Arnold Schwarzenegger reprises his role as the Terminator in “Terminator Genisys.” (Photo credit: Melissa Sue Gordon/Paramount Pictures/TNS)

By Rick Bentley
The Fresno Bee

LOS ANGELES — The script for “Terminator Genisys” called for a young Arnold Schwarzenegger to battle an older version of himself. Director Alan Taylor wasn’t worried about creating the young version as much as he was about getting Schwarzenegger on board with playing the older Terminator.

Taylor should have worried more about the younger version.

“I hadn’t met Arnold yet, and I didn’t know what to expect. He’s a singular alpha male so I didn’t know what kind of personality he would have when I met him,” Taylor says. “I really, really wanted this guy to have gray hair and embrace his age. I didn’t know how he would feel about showing the character breaking down. But, it ended up being a love fest working with him. He had no concerns about the aging. He just wanted to nail the character.”

“Terminator Genisys” is the first film in the franchise — which started in 1984 with director James Cameron’s “The Terminator” — to address why the killing machine looks older. The explanation: The cyborg’s insides are mechanical but they are covered in skin. That skin ages like it does on a human.

“Terminator Genisys” changes the timeline established in the other movies. Here, the Terminator doesn’t first meet Sarah Connor when he’s trying to kill her as a young woman; instead, the a T-800 (Model 101) was sent back in time to when Sarah was a young girl.

This sets up a battle between an older and younger version of the T-800 at Griffith Observatory.

“I didn’t worry about the younger version because I knew we could get that worked out with visual effects,” Taylor says.

Complicated special effects are rather new for Taylor. He’s been directing since the ‘90s, but his early work was with television shows such as “Oz,” “Sex and the City,” “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men.” His real special-effects training came through his directing work on “Game of Thrones.” His move to feature films came with the heavy special effects of “Thor: The Dark World.”

He didn’t count on those visual effects taking a year to complete and being finalized minutes after the film was to be delivered to the studio.

The process started with 28-year-old model and bodybuilder Brett Azar, who was cast to fight Schwarzenegger in the showdown. After the footage was shot, the special effects team started the lengthy process of placing a computer-generated version of Schwarzenegger on Azar’s body.

Even casting a bodybuilder didn’t quite give Taylor the Terminator shape he needed.

“If you go back and look at Arnold in the ‘80s, you’ll see he had a peacock chest,” Taylor says. “Bret did the scene and then we had a full CGI body of Arnold that we sort of mapped on to Brett.”

The special effects team wasn’t able to use any of the footage from the original “Terminator” movie because it was owned by a different company. They had to resort to lifting images of Schwarzenegger from other films and photographs from the mid-1980s.

“We were lucky that Arnold was one of the first actors to be digitally scanned and I’m told the special effects team had access to that,” Taylor says.

David Ellison, one of the “Terminator Genisys” producers, says the time it took to create the younger version of Schwarzenegger was necessary. The goal was to create a computer-generated version of an actor that looks totally alive. That’s what he sees with this film.

All of the work was necessary because the battle between the two Arnolds comes so early in the film. Taylor knew that the clash is a pivotal scene in either winning over the audience or terminating their interest.

“We were all quaking in our boots as to whether we were going to be able to solve the technical things,” Taylor says. “I decided we were going to push the envelope with the special effects. Pushing the envelope means you don’t sleep. You freak out. Nothing was worse when we would look at these shots of the young Arnold and they were close but not quite there. Then you cross this magical line through hundreds of man hours to make it work.”