William Wisher Jr., the screenwriter who helped James Cameron co-write The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, has died. He was 71.
Wisher’s family confirmed his death in a statement shared with Rolling Stone. No cause of death was given, though the family said Wisher “passed away peacefully at home.”
“William believed that stories have the power to connect people across generations,” they continued. “While the world celebrates the unforgettable films he helped create, we will remember him for his kindness, his humour, his brilliant imagination, and the love he gave so freely to his family and friends. We are grateful for the outpouring of love and support during this difficult time.”
Wisher worked extensively as a writer and producer in Hollywood during the Eighties, Nineties, and early 2000s. Beyond the two Terminator films, he helped develop the story and write the screenplay for another Nineties sci-fi favourite, Judge Dredd. He wrote the historical action film The 13th Warrior and contributed to two Exorcist prequels, 2004’s Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist.
Like many Hollywood screenwriters, Wisher also took on a variety of uncredited script doctor jobs. Most notably, he did revisions for John Woo’s 1996 action flick, Broken Arrow, with John Travolta and Christian Slater. And he worked on two Die Hard films, 1995’s Die Hard With a Vengeance and 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard. (He was credited as an executive producer on the latter.)
The Terminator was also, technically, an uncredited screenwriting job, but Wisher was crucial in helping Cameron develop the film. The two had become friends in the early Seventies, and at the time Wisher was angling to be an actor; when Cameron was working on a script, he’d often ask Wisher to come over and act out his works in progress.
By the time Cameron came up with the idea for The Terminator — about a robot assassin sent back in time to kill the mother of humanity’s unborn saviour — Wisher was growing more interested in screenwriting. Cameron enlisted him to help “flesh out some of the scenes” of the movie, as Wisher put it in a 2017 interview. And while Wisher didn’t get a screenwriting credit on the 1984 blockbuster, Cameron did cast him (which helped him get a SAG union card) as a cop who gets knocked out by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator.
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After The Terminator, Wisher’s writing career officially got underway, and when it came time to make Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Cameron enlisted him to co-write the script. Reflecting on T2 in 2017, Wisher singled out a scene where future saviour John Connor (Edward Furlong) thinks his mother, Sarah (Linda Hamilton), is about to hug him, only to realise she’s checking to see if he’s injured after a dangerous escape.
“The look on [John’s] face is just, ‘Oh my God! I thought that was a hug! I’m never gonna get one from you!,’” Wisher said. “All of that is really good, emotional stuff, and I think it’s that that makes the surrounding action [work]. Because if you don’t care about the people, then it doesn’t matter how big the explosion is, it’ll be boring, you know? So that’s always been my theory: if you’re going to do an action film, what you’re really making is a dramatic film with themes that are universal, and matter, and then you surround that with car chases and gunshots. And then people care. At heart, it’s a dramatic film. T2 is not an action film in my mind – even though there’s plenty of action in it.”
From Rolling Stone US
