'Terminator: Dark Fate' Director Breaks Down a Car Chase

Hi, I'm Tim Miller, the director

of Terminator: Dark Fate and this is Notes On A Scene.

[metal grinding]

[girl screaming]

Every scene in the movie has a life of its own, right?

And you talk about it when you're prepping.

This is the cabin scene, and this is the turbine hall scene,

and this is the pickup chase.

In this pickup chase we really wanted to do something

that wasn't a big gun thing, right?

Because we got a lot of guns in the movie,

but we also have this amazing opportunity.

The defenders are not suddenly limited

to what kind of weapons they have in the 20th century

or fighting techniques. And Grace,

who is the super soldier from the future

who comes back to protect Danny, she's augmented.

She's stronger than human, she's faster than human,

and she's a total [beep] badass.

It opened up so many doors for us

in terms of what we could do with action.

So this is the beginning of the scene

right after they've had a big fight inside the factory.

They run outside and they steal this pickup truck.

[man yelling]

[wheels screeching]

[sirens wailing]

[Tim] They're being chased by cops

as they flee the scene of this lots of gunfire.

And now Grace hears something because she's a super soldier

she's got augmented ears, she can hear things

that other people can't.

And what she hears over here is a big [beep] truck engine

revving at maximum RPM because

[loud crashing]

Terminator, who they knew was chasing them,

has stolen a truck and like terminators do,

shortest distance between two points,

he just goes right through the wall.

So now the chase is really joined in earnest.

What we did for this scene here

is the pickup truck is actually being towed.

And these characters inside here are actually CG.

You know stunts are very dangerous these days

and stunt people are very brave,

but we don't like to put people

in danger when we don't have to.

Faster! Go faster!

[crowd screaming]

And again in these scenes you always wanna show

that not only is it dangerous for the main characters,

but it's dangerous for everybody around them.

And part of the fun is scenes like this

where you have a lot of bystanders put in mortal danger.

You know hats off to the stunt crew

because these cars are still hurtling by

at 30 or 40 miles an hour as they come around this corner.

[Dark-Haired Woman] Look out!

[horn honking]

[Tim] We wanted to have a little game of chicken

with the truck and I thought oh

this would be really cool to do it from behind.

So we construct it so that there's literally no way

for her to go forward and she has to go backwards.

Again we do some cool stuff to make it look

much more dangerous than it actually is.

This truck was actually a little bit further back.

It was really back here.

And this truck, this car right here is CG.

The pace at which you have to shoot some of these scenes

is such that you can try and do it all practical

or you can mix techniques

and try and save time.

And also, you know, it's a little safer

and you wanna save lives too,

you don't wanna put anybody in danger.

And the damage it does to the door

is all to set up the fact where the door swings open.

Cause I thought if the driver side of the car door was open,

somehow seeing them unprotected during this whole chase

I thought it would be more interesting.

This car is not really there.

And this door is not really there.

And aside from her being exposed,

I really wanted this one moment with Grace

where another car hits the door.

And she's so focused, and she's so hyper aware

of everything that's going on around her

that she doesn't even acknowledge the fact

that death was just inches away from her.

All of this is really just prelude to the big beats

which are gonna happen on the highway.

For that piece and to get the actors in it

there's actually under here,

there's a whole platform on wheels

that was on a big slider track that went off this way.

And it's got a big chain that tons of stunt guys

manipulating this thing that pulls the truck

into the guard rail at high speed.

The guard rail is not actually there.

Even this one here is in the foreground

but the guard rail's cut off where the truck actually hits.

And it doesn't hit a guard rail,

it slams into the end of the track.

And I wanted to do this other thing here where

I wanted it to look like Mackenzie's about to get her leg

smashed into the guard rail, and she pulls it back

right at the last second.

So you'll see her leg is out right here.

So now she's gonna swing in

and she pulls the leg in just before they hit.

The little things like that, who's gonna know?

I know. I think it makes it all cooler.

[loud crashing]

I wanted to get rid of the big thing at the front

because I was just a little bored with it by that point.

[woman screams]

We wanted to do this sort of squeeze moment.

We're actually shooting this on a blue screen stage

because I wanted it to look like

you know, they're scraping the guard rail which we set up so

these are digital sparks that are coming up here.

This is a digital car and this is a digital truck

coming over here for just this one shot

that we kind of sandwich in between him.

You can, you know, sort of seamlessly

sorta slip these little shots in here that are

it's a mix between what you shot on the day

and what you did on the stage later.

There's so much [beep] action in this movie.

You have to have a [beep] plan.

I mean there's 600 people

that were on this set.

I mean I'm counting catering and everything else.

You have to be on your A game

and have thought of everything.

I think part of being a director, one of the biggest parts,

is being able to sit in meetings.

It's an amazing skill that I've developed directing

is to sit in meetings and talk about over and over again,

what you'd like it to be

and have everyone else tell you why you can't have it.

And then you come up with, well what if I could do this?

Well how about if I change it to that?

Or what about that?

There's so many of those little junctions

when you design an action scene

that you come to and you either go,

okay well I'll change the action, or I'll do it digitally,

or we'll just cut it completely.

It really is a collaboration of who can do what

and what's the best way to do any given thing.

Giant trucks moving around at high speed

requires a little planning.

