I'll be back


Rome, 1982, Mr. James Cameron is lying on his back in a hotel room having a fever dream. The dream is vivid, frightening and irresistible. Mr. Cameron would later profess his love of nightmares. This particular nightmare was about a robot and it would prompt him to write "the definitive robot story" because "no one had really done it before."

The imagery arrived in his head fully formed: a metal endoskeleton emerging from flames, piercing red eyes zeroing in on its target. The story was simple, streamlined and practically wrote itself. Largely reminiscent of another film about an unstoppable killing machine that had happened ten years earlier, except this one was gonna get you even if you stayed out of the ocean.

An accident in casting meant that the role, originally offered to Lance Henrikson, went to an Austrian bodybuilder who would later further his plans for world domination and blur the line between fantasy and reality in the early years of the 21st Century by becoming the Governor of California.

A B movie upon release the film found its audience on video, a new technology which was bringing cinema into the home in the early eighties.

It would later become the basis for the most expensive film of all time, T2: Judgement Day, a seminal work in the area of CGI, which, in the early nineties was opening up whole new worlds of possibility for filmmakers, storytellers and artists.