Revisiting 'The Terminator' - producer Van Ling speaks

1. The new Terminator DVD features a fully remastered and restored transfer, which undoubtedly is the best the film has ever looked on home video. Since the film has such a complex distribution history, how hard was it to find usable elements, and how long did the remastering/restoration take to complete?

VL: As you probably know, the film was originally owned by Hemdale and released by Orion in 1984, and then both companies were bought by MGM. The good news was that it was now all under one roof, but the bad news was that all MGM had was whatever those two defunct companies handed over. There was minimal paperwork and clipping files, given the popularity of the film, and no one who was around at that time was still associated with the studio.

So even though I didn't work on the film, I had to serve as the production's "memory" in order to help MGM figure out what everything was. The guys I worked with at MGM Technical Services, Gray Ainsworth and James Owsley, were great about it. I also had the benefit of access to all the things I had collected on the film back when I was at Lightstorm, so we had some materials --personal Cameron art, and so on-- that no one else had. I also got in touch with Gene Warren of Fantasy II and pyrotechnician Joe Viskocil and got some great material -- stills and footage -- so that was good. But due to some pretty tough legal conflicts, there was no on-set behind-the-scenes production material available to me, unfortunately, although I think I made up for it with the new interviews.

Note that I was in the middle of finishing T2 at the time I started on the supplement for T1, so I ended up not having the time to do the menus or to get too involved with the new transfer and mix. That was not really a problem, though, because it was in good hands with MGM, Skywalker Sound, composer Brad Fiedel and Lightstorm, once I helped get them all hooked up with each other. The retransfer and the new mix took several months on their end, while I concentrated on docs and still galleries and the restoration of the deleted scenes, all of which took about four months. It was a bit of a rush.

2. The Terminator DVD also includes a new 5.1 surround EX mix, though the original theatrical release was in mono. How did you create - most impressively! - a full 5.1 EX mix out of mono elements? Were any sounds or effects newly created just for the DVD?

VL: You can thank Gary Rydstrom and Gary Rizzo at Skywalker Sound for the new mix, as well as Brad Fiedel, the original music composer. They had the tough job of taking all of the original mono elements and splitting them all into multiple tracks and then adding sweeteners and remixing it while trying to maintain the spirit and energy of the original mix. You don't want to go too far afield from the original, but you want to make the most of the 5.1 channels. They completely rebuilt the effects tracks, and Brad had to figure out how to spread out the music tracks while still using the original music elements! Part of the spirit of the original mono mix, as Brad points out in the supplemental materials, is the seat of the pants feel of everything, so it was often about fighting the urge to "fix" things that we would do differently today. The basic tenet was to treat the mix like they would have done it if they had had the multi-track technology back then.

3. You've now created many DVD special editions, such as Independence Day, The Abyss and T2, and you also produced many of the laserdisc special editions for these titles as well. But the Terminator was created from scratch specifically for DVD. Where there any specific challenges you faced in bringing The Terminator to DVD, and how long did the project take to complete?

VL: Collecting the materials was a bit of a challenge. I had already done small sections of the necessary research back in 1992 for the VHS boxed set of T1 and T2 that came out back then --that's where the T1 retrospective came from-- but I really wanted to do a new documentary to cover all the aspects of the film, from conception to release. Fortunately, in the end I was able to get nearly everyone I wanted for interviews, except for Arnold and Linda. They were both too busy, I think.