Hurd's business and personal life are seldom separate. She is now married for her fourth time, to Jonathan Hensleigh, who is a screenwriter and will direct the crime thriller The Punisher, which Hurd is producing. (She met Hensleigh before they started working together, she said.)
One of her other former husbands is the director Brian De Palma, with whom she shares custody of their 11-year-old daughter, Lolita, who is named for Hurd's mother.
Hurd and De Palma met in 1990, when she invited him to dinner to try to persuade him, without success, to direct a film she wanted to make.
In all, she has produced 28 films for, among other studios, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures.
"She has been down so many roads so many times that nothing fazes her," said Mary Parent, the president of production at Universal Pictures. "It's all in a day's work."
Hurd says it would be difficult to get a movie like The Terminator made today. "They would think of it as an US$80 million film -- not a US$6.4 million film, which is about what it cost," Hurd said. "With a first-time producer and director" -- as she and Cameron were then -- "it would be much harder to get people to believe we could do it."
And audiences and studio executives have grown to expect flashier, more spectacular special effects. She attributes that partly to the proliferation of video games and the stylized editing popularized in music videos on MTV, which she said, has left moviegoers wanting a more vivid experience.
"The intensity has changed the tone and the type of movies which get made," she said of today, compared with the early 1980s, when The Terminator was released. "The bar has been raised higher than ever, so even though the special effects hold up for its time, those effects would not have been good enough today."
But technology has also proved a threat to the studios, as it has gotten easier to appropriate those images and circulate them on the Internet. Recently, an early version of Hulk began circulating online, and several people who saw it panned the computer-generated image of the angry monster, saying it was too cartoonlike.
"The problem is, it is more difficult for us to safeguard prints," Hurd said. With digital editing and distribution, copies can too easily be siphoned off the network stream. "With anticipated films," she said, "this is going to happen a lot."
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