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Dreamwatch

You are not doing T3 but you are doing TRUE LIES sequel with your good friend Arnold Schwarzenegger. Why is that?

If I were a surgeon, would I operate on a friend just because they were my friend? You have your professional interests and then you have your relationships with your friends, Arnold and I are still friends and no matter what happens with any of these projects, we’ll always be friends. In fact, he came to me and said, “I’d really like you to reconsider doing T3.” I thought about it for a while because we are friends, and because there was a sense of maybe going back and recreating that magic that we had done now three times, if you include T2-3D (the theme part show at Universal Studios), and it had been an enjoyable and satisfying experience for both of us, all three times. But I don’t control the underlying material and I just didn’t feel strongly that I had another story to tell, I felt we had closed that story out and anything I could bring to it after that was not new. I thought, “Well it’s a new century and that’s kind of last century’s story.” I would have also had to abandon many projects that I was working on at the time, so I said, “Arnold, you’ve always stood behind me and said you won’t make this film unless I do, but I think it’s your character as much as it’s my character and you should go make this film,” and that’s how we left it. I also told him he should get an awful lot of money to do it. I don’t know the details but I believe that’s what he did [laughs]!

So why TRUE LIES, then?

We do control the rights on TRUE LIES, and Arnold, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tom Arnold have all expressed interest in doing it. The script is being written now and I’ve worked with the writer on the basic scenario, so if a script comes back that we all love then we’ll go ahead. But I don’t think any of us feel compelled to make it if it’s going to draw or lose. Only if it’s going to win.

You deal with the future in many of your projects, and in DARK ANGEL, it’s not pretty. Are you concerned about the future?

I’m not concerned but it never helps to bury one’s head in the sand. Am I concerned about the success of the show DARK ANGEL based on it somehow mirroring a real event? I am not. Let’s pray it never happens, but how many shows have been based on some form on the collapse of civilization based on nuclear war or whatever? The fact that it’s in the public consciousness is not a bad thing. It keeps people aware of the problem. In reality we’re in a time of prosperity, but it’s more interesting to show the opposite, a time of recession or depression, because you always have to give people something they don’t have. That’s the purpose of fantasy – it’s the one thing that science fiction does. It says, “Here’s an alternative world where things are different”. If we were in a depressed state right now, we might show prosperity in the future!

How do you envision the year 2020?

I’d like more continuous progress of this kind of internet infrastructure we see, with more global reach bringing us together. I see us on the verge of a kind of collective consciousness and it’s mostly, although not all, good. I’d like to see us continuing the exploration that we began and then stopped so that would set us on Mars by 2020. I think the human race can pull together and do amazing things if we direct our energies towards conquering disease and greater equality between the Third World and the developed world. That’s my utopian wish list, although we might be in a situation like in DARK ANGEL.

Which one is closer to how you think?

I’d say they’re equally probable, but personally I tend to have a great deal of faith in the human animal and just in people in general. I have not much faith in all the systems and governments and bureaucracies to do the right thing or do it quickly enough. We need an energy policy that makes sense right now or it’s just a continuation of the same madness it’s been for the past fifty years.

Next week April 22, 2001: Tip of the Iceberg Part 3