Arnold Schwarzenegger Didn’t Look Like the Terminator to James Cameron at First: ‘It Wasn’t Our Vision’

James Cameron said Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t necessarily the image he was looking for initially when he crafted the appearance of the murderous, autonomous android in “The Terminator.”

The filmmaker opened up about the film in an interview with Empire, during which he shared that the decision to cast Schwarzengger worked out perfectly – though it wasn’t his first idea.

“I think a lot of filmmakers, especially first-time filmmakers, get very, very stuck in a vision, because of insecurity,” Cameron explained of his breakthrough film. “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.”

In the classic 1984 action/sci-fi flick, Schwarzenegger plays Cyberdyne Systems Model 101, also known as a T-800, or as the world knows the character, The Terminator. The killer cyborg traveled back in time from 2029 to assassinate Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in an effort to prevent the birth of the person who one day leads a fight against machines.

While discussing the film’s impact over the years, Cameron also shared that he doesn’t see it as any type of “Holy Grail” project, saying some components of the film are “cringeworthy” due to the lack of resources they had at the time.

“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 said, adding that its “production value” was a primary issue for him.

However, he says each characters’ lines were just fine, despite what critics have to say. The filmmaker, who’s given Hollywood blockbuster films like “The Titanic” and “Avatar,” says haters can hate, but his films’ success speaks for itself.

“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. “You know what? Let me see your three-out-of-the-four-highest-grossing films — then we’ll talk about dialogue effectiveness.”