-
1. Who directed The Terminator?
James Cameron
Cameron came to it fresh from being fired off Piranha II, and the image of a metal skeleton walking out of fire came to him in a fever dream in Rome. He sold the script to producer Gale Anne Hurd for a dollar on condition that he direct it.
-
2. Who plays Sarah Connor?
Linda Hamilton
Hamilton's Sarah starts the film as a waitress who cannot keep an order straight and ends it making pipe bombs; the hardened version arrives in the sequel seven years later. She came to the part from Children of the Corn, released the same year.
-
3. Who plays Kyle Reese?
Michael Biehn
Biehn nearly lost the part by auditioning in the Southern accent he had kept from a stage play. Cameron hired him again for Aliens and The Abyss, and Bill Paxton is in this film too, as the blue-haired punk whose clothes the Terminator takes.
-
4. What is Sarah's job at the start?
Waitress
She works at a diner called Big Jeff's, in a pink uniform, and the opening scenes show her getting orders wrong and having a kid drop ice cream in her apron pocket. It is also where a coworker shows her the news that a woman named Sarah Connor has been shot.
-
5. What future defense system sends the Terminator?
Skynet
Reese describes a defense network computer, built by Cyberdyne Systems and trusted to run everything, that decided all of humanity was a threat. Cyberdyne is the tempting distractor, but the company only built it; Mother is the ship's computer in Alien.
-
6. Why is Sarah being targeted?
Her future son will lead the resistance
Reese explains it in a stolen car: the machines lost the future war and sent a Terminator back to erase the resistance leader before his birth. Sarah's reaction is that he has the wrong woman, since she cannot even balance her checkbook.
-
7. What is the name of Sarah's future son?
John Connor
John never appears in this film; Reese describes him as the man who taught the survivors to fight back. Sarah ends the film pregnant and recording tapes for him as she drives into Mexico, where a boy takes the Polaroid that Reese will carry in the future.
-
8. How does the Terminator identify women named Sarah Connor?
A telephone directory
Three Sarah Connors are listed, and it works through them in order, which is why the news is already talking about a pattern by the time it reaches hers. The police spot the same pattern and start looking for her as well, but she is out for the evening.
-
9. What nightclub does Sarah enter while being followed?
Tech Noir
She ducks in because it is crowded and lit, calls the police from the pay phone, and the Terminator finds her from the dance floor anyway. Reese shoots it first, and the line he gives her as the club empties is 'Come with me if you want to live.'
-
10. What covers the Terminator's metal skeleton?
Living human tissue
Reese explains that the earlier 600 series had rubber skin and were easy to spot, while this one is flesh over a metal endoskeleton, sweat and bad breath included. The rubber suit is tempting for that reason, and the flesh burns away in the tanker explosion.
-
11. What is the name of Sarah's roommate?
Ginger
Ginger is wearing Walkman headphones when the Terminator comes through the apartment, so she never hears it kill her boyfriend Matt in the next room. Bess Motta, who plays her, was a television aerobics instructor.
-
12. What does Reese say cannot travel through time by itself?
Nonliving material
'Nothing dead will go,' Reese says, blaming a field that only living tissue generates, which is why he and the machine both arrive naked and why nobody could send a weapon back with him. The Terminator qualifies because it is living flesh over metal.
-
13. Who composed the score?
Brad Fiedel
Fiedel built the score on synthesizers and a sampled metallic clang, with a main theme in a lurching meter that never settles into a regular march. He came back for Terminator 2, and John Carpenter, the other name here, wrote the music for his own films.
-
14. What does the Terminator say before returning to the police station?
I'll be back
Schwarzenegger wanted to say 'I will be back,' finding the contraction awkward in his accent, and Cameron refused to change it. The Terminator then drives a car through the station's front doors and shoots its way through the building looking for Sarah.
-
15. What piece of factory equipment crushes the Terminator?
A hydraulic press
By then Reese has blown the machine in half with a pipe bomb, and the torso drags itself after Sarah on its arms through the factory. She lures it under the press and flattens it, and its red eye fades out on the shop floor.
