Terminator: Dark Fate has James Cameron’s visionary storytelling behind it, but it’s Tim Miller who serves as the guiding directorial hand. From kicking off Deadpool as his feature film debut to restarting Terminator, he’s proven his chops on the action hero front. The talented director shared his approach to the movie in a recent interview with Screen Rant in preparation for its November 1st release.
This is the Terminator movie that I've wanted ever since Judgment Day. Thank you so much. How did you approach this film, given the previous legacy sequel films like The Force Awakens in recent years?
Tim Miller: First of all, thank you very much.
You feel like, if there’s a railroad, the track was already laid there. So, it just happens to stop out in the middle of nowhere, and I just started laying more track. Because Jim kind of created this; set up the story, set up these characters; and I'm just sort of telling the next chapter of it.
I really feel like, we talked about this a lot in the writers’ room, it's almost like you set up a simulation of Sarah Connor and of T-800 and you just run it. And this is kind of the story that comes out. I think it's sort of a natural evolution of those two stories; I hope it feels that way.
And the fact that Jim's involved in it, really gives it his [all] – he's been thinking about it.
You get that feeling that this would have been the next in line. Question about the name, Legion. Where did that come from?
Tim Miller: That one was mine. I did a lot of [research]. You want it to sound like a cool name, but I also wanted to suggest that it's not a singular intelligence. I wanted to feel like it was this big distributed intelligence that didn't see itself as a single entity. It became this sort of all-encompassing thing. And so Legion seemed like the right name. And there's some biblical references in there, because Jim loves a good biblical reference.
You talked about the writers’ room a little bit. Was there ever a plan, if Linda didn't come back, for the story to continue on?
Tim Miller: You know, we had a really brief time where we talked about other options before we said, “Well, what if Linda comes back?” Because that's the optimal thing. And once we started talking about that, we didn't talk about anything else until Jim had an answer. So, we all just kind of followed.
Because if Linda says yes, then that drives a whole bunch of decisions. And if she says no, then you have to do something completely different because there was no world in which anybody else played Linda Hamilton.
So, all roads lead to Linda and I don't know what was beyond them. Probably nothing. I probably would have f***ed off and quit if she didn't do it.
