Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines began its ambitious 100-day schedule filming in and around the Los Angeles area on April 14, 2002. "The first night of shooting, Arnold came out of his trailer in his Terminator wardrobe, with the leather jacket, the sunglasses and the big shotgun," describes Mostow. "He walks onto the set to do his first scene, and I turned to everybody and said, ‘Now we’re making a Terminator movie.’"
Schwarzenegger further impressed the filmmakers, cast and crew with his awesome physicality and exacting preparation. "When we started filming, Arnold was the exact same dimensions that he was when he did T2," Mostow says of Schwarzenegger, whose black leather jacket from the film fit him like a glove. "That’s not special effects. That’s just old-fashioned working out."
"I was very excited to do the work that it takes to be in the same shape I was in when I made the previous Terminator films," says Schwarzenegger of his three-to-five hour daily pre-production workouts. (To stay in peak physical condition throughout production, he worked out every day during his lunch break.) "Working out, rehearsing the scenes, preparing for the stunts – all of those things were a great pleasure for me."
Schwarzenegger feels his character suits him as well as the physicality he perfected for the role. "The first scene I shot in the first Terminator movie was a night scene, and I was sitting in a police car," Schwarzenegger remembers. "My eyebrows were shaved off, and I had hair and makeup effects to simulate that I’d been through the fire. And Jim Cameron came up to me and said, ‘It’s like you’ve played this character for years, you’re so locked into the Terminator.’ That’s exactly the way I felt on Terminator 3. The first night I came on set, I felt like I had been shooting the movie for six months. I loved stepping back into this character."
As always, the actor relished the challenge of doing much of his own stuntwork. "Because of my continuous training and weight lifting throughout my life," Schwarzenegger says, "I’ve always been prepared for the physical aspect of these movies, and I enjoy the challenge. To me, each stunt is always an exciting new adventure."
Some of the most elaborate, intricately choreographed stunts in the film are featured in a furious high-speed chase sequence in which the T-X maneuvers a 100-ton crane through city streets, swinging the crane arm into a fire engine and then into a glass building as the Terminator hangs on with trademark tenacity. The riveting sequence, designed by Mostow and stunt coordinator Simon Crane, was filmed on a quarter mile long street set built from the ground up at the Boeing Plant in Downey, California. Fourteen cameras were used to shoot the Terminator slamming into the glass building on the crane arm, because like many of the stunts executed for the chase, there were no retakes.
Movie Database
In Theaters
