Last week we hit the Terminator Salvation junket in Beverly Hills, where we had the opportunity to speak with the film's director and star. Read on to find out what McG had to tell us and the other journos in attendance about reviving the franchise and how Christian Bale felt saying one of Arnie's most famous lines.

McG

The film opens with an impressive scene of Christian Bale in a helicopter. It looks like one long tracking shot.

I'm very influenced by the Hitchcock picture Rope, where, at that time, they would run out of film in the mag, and they would move onto somebody's back full-frame; and that's where they would hide the cut and do their thing. One of the things we wanted to do with this film was honor the audience and the passionate by staging and blocking the picture in a way that doesn't rely on cuts. I think cutting is a bit of a cheat, when you say, "Oh, let's throw a bunch of cameras on the scene, and then we'll cut it together. We're gonna make it work in post."  We chose to go and scout the locations. Christian was a good sport. And we blocked the action very succinctly. When you see him coming out of the hole, the camera swings around to see a transport ship of Skynet flying away. Christian runs over to a helicopter – the pilot's been killed – he gets in the helicopter to take off, all without a cut. The camera is now moving with him, the hole down below explodes. The helicopter crashes, he cuts himself out of the seatbelt, crawls out to see a mushroom cloud, which is effectively the ashes of all the people he cares about, until he's interrupted with this hand on his shoulder, of the T-600. No cuts. We do that a great many times in the picture. In the spirit of saying, "We honor you, audience," we're trying to show a lot of legwork and a lot of planning went into this film, and it's not just schlocky and cut together in the spirit of faking the action. So that's one example.

The escape through the minefield of the Marcus character and the Blair character, same thing – very, very long shots, which in the body of action sequences one traditionally equates with a great many cuts, we chose to do with a single shot.

How did you go from being the Charlie's Angels guy to getting this film? Were you afraid at one point that you'd been stereotyped?

No. It's the privilege of the public to put people in boxes. You take the body of material that anybody's been a part of and you draw conclusions. I mean, who would ever guess that a guy who was on 21 Jump Street with a ridiculous name like Johnny Depp would go on to be one of the great entertainers of our time. You gotta earn your stripes and pay your dues, and I'm certainly willing to earn mine. Fortunately I'm most comfortable in this genre, ironically. These were the films that I grew up on. This was my film school. This was my passion. So I'm very comfortable working in this world. You just sort of take the good with the bad. You take your lumps along the way. On this picture, I tried to get away from being a cheerleader, and really just let the film do the talking. It started at Comic-Con over a year ago. We just said, "This is what the film is, and we let is speak for itself." And you try to honor the fanbase by making elegant choices – Stan Winston, certainly Christian Bale – people have to take a closer look. They weren't excited about the prospect of the Charlie's Angels guy making a Terminator movie. And respectfully, why would they be? What have I done that would suggest I'm the right guy. So you take a step back, you work that much more diligently, and you let the film do the talking.

What have you learned about yourself?

Well, I definitely hate myself. I can promise you that. But when you hate yourself, I think it gives rise to a higher level of artistry.

Why do you hate yourself?

I've got a mirror, don't I? I don't know… It's part of my own inner turmoil and I don't think we have time to get into that. [Laughs.]

Do you see a link to [the world] after the robots take over, a meritocracy, and the way Hollywood is now?

Indeed. But I don't think that that is the case globally, or that that is true to the body of the United States. It's true in Hollywood to some degree, and there's a lot of room for improvement there as well.

How many drafts did you go through?

I don't know. I read a draft that John and Michael wrote, and that's the reason that I'm here. Talking to Jim Cameron about it, [he said,] "Why is this worth telling?" I said, "Because it's the future war. People are interested. I'm interested. It's not a contemporary movie with the machine coming back in time and chasing someone. This is that world that you've only ever given us a tiny glimpse at, and therefore that's the point of entry." He kind of nodded and went, "That's cool."

Can you talk about casting Christian? He's in the Batman franchise and here you are asking him to be in another franchise. I never would have even thought of casting him.

That's exactly why it was appealing. He'll say it himself. He's bloody minded. And he always likes a challenge. And this was no gimme – "Who calls himself McG? Who's this guy talking to him? And what are we out to do and why is this worthwhile?" But he likes a challenge like the next guy. So I went over to England. I saw him. I wanted him to play Marcus. He was more interested in playing Connor. And we went about the business of working on the script. You gotta understand, Christian Bale is so passionate about acting and about his craft. He's got no entourage. He's got no assistant standing out there in the hall. He drove here in a beat-up pick-up truck. He is about the work, and that's who he is. To work with an actor who's that focused and that intense, I think, is to all our benefit.

