As Arnie returns to play everyone’s favourite robot assassin, John Patterson heads to a sweltering New Orleans set to talk to the star and the team behind the fifth Terminator movie

The former governor of the state of California is slumped in a black leather armchair after a hard day terminating in a tropically humid New Orleans. On his face is a layer of putty-like prosthetic makeup, luminous mint in colour and presumably for green-screen masking, a semicircular metallic attachment glued around it, suggesting that the T-800 may have lost another electronic eyeball today.

Long the sanest Republican politician in the country, Arnold Schwarzenegger is back in the saddle as America’s action hero. About to turn 67, he is in excellent shape, as you would expect, though he looks knackered after his exertions in the heat. “There are different stages of deterioration for the T-800,” he says, pointing at his face. “Stage one is scratches, stage two is worse. This is stage five, and there’s a stage six after this, so I will definitely be taking a beating or two.” His accent is heavy, but his English is excellent, with a very Germanic meticulousness regarding grammar and syntax.

Tired as he is, Schwarzenegger is nonetheless in characteristically tireless form as the promoter-in-chief of his own product; everything he says is designed to sell it. “It’s terrific because I think very few times, if any, can I remember that the same person has been involved in the same franchise, from 1984 to 2015, over 30 years. I don’t know of another example, not James Bond, not Batman – the actors always change. There are no others,” he avows with conviction. (It feels best not to mention Die Hard when he’s on such a roll.) His director is a “visionary,”, his collaborators “amazingly talented” and “incredibly dedicated”, and so on. He’s an endearingly relentless steamroller of a salesman.

Schwarzenegger is also kind enough to share with us some of the tips he offers in his own motivational speeches (a second money-spinning career for every ex-politician): “Have a clear idea of what you’re doing; don’t listen to the naysayers; work your ass off; give something back, don’t just take.” It’s the classic Horatio Alger, up-by-your-bootstraps, all-American recipe for getting ahead, and God knows, it worked for Arnie.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Schwarzenegger on set with producers David Ellison and Dana Goldberg. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon

Here he is with an odyssey of success behind him, riches in the bank and the summit of his political ambitions achieved. All things considered, he didn’t do too badly, and, as a liberal Republican, he set things up quite nicely for his Democratic successor Jerry Brown, who doesn’t face the Republican supermajority in the State Assembly that scuppered Arnie’s best ideas, some of which Brown has now adopted. But the “Gropenfuhrer” allegations that dogged him in his first gubernatorial campaign were echoed after a retirement forced by the scandal of a child born to his housekeeper years before, resulting in separation from his wife of 29 years, Maria Shriver of the Kennedy dynasty. There is a lot to climb back from, then.

Today, there is something poignant and slightly shrunken about Schwarzenegger as he talks about his upcoming projects. “Triplets, the sequel to Twins, The Expendables 3”: every one a sequel or a reboot, everything from yesterday. At one point I almost feel bad for finding out I’m fractionally taller than he is. Terminator Genisys, however, looks like the real deal, and possibly his salvation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Filming of the fifth Terminator movie is taking place, appropriately enough, in the ruins of our recently collapsed civilisation. In this case, it’s the hollowed-out shell of what was once a big-box Lowe’s Home Improvement superstore, with ceilings 50ft high and a vast interior space capable of holding six or seven different indoor sets for the movie. Lowe’s didn’t go under in the financial collapse of 2008, but only because it shut down tonnes of branches like this one. Lowe’s is never coming back here, and neither are the four big-boxes adjacent to it, all of them echoingly vacant and sombre.

Everything about the Terminator Genisys set is on a massive scale. In the vast parking lot outside the site of the main location, 30 Star Waggon trailers are parked side by side, in diminishing perspective toward the low horizon. When the lunch-bell sounds, the craft services section – five huge tents joined together – is so packed it’s like the wedding in The Godfather. “It’s in the nature of the beast,” says director Alan Taylor, “and it’s a big beast, a highly collaborative process. Much of the film-making goes on not on the set, but in post and in the effects labs all over the planet. And we have two full-time units shooting. The second unit even has its own separate base of operations. That is big.” And this man has worked on Game of Thrones, so he knows.

It’s July 2014 in a monsoonal, enervatingly humid New Orleans, the kind of feverishly torpid, exhausting Louisiana day that makes you hallucinate about fjords and ice-fishing. Indoors, it’s worse; the air doesn’t stir. Between the baffle-walls and partitions are glimpses of large movie set-pieces. Near the floor-to-ceiling entrance, there is what looks like an electricity substation, all scary-looking pylons and zap-you’re-dead conductors and transformers, an excellent location for a fight to the last between a couple of T-800s.

Out of sight somewhere is the Cyberdyne Laboratories set, visible only on a monitor in the green room on which, for a few minutes, Jason Clarke, who plays John Connor, acts out a scene with Courtney B Vance’s Dr Miles Dyson. This is as close to a spoiler as we will get all day, the admirably (and annoyingly) close-mouthed, spoiler-phobic cast and crew going all out to keep us from learning too many details of the narrative – or indeed, any at all.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jason Clarke and Jai Courtney in Terminator Genisys. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Pictures

But Connor, hero of the War Against the Machines, messiah of post-apocalyptic mankind ... here in the present day ... at Cyberdyne? That stuck in my mind. For a year.

