Trivia

Main info

Interested in some in-depth knowledge in the making of the best sequel of all time? Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of them... and this page shows you whats been happening behind the scenes, with cast and crew, tidbits of collected info or whatever else we found interesting to share back with the community.

In-depth info

The original script did not call for the top of the truck to be ripped off during the chase through the storm drain beside/beneath the freeway, but when they arrived on location they found that the cab wouldn't fit under the overpass so director James Cameron decided that the roof was going to have to come off.

The T800's bike jump into the storm drain was performed by a stuntman Peter Kent. The motorbike was supported by 1-inch cables, so that when they hit the ground, the bike and rider only weighted 180 pounds. The cables were later digitally erased.

More explicit shots of the arm cutting scene were removed.

SFX crew had to incorporate Robert Patrick's football-injury limp in their animation of the T1000. Next, they filmed the stuff with the T1000 pretending to be driving from the right-hand steering wheel (wearing a mirror-image police uniform), while the real driver was hidden under a black hood at the lowered real steering wheel. For the final film, the scenes were flipped left-to-right to make it all look right, and combined with footage shot with a normal truck driving in the drain. This was done so that Patrick could concentrate on acting rather than driving. They accidentally caught a street sign; after they mirror-imaged the scene, they digitally reversed the text on the sign so it would appear correct.

Linda Hamilton's twin sister, Leslie Hamilton Gearren was used as a double in scenes involving two "Sarah Connors" (i.e., when the T1000 was imitating her), and in a scene not in the theatrical release, but on the DVD as a mirror image of Linda.

The mall scenes were spread out over two malls. The scenes shot outside the mall were filmed outside of the Northridge Fashion Center in Northridge California. This mall was closed for months after the Northridge earthquake destroyed much of it in 1994. Parts of the parking garage in the movie were destroyed in that earthquake.

Cameron asked Special Effects creator Stan Winston to direct a teaser-trailer. Cameron didn't want the trailer to just be early footage, and so with a budget of $150 000, Winston created a trailer which showed a futuristic assembly line churning out copies of Terminators, all of which looked like Schwarzenegger. Cameron was pleased with this trailer as he had fears about audience reactions to trailers showing Schwarzenegger returning as a T800, after the T800 in the first film was clearly destroyed.

Production took sufficiently long that Edward Furlong visibly aged during the shoot - he is clearly much younger in the desert, for instance, than in other scenes. His voice began to break and had to be pitched to one level in post-production. He also grew quite a bit. At the beginning of shooting, he was a few inches smaller than his double and, at the end, he was a little bit taller than him. He even had to stand in a hole during the shooting of some scenes.

Over 1 million feet of film was shot and printed. Far less than 1% of that is actually seen in the final cut.

The T800 loses its left arm, and hauls itself forward with its right. The same thing happened to the T800 in The Terminator.

The T-800 says "I need a vacation", which Arnold Schwarzenegger previously said in Kindergarten Cop. This was not in the script, but ad-libbed.

The T1000 tells the helicopter pilot to "Get out!". This is an interesting parallel to The Terminator, in which the T800 gives the same command to a truck driver under similar circumstances.

Given Schwarzenegger's $15 million salary and his total of 700 words of dialog, that translates to $21,429 per word. "Hasta la vista, baby" cost $85,716.

The "forced medication" scene (Special Edition only) had to be re-shot several times because actor Ken Gibbel wouldn't hit Linda Hamilton properly with his nightstick. The scene was very physically demanding and Hamilton was furious with Gibbel because he repeatedly botched it. She got her revenge in a later scene where she beats Gibbel with a broken off broom handle - the blows are for real.

The sound that the T-1000 makes when transforming was created by putting a condom over a microphone and dipping it into oatmeal.

When the Terminator tells Sarah Connor about Miles Dyson and the history of Skynet, Arnold Schwarzenegger was reading his lines from a card taped to the car's windshield.

Cameron once owned a dog named "Wolfie".

John's foster parents are named Todd and Janelle Voight. This means that if he'd legally taken their name, he would have been John Voight.

According to James Cameron, Linda Hamilton suffered a permanent hearing loss in one of her ears during the elevator shootout because she had not installed her ear plugs after removing them during a trip to the restroom between takes.

The Minigun used in the Cyberdyne scene was so heavy that Arnold Schwarzenegger was in fact the only person on stage that could carry the gun.