Do you think your use of practical effects is going, possibly, to move the industry toward more organic productions of action films?

I'm always using this example – I think the public has an intimate understanding of physics, and I think filmmakers underestimate that. And I think, "Y'know, we all know what's gonna happen right there." And if I just said, "Well, do the CG pen," all of us would go, "Something was off about that dopey CG pen." I also don't like trying to get performances out of characters when I'm saying, "Hey Christian, you do you see that tennis ball? That's a seven-foot robot trying to kill you. And that green screen is ultimately going to be a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles." That's bullshit. I think that's a cop-out. You can't reach your highest level of performance in the absence of a tactile environment. I think from a place of performance, from a place of feeling the heat, it's in the interest of building everything and creating as much as you can in camera, and honoring the audience in that respect.

Christian Bale

[Your co-star] Sam Worthington said he hates being labeled intense. How do you feel about it?

I hate that fucking word. [Laughs.] I don't really analyze each word. Whatever. People can label me whatever they want to label me. That's their prerogative. I don't actually have the same passionate feelings that Sam does about that word. I don't care. Call me an a-hole. It's alright. I'm fine. If that's what you think of me, that's your right to think that.

What did you see in this movie that made you want to be a part of it?

I felt like the franchise was done. So when I first got sent it I didn't have any interest. Then I sort of got a creeping idea there really was something good that could be told here. And if that was gonna happen then, absolutely, I wanted to be on for it. I like mixing up, doing Dark Knight, Batman Begins, doing The Machinist and things, and then Public Enemies, then doing Terminator. I enjoy that mix.

How does the physicality of this role and that of Batman change your life, when you're spending all those months at a time so intensely physically [training]?

No so intense on this one. Not nearly as intense as it was on Batman. It was probably more intense for Sam, because he's somebody who could actually have a fistfight with a Terminator. But as a human being, you're not having any fisticuff sessions with a Terminator. You get to that point and you're probably just dead. So for me it was mainly just weapons handling, and preparation for that. We had a great advisor, who I spent a lot of time with. The physical challenge was not nearly as tough as I thought it was going to be.

Can you talk a little bit about how you collaborated with McG?

Well, initially, the collaboration was just me saying no, I didn't want to do the movie. Then it was why. When people look at a franchise, a mythology and think it's over, you got to come back with something that really knocks people out. I just didn't think it was there. But that was not just me – that was everybody who felt that. But I really couldn't see that it wouldn't be able to get there. It seemed crazy to me that that wouldn't be possible. So [I] took a leap of faith because it was the writer's strike and everything, saying, "Listen, let's all just have a few points that we want to get across in another script and let's have that be written and, fine, let's go after that." Of course a movie is a collaboration, but a director has to have his own point of view. That is a director's job – he creates the point of view and he must have a strong point of view. He has to. He can't be wishy-washy. He creates the rhythm of the piece. You can have too many chiefs. So he's obviously very open to ideas, but I like it when I'm hearing great ideas and then I'm just adding on to it, and making something extra.

What was your reaction when you saw it cut together?

Well, I saw a few different variations, like any movie goes through, a lot of different shapes. But ultimately, the last one I saw, I felt satisfied. The public will decide. Because this isn't a movie that you kind of sit down and want to watch [alone at] two o'clock in the morning. It's not something which is gazing into the human soul and speaking to you in that way. It's a movie that's meant to be watched with a lot of different people and get that common energy. Movies like this are much like sports. It's that feeling of a common excitement throughout the theater. That was what I loved about seeing T2, and I felt like we might have a chance here. People will decide, but I think we might have a chance of having revived this, and be able to move on and see about what happens to any future movies, if this one does well enough.

Was the "I'll be back" scene in the script? Was that fun to do?

That was actually something which a friend of mine who came on as a writer for a while (and I would have liked him to have been around longer throughout the movie); that was when Jonathan Nolan was on it briefly, and he called me up and said, "Christian, I've got an idea. I just want to run it by you, because you might just say, "No way." And I thought, "You know what? Let's try it. We can always cut it out." But my aim was – and you can tell me if you feel I did it successfully or not – to have it be such a logical answer to what I'm being asked that hopefully people didn't go, in that second, "What's he doing an Arnie impression for?" I didn't ever want it to come across as an impression, just something that ideally, for me, a few seconds later, people who know the other movies go, "Hang on a second, he just said the same line…" That way I felt comfortable.