The Terminator franchise has endured its own odyssey since the fourth, Arnie-less entry, Terminator Salvation, set entirely in the future as mankind wars with the machines. Schwarzenegger, whose victorious gubernatorial campaign in 2003 surely benefited from the simultaneous summer release of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, wasn’t around for Salvation, “and anyway, I didn’t like the script. But the day I left the governor’s office, I got a phone call saying that the Ellisons had bought the rights to the franchise.”

The Ellisons are Megan and David, the children of billionaire Oracle chairman Larry Elllison, each of whom has their own production company: Megan’s Annapurna Pictures, which finances the kind of middle-budget arthouse projects that the studios won’t touch in the current comic-book monoculture (Her, Foxcatcher, The Master); and David’s Skydance Productions, which has specialised in remakes, sequels and reboots such as True Grit, Star Trek: Into Darkness and GI Joe: Retaliation. They elected for Skydance to handle T5.

The franchise fell on bad times in the post-2008 economy, but in the end it arose from the ashes of various bankruptcy fire-sales. Everyone interested in Terminator agreed that they disliked McG’s Terminator Salvation, director Alan Taylor (The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones) in particular.

“What detracted from it for me was that it was set entirely in the future. Part of the mythology and the fun is that they’re set in a world we know and can comprehend, and then into that world comes this incomprehensible, unstoppable force. Seeing that relentlessness rampaging in our world is key to the mythology. So they abandoned one of the things I love most. We begin in the future, showing events that have been mentioned in previous movies, but were never staged. And then you find yourself in our world. We’re a very different animal. One of the things I admire about James Cameron’s original T1 and T2 is that they’re very simple, very pure. We’re a lot more complex than that, which is a challenge.”

Consultations were had with franchise creator Cameron, who gave his blessing, and Arnie entered talks (“With no Arnie, as far as I was concerned, there would be no movie – and we had no plan B,” says Ellison’s co-producer, Dana Goldberg). A script was finally commissioned from Patrick Lussier and Laeta Kalogridis, and once it was deemed strong enough to underpin a projected trilogy of movies, things really got under way. As David Ellison says: “It was nice to wash off 30 years of built-up complications and go at it all over again as a cohesive new franchise.”

But he insists this isn’t Terminator part five, or a reboot, or in any way a betrayal of the franchise. “We didn’t want to just recreate the movies Cameron made, we wanted to take his incredible universe and update it to have a relevance for today. So it is very, very reverential to the canon that’s been established, just heading in new directions.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Tristar

Cast and crew insist that the first two Terminator movies – the only ones, as far as I can divine, that they’re interested in – were made in the shadow of the cold war. Back then the theme of man against intrusive, potentially insurgent technology was still strictly a sci-fi staple. Nowadays it’s the world we all live in, and the franchise is adjusting itself accordingly.

“That cold war paranoia is the larger framework of the first two movies,” says Ellison, “but now we are so reliant on technology that – I mean, I see six or seven iPhones on the table in front of me, at least two of which have a thumbprint-ID security feature on them. SkyNet no longer needs to beat down your front door because you lined up in front of the Apple store and invited the wolf to dinner. So a commentary on technology and society, and how they interact, is a very important part of this story.”

Clarke agrees: “If you read books like The Singularity Is Near [by Ray Kurzweil], you know technology is going to be a problem, artificial intelligence reaching that point where it can master us, where one day the machines, which we’ve built to function at no higher level than a servant or a dog, are gonna go all Animal Farm on us and move into the bed – and then you’re finished!” (This is the first time I’ve ever heard his native Australian accent.)

A year later, back in Hollywood, we’re shown enough of Terminator Genisys to hazard a few good guesses, and one major mystery from New Orleans is solved. Connor does indeed return from the future – or does he? The John Connor who arrives in 2015 is a Terminator himself, and he kills some surprising people.

And this time around, the person who, in accordance with established Terminator tradition, gets to say, “Come with me if you wanna live!” is Sarah Connor herself, played by Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke. She is following in the footsteps of her GoTs cast-mate Lena Headey, who starred in the promising but soon-cancelled TV adjunct to the franchise, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but she still hews to the Linda Hamilton version of the character.

• This article was amended on 12 June 2015. An earlier version misspelled Ray Kurzweil’s name as Raymond Kurzwell.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Pictures

“There was obviously an incredible amount of pressure following in the footsteps of Linda Hamilton, playing one of the most iconic female roles ever, but I didn’t feel like I could turn it down. But my backstory is such that Sarah is essentially an entirely different character.” Playing the Queen of Dragons in GoT, Clarke had done her homework on strong women: she liked Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib, Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth and Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment. “Top of the list: Linda Hamilton in T2.” As she reminds me, “I’m the only girl on this movie, running with the boys, so I had to show my mettle, show ’em how it’s done! I’m not allowed to slow down. I’ve been warned that now I’m fanboy-fodder for life, and my dark hair is no longer my disguise - my cover is totally blown, I’m screwed!” she chuckles delightedly, straightens her Terminating outfit, and heads back to the set to kick another hundred acres of robot ass.

Delighted that he has a good product to hawk, Schwarzenegger is exuberant and upbeat; a far more effervescent, less dejected-looking figure, at our second encounter in Hollywood last month, with the swampy, debilitating haze of New Orleans firmly in the past. Most delightful for him: James Cameron’s blessing. “I think he was very happy. I talk to him all the time. I heard no complaints.”

More good news for the sales force.

• Terminator Genisys is released in the US and Australia on 1 July and the UK on 2 July