James Cameron says getting fired from his first directing job led him to write 'The Terminator'

"But I believed at the time, I internalized that I was not doing it well, you know, and I thought, 'Oh crap, now I'm worse off than if I hadn't taken the job in the first place. Now I'm at negative 10. I could have just been at zero. Now I have to dig out of a hole to get to zero,'"

"I couldn't wait for a directing gig to come to me. I had to create it for myself. And that's when I wrote 'The Terminator,'"

"The visual effects have to be very limited, but they have to be powerful, so that it's not a ridiculous budget like a 'Star Wars' movie that I knew we couldn't afford or nobody would hire me for,"

James Cameron was fired from his first directing job on Piranha II: The Spawning and initially viewed the experience as a professional failure. He believed he had to recover from a perceived setback and determined to create his own directing opportunity. Cameron wrote The Terminator as an original project designed to fit a small budget while leveraging his design and visual-effects expertise. He prioritized limited but powerful visual effects to avoid large-scale budgets like Star Wars. The Terminator provided a way to climb out of a career hole and relaunch his directing trajectory.

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