[beep]

When we first started shooting this movie,

we hadn't decided on a rating.

But I knew the Terminator's DNA is R-rated.

I wanted to make an R-rated movie.

Jim wanted to make an R-rated movie.

Arnold really wanted to make an R-rated movie.

But of course these are big money decisions

and PG-13, it's a wider audience

and there's a lot of arguments on both sides.

And honestly, I understand the economic arguments

for these things but I knew that we could pretty much

change it to an R-rated

from an effects standpoint later.

All the blood is digital anyway.

The one thing I couldn't get was the language.

So I made sure that every place it was natural

for the character to curse or speak in

sort of the way everybody else speaks,

certainly the way I speak,

we would always get some coverage with that.

And honestly, it was the thing that came most naturally.

I don't think I told Mackenzie to say [beep] here,

I think she just did.

[woman shouting]

[Dark-Haired Woman] Oh my god!

[Tim] There's two things I wanted to match

about Jim Cameron's pace.

Number one, inside the action sequences themselves,

you have to stay focused on character.

Because if shit starts blowing up and you're not focused

on the characters but you're focused on wide shots

and spectacular visual effects, I think you've failed

because you want the audience to put themselves

in the character in danger.

Secondly, Terminator movies and all of Jim's movies

from Aliens on, they always have this very slow build.

They usually have some action up front

to kind of wet the appetite.

Then you have a lot of character building,

and then, when it ramps into the action,

it stays there and this tension stays high for a long time.

So I wanted to replicate that pace.

Can you drive?

No, I mean I can't, I-- I got it. I got it.

Grace, what

Dani put your seat belts on!

This was really one of the sequences

built around certain moments.

I wanted to take away all traditional weapons from her,

and I wanted to show how strong

and cool she is with nothing.

She can make a weapon out of nothing.

Big comic book fan, I always loved Bullseye and Daredevil

because he could use the seed from a lemon

as a deadly weapon, or a paperclip or a playing card.

And I had that kinda in my mind when I wrote this scene

and I thought, what can we do with her

that she could fight off the Terminator

in this highway scene, and I came up with the idea

for these rebar, and she is so strong

that she could hurl these things at supersonic speed.

So this is actually Mackenzie Davis on the road

at high speed, hanging out the doorway.

And then this is done as a separate piece on the back lot.

So the truck is stationary, doesn't even

the seat, the wheels here are CG

because the wheels aren't rolling.

All of this out here is all digital.

This is one of Mackenzie's stunt doubles.

And I wanted to do something that shows

just how powerful and fearless she is

to jump out of a car at 90 miles an hour.

She doesn't even think twice about it.

I wanted it to be very simple and efficient.

What we end up here with, I think it's a cool move,

but it's actually just the most efficient way

to get into the back of the truck from there

if you're a super soldier and can jump,

you know, eight feet.

[grunting]

We had a whole variety of things for her.

Sometimes in the back she just had a little thing

about this size in her hand,

and the rest is digital extension for this.

And she was just throwing this little thing.

Sometimes she had a full rubber version of the rebar

and she was actually throwing that.

But this part right here was,

this is one of those things where you don't plan on

but later on you say oh [beep].

I should have done it this way to begin with.

When we put it all together in the edit room,

it just didn't seem as compelling and I thought,

it should really be like, she throws one it doesn't work.

She throws another it doesn't work.

So, what is she gonna do?

She throws two at once at the same time

to overwhelm him so he can't get to them

and they both go through and penetrate.

We mocked that up in the edit bay

and then we went and we did some re-shoots.

It makes the whole sequence work.

That's an homaged Robert Patrick

pushing the truck glass out in Terminator 2.

This movie's filled with these little homages.

You wanna do this for like fan service stuff

because I'm a fan, but you also don't want it

to be heavy-handed or people feel like they're watching

the same movie over and over again.

I also wanted to do a little shot right here

to show the spikes are going through his endoskeleton

and all the way through into the back of the truck.

What's actually there in this shot,

I think it was just a little stub

with a harness over Gabe's shoulder like that

to keep it in place and that's actually what he grabs.

This is digital, this is digital.

You know, we talked a lot about how to reveal

Gabriel's abilities, the ability to split.

That's like the big reveal for The Terminator the movie

and of course, my initial instinct was

we should delay that, right?

We show a lot of other stuff, we show what a badass he is

and then we up the ante later on.

And Jim said, no no no no no, you go big early.

So this whole scene was designed

to kind of back into that big moment.

The whole technology of this terminator

is that he is this combined form

of liquid metal and endoskeleton.

I really try and walk that line between wanting

to honor the franchise, but also I wanna make it different.

I want fans to feel like we're not just telling

the same story over again, we're trying

to bring something new to the mythology.

Anything in here, I'll have a reason.

If you ask me any question about how any of this happens,

I will have a rationale.

I will never use the excuse of,

well it's a [beep] movie so who cares, right?

Of course on some level you don't wanna bore the audience

with too much exposition and all of that.

But I do think that as a director,

you should have thought about all that

because in a subtle way, it kind of plays out.

And throughout the film is sort of a foundation

that is semi-logical, even if you don't wanna

be boring the audience with lots of science-fictional terms

about time travel because it's all bullshit.

But, it's cool bullshit right?