Director James Cameron was high on MDMA when he came up with key Terminator 2 character

The idea for 10-year-old John Connor came to James Cameron while high on ecstasy (Picture: Rex)

James Cameron has revealed the inspiration for a key character in Terminator 2 came to him while he was high on MDMA. 

The director, 66, revealed that the idea to include a 10-year-old John Connor in the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgement Day was born after he took the class-A drug ecstasy and listened to Sting’s song Russians. 

In a recent oral history of the film, published by The Ringer, James explained: ‘I remember sitting there once, high on E, writing notes for Terminator, and I was struck by Sting’s song, that “I hope the Russians love their children too.”

‘And I thought, “You know what? The idea of a nuclear war is just so antithetical to life itself.” That’s where the kid came from.’

He also revealed that the first part of Terminator 2 to come to fruition was the liquid metal Terminator played by Robert Patrick. 

James explained: ‘I talked to Dennis Muren at ILM. I said, “I’ve got an idea. If we took the water character from The Abyss, but it was metallic so you didn’t have the translucency issues.

The young John Connor only came about due to that flash of inspiration from James Cameron (Picture: StudioCanal/Shutterstock)

‘But you had all the surface reflectivity issues and you made it a complete human figure that could run and do stuff, and it could morph back into a human, and then turn into the liquid metal version of itself, and we sprinkled it through the movie, can we do it?”

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‘He said, “I’ll call you back tomorrow.” He called me back and he said, “We can do it. We can’t do a huge volume, we don’t have a pipeline, so pick your battles.”’

James revealed that the film still only used 42 shots with CGI, compared to 14 for The Abyss which was filmed two years earlier, but if it were made today there would be another ’50 or 60’ shots using the technology, which was previously done with practical prosthetic effects. 

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