Brancato talks Terminator 3 Script!

RossBond has placed some quotes from SFX magazine August 2003 on the official t3 forum. These quotes are from Brancato where he talks about the Terminator 3 script!

"Generally I'm not a lover of franchises, I prefer original stories, if there are any left in Hollywood! But Terminator seemed like something special. It's not like a James Bond movie where they crank them out every couple of years. You could go somewhere new with the story."

"Certain fans have been anxious if this really is a Terminator movie if James Cameron isn't involved. But a movie like The Matrix Reloaded felt so different from the original Matrix, it was almost like it was written and directed by different people all together. Also, both Terminators were very different from one another."

"John Connor has been raised to believe he's the saviour of mankind. And then he undoes his own future. He's left with the sense that the world that he's inhabiting isn't exactly the true world. I suppose he's thinking "What is my point?" His own father doesn't exsist anymore, because he's from a future that's no longer possible, all because of the actions he took. And yet he hasn't vapourised into thin air. We started the character out as just a pretty messed up drifter, and we take him from that place to becoming a functioning member of whatever society the future has to hold."

"The first movie says distinctly well: "Fate is fixed, death is inevitable." The second movies says: "well contingency exsists, we are free." So the question of free will versus fate is constantly the foreground of the whole series. Looking at the world again, we clearly had to address from the outset these kinds of philosophical issues. It was actually kind of fun- I have a background in Philosophy- so we're tapdancing to try and make it all fit. Originally, in T2, there was going to be a little postscript, which you can see on the DVD, with Linda Hamilton saying; "Oh, now life has gone on fine and we're all happy in our sweet future." I'm glad Cameron didn't attach that!"

The film follows one old theory: that if the past is changed (or our present) then events will rearrange themselves so that the timeline remains intact and paradoxes cannot occur. It could all be nonsense, but Brancato is not too fussed.

"I think both films contain contradictions. Every story that involves time travel is self-contradictory. How is it possible that this future that affected events in the past doesn't exist? That's inevitably paradoxial. But we did have to do our best to make it seem it fits logic. At least if you don't think about it for more than a minute and a half!"

About the BTTF2 style invasion of earlier films

"Often ideas like that, that sound really cool on the internet, s*ck in reality. It's so easy to drown in ideas. A lot of the challange was to not be tempted to run with some of the wackier implications of the Terminator universe. Terminator movies are very grounded in present day reality. And as we started to get into stranger terrain, it started to feel like something much goofier. So we tried to remain as much fixed in a gritty and immediate world to make it feel part of the franchise." He sighs. "At first it seemed like a lark. "Wow! Killer robots! Time Travel!" But then actually getting down to do it turned into a far more difficult task."

"We had to choreograph an awful lot of action; blow by blow, trying to figure it out. And we did try, many times, to have words exchanged by Terminators. It felt....stupid, you know? You didn't really want a laugh line if you're trying to play this for effective tension. And mostly the movie, having seen it a couple of times, works very well on a suspense level, moment to moment. We tried very hard not to fall into the trap of laughing at things we're surprised by or excited by."

"What I loved about the series, from the first one when I saw it in '84, was it was such a perfect mix of very smart and very stupid. It worked on multiple levels. And you hope for a project that can do that. That can be an immediate, crowd-pleasing thrill ride as well as having something a little bit deeper to play with. And, you know, I hope we were true to that. Wether it makes a lick o' sense to an audience we'll soon find out..."

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