Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released 30 years ago this week. The sequel to the 1984 hit The Terminator was a long time coming, but turned out to be worth the wait. James Cameron had made several movies in between, and knew that fans of The Terminator would return, but also knew there needed to be something new to impress the audience in addition to the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Cameron: I talked to Dennis Muren at ILM. 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.”
Dennis Muren (visual effects supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic): I had an idea of what’s possible not only from The Abyss, but I’d seen there was work being done and research at universities, and commercials on TV at that time that had computer graphics, and their figures were moving and animated.
That's just one part of the many components that had to be worked out to get T2 made. James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong, and many other people involved in the production tell the story of how Terminator 2: Judgement Day came about at The Ringer.