Sam Worthington Looks Back At Terminator, Forward To Avatar

A handful of sites got to visit the set of Clash of the Titans over the last weekend, and Devin at CHUD took the chance to talk to star Sam Worthington about some of his recent projects. In a pair of pieces published last night, Worthington defends some of Terminator: Salvation ("It was dark. There is no humor. That's what we set out to do.") while at the same time recognizing that some things could have been done better. He also has great things to say about James Cameron and working on green screen for Avatar. It's all after the break.

So what about some of the logical holes in Terminator? Worthington, who evidently spends a lot of time on the internet reading critic and fan reactions to his work, has taken some of the complaints to heart.

I can nitpick with the best of them, man, and go down the list on IMDB where they found holes in it and go, 'You are fucking right! If there was a big 10 ton robot coming outside that gas station, surely we would fuckin' hear it!' And I missed that! So now I'm going to be a bit fuckin' better when I'm going through my scripts because now I feel like an idiot for not turning to McG [and saying something].

He also calls James Cameron an 'ultimate collaborator', which is a far cry from the draconian portrait of the director painted by actors in the past.

(Though I've been thinking about this recently, as Cameron is out doing press. Though I never thought of Cameron as anyone other than a guy who wanted do to the best job he could and wasn't willing to put up with any bullshit, now he seems kinder and gentler. Did all those years of working undersea, where you can't control every little thing, mellow him out a little?)

Or maybe it's just that Worthington really likes the greenscreen approach required to create much of Avatar's alien landscape. "It increases your skills," he says, "takes you down to the essence of what acting is, which is reacting. It's more of a challenge since you've got nothing." Not that there was literally nothing, as "if there's an explosion, Jim would throw stuff at you. Or he'd hit you with a big stick to propel you across a room. Or fire a gun so there was the sound of it. He would always give you something to react to, and the challenge would be to find something to make it true. And it brings you back to the basics, which is that it's just you and another person."