Pitch Terminator Salvation to us.

McG: The whole idea for doing this movie is to honour the first three movies but begin again. The big difference is we're post-Judgement Day, whereas the other pictures were all contemporary, with Terminators coming back in time. It's deep post-Judgement Day, it's a new beginning, and because the future is malleable, there are a great many places to go.

One of the joys of this picture is it explores the space between Judgement Day and the becoming of the T800. So we get to see all the research and development that went into the proficiency of the T800. It's like an Apple computer; the first ones you got 15 years ago had 2 megs of memory, and they weren't so fast. And now today it's the Macbook air and it does back flips. You know, it's the same thing with the Machine world. And it suggests a world that's less based in science fiction than it was when Jim Cameron was making the movies.

How do you mean?

McG: Well we live in a time where if you have an arthritic shoulder, they'll give you a new one. We can make a 70-year-old woman pregnant, and deconstruct the human genome. And certainly the days of talking to a psychiatrist about your mommy and daddy issues are over -- they just want to manipulate your serotonin levels. And therefore it's real -- it's here. It's now. That wasn't the case when Ridley Scott made Blade Runner, or the first Terminator pictures, or even when the first Matrix came out. So in response our film was designed to have that tactile reality of Children of Men, or even the Bourne franchise.

Christian Bale and Sam Worthington in Terminator Salvation.
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Are there obvious elements in the previous movies that have to come back into play in yours?

McG: Certainly. We pay off a great many things that are established -- particularly with Kyle Reese. We talk about the mythology of his shotgun strap, his proficiency for stealing cars, and we see where he learned a lot of these skills. And it wasn't from Connor, it was from the Marcus character, which is one of the joys of the picture. We cite "Pain can be controlled, you just disconnect it," you know, and we realise where he got that, and there's a great many tidbits for the hard-core fans out there. But it's designed as well for people who don't know that much about the ins and outs of the first films.

Any "Hasta la vista, baby" moments?

McG: We're working on a few. But I would never be so bold as to say we'll have that good fortune of, you know, stuff sticking around to that degree. [Laughs]

You've got a really talented team of writers on board.

McG: Yeah, we wanted it to be written with the deftest pens possible. There's a writing team called Ferris and Brancato that wrote the original draft. Then when I got involved, I brought in Paul Haggis, we worked for about 2 months on the script, with Christian as well. He taught us a great deal about character. Then we brought in Jonathan Nolan -- who wrote the Batman pictures, Prestige, and largely Memento. So it's a very cerebral bunch that's here to make a film of the highest quality.