This should give you an idea about how clear a director's vision can be," the film producer Gale Anne Hurd said as she pulled a small painting off a shelf in her Beverly Hills office one day last week.
There, airbrushed in muted shades of brown and black, was Arnold Schwarzenegger as the title character in The Terminator, one red eye glowing as half his scalp had been peeled away to expose a metal plate underneath. The image, a conceptual rendering for use by the makeup and costume designers, was painted more than 20 years ago by her husband at the time, James Cameron, who co-wrote the 1984 Schwarzenegger science fiction epic with Hurd and directed it.
Cameron moved on to other spouses and other films, including the 1997 blockbuster Titanic. But Hurd is still specializing in science fiction action spectacles like Hulk, which opens in Taiwan next weekend. Special effects, though, have come a long way.
Bruce Banner, the film's protagonist, turns from an impassive scientist, when threatened, into an angry green monster. And rather than airbrush renderings, the monster was created solely on a computer. Long before filming began, the movie's director, Ang Lee, donned an electronic suit and acted out a number of scenes to provide the basis for what became the on-screen character, Hurd explained.
"With Jim, he had to draw," recalled Hurd, one of four producers on Hulk. Lee, on the other hand, had "the opportunity to make anything he can imagine in his mind real," she said.
Even as filmmaking technology has evolved, though, Hurd's interest in movie storytelling has been consistent throughout her producing career, which has focused on the supernatural and the fantastic, including the outer-space horror film, Aliens (1986), the undersea adventure, The Abyss (1989), and the earth-threatening asteroid spectacle, Armageddon (1998), on which she was one of three producers.
Only with rare exception does she stray from this path, as with the 1999 wacky comedy, Dick, a film she produced about a teenage girl with a crush on President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate period.
"It's arrested development," said Hurd, who is 47. "You have to go back to the literature that consumed me as a child." That would include the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Ursula K. Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea fantasy series and action hero comic books like Hulk, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four."
"I liked books that took me places," she said. "I liked being transported."
As a result, she has been willing to exercise enormous patience in waiting for her projects to hit the screen. Hulk, she explained, was initially set up with Universal Studios in 1991. And the third installment of the Terminator series, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, of which she is an executive producer, is due in theaters next month -- 12 years after Terminator 2 and 19 years after the original.
"Perhaps the lesson in Hollywood I should have learned is not to resist, that when the wind is blowing in one direction you go with it," she said. But after pondering the notion, she added, "I don't want to learn that lesson."
Hurd was born in 1955 and graduated from Palm Springs High School in 1973 before heading off to Stanford, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa four years later with majors in communications and economics.
She started in the industry working for Roger Corman, the B-movie maker, through whom she met Cameron. They were married for three years, but even after the divorce they collaborated on several films, including The Abyss.
RSS