron cut the scenes because he wanted to leave some questions yet unanswered, which he never regretted as he could make an entire sequel out of the unused ideas.

[darrell]

Ron Perlman, Stephen Lang, Chevy Chase, Michael Keaton and Alec Baldwin were considered to play the Terminator.

[nina]

Geena Davis auditioned for the role of Sarah Connor. She co-starred with Linda Hamilton in Secret Weapons (1985) the following year.

[liam]

Arnold Schwarzenegger allegedly delayed the start of filming by two days by claiming that the custom made leather jacket wasn't manly enough.

[bryan]

Russian arthouse filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, while critical of mainstream cinema, praised The Terminator, stating that its "vision of the future and the relation between man and its destiny is pushing the frontier of cinema as an art". He was however critical of its "brutality and low acting skills".

[nina]

Debra Winger successfully auditioned and won the role of Sarah Connor. However, she later changed her mind and turned the role down.

[beth]

In James Cameron's original treatment, Sarah Connor has an old figure skating injury that was fixed with a couple of surgical pins, and the Terminator cut the legs open of the first two Sarah Connors to find this identifying mark. In the novelization of the story, the pins were instead inserted into her leg after it was broken during her final fight against the Terminator. SkyNet knew Sarah had surgical pins in her leg, but not when or why she got them. The Terminator was therefore looking for a sign of an injury she had not yet sustained.

[ella]

The book that inspired Edge of Tomorrow (2014) makes an oblique reference to the climax of this film with a robot in a factory.

[dustin]

According to an article from Hot Dog #10, April 2001, studio executives threatened to shut down the project if James Cameron filmed additional future war scenes beyond the script.

[mathew]

One of the concept art showed a T-800 skeleton crawling after Sarah with a butcher knife.

[melinda]

Lightstorm Entertainment, the company later founded by James Cameron that would produce his films Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and True Lies (1994)), was named after the lightning effects that accompany the time-travel process in this movie.

[terry]

(at around 1h 35 mins) Sarah causes the hydraulic press to shut twice, once by accident and once on purpose. Both times the remastered soundtrack uses a completely different sound effect when this occurs than what was originally presented in the mono soundtrack.

[kristina]

The screenplay is officially credited to James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, with additional dialogue by William Wisher. In reality, Cameron and Wisher were the main contributors: Wisher did the dialogue for the early Sarah Connor scenes and the police station sequences, while Cameron focused on the rest. They would update each other daily on their progress over the phone. Hurd's role was mainly in editing the script; she had put her name onto it so that it would make an easier sales pitch, but she ended up getting a full writing credit for this film and several other Terminator-related projects as a result, despite not doing any actual writing. Cameron said that he was somewhat disappointed that Hurd never set the record straight, but what annoyed him even more was that people automatically assumed that making a woman the central character was Hurd's idea, while it was in fact his.

[albert]

Edward James Olmos and Louis Gossett Jr. were considered for the role of Lt. Traxler.

[ivan]

Lance Henriksen who stars in this film as Lt. Vulkovich, and Robert Winley who plays the cigar biker in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), appeared together in Stone Cold (1991) with some scenes together.