James Cameron came up with key Terminator 2 character while high on MDMA

Beloved action sequel celebrates its 30th anniversary this week

James Cameron has said he was high on MDMA when he devised a key character for the second Terminator film.

In a recent oral history of Terminator 2: Judgement Day published by The Ringer, Cameron said he came up with the idea to include a 10-year-old John Connor in the film during an ecstasy trip.

“I remember sitting there once, high on E, writing notes for Terminator,” said Cameron, “and I was struck by Sting’s song, that ‘I hope the Russians love their children too.’”

“And I thought, ‘You know what? The idea of a nuclear war is just so antithetical to life itself.’ That’s where the kid came from.”

The song Cameron was referring to was “Russians”, from Sting’s debut solo album The Dream of the Blue Turtles.

Elsewhere in the piece, the Titanic filmmaker suggests that the first part of T2 to come together was the villain, the shape-shifting liquid metal Terminator played by Robert Patrick.

“I talked to Dennis Muren at ILM,” Cameron said. “I said, ‘I’ve got an idea.’

“If we took the water character from The Abyss, but it was metallic so you didn’t have the translucency issues, but you had all the surface reflectivity issues and you made it a complete human figure that could run and do stuff, and it could morph back into a human, and then turn into the liquid metal version of itself, and we sprinkled it through the movie, can we do it?’

He said, “I’ll call you back tomorrow.’”