Trivia
This is the second Terminator film to have the line, “Come with me if you want to live.”In The Terminator (1984), Kyle Reese says it to Sarah Connor at the Tech-Noir club. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the Terminator says it to Sarah Connor when they first meet at the mental institution. In Salvation Kyle Reese says it to Marcus Wright when they first meet. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), a paraphrased version of this line (“Do you wanna live? Come on!”) is spoken by John Connor to Kate Brewster when he and the T-850 rescue her in the graveyard. “Come with me if you want to live” is also spoken by Cameron in the pilot episode of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” (2008), when rescuing the teenage John Connor from the Cromartie T-888.
Identical twins Don Stanton and Dan Stanton played the hospital security guard and the T1000.
One of the tag lines for the movie was 'It's nothing personal'. This was a play on many movies from around that time that had the tag line 'This time, it's personal'.
Arnold Schwarzenegger's young daughter screamed the first time she saw her father's face made-up to show the robotics appearing underneath the skin tissue.
Though there had been talk of making a sequel to The Terminator immediately after the original's release, legal and technical issues prevented it.
Linda Hamilton's twin sister, Leslie Hamilton Gearren was used as a double in scenes involving two "Sarah Connors" (i.e., when the T1000 was imitating her), and in a scene not in the theatrical release (but on the DVD) as a mirror image of Linda.
It took two takes to get the van crashing into the Cyberdyne lobby, and they sprayed adhesive onto the floor to stop the van from skidding too much.
Most of Edward Furlong's voice had to be re-dubbed by Furlong again in post-production because it changed during shooting. His young voice is left intact only in the scene where he and Terminator are talking about why people cry, because James Cameron wanted it to sound dramatic and thought it was better if left intact.
For the sound of T-1000 passing through metal bars, Rydstom simply inverted an open can of dog food and recorded the close-packed food as it oozed slowly out.
Charlie Korsmo was offered the role of John Connor, but he could not accept the role due to obligations to What About Bob? (1991).
Prior to making this film, Linda Hamilton received weapons training from technical advisor and former Israeli commando Uzi Gal.
SFX crew had to incorporate Robert Patrick's football-injury limp in their animation of the T1000. Next, they filmed the stuff with the T1000 pretending to be driving from the right-hand steering wheel (wearing a mirror-image police uniform), while the real driver was hidden under a black hood at the lowered real steering wheel. For the final film, the scenes were flipped left-to-right to make it all look right, and combined with footage shot with a normal truck driving in the drain. This was done so that Patrick could concentrate on acting rather than driving. They accidentally caught a street sign; after they mirror-imaged the scene, they digitally reversed the text on the sign so it would appear correct.
More explicit shots of the arm cutting scene were removed.
The original script did not call for the top of the truck to be ripped off during the chase through the storm drain beside/beneath the freeway, but when they arrived on location they found that the cab wouldn't fit under the overpass so director James Cameron decided that the roof was going to have to come off.
Production took sufficiently long that Edward Furlong visibly aged during the shoot - he is clearly much younger in the desert, for instance, than in other scenes. His voice began to break and had to be pitched to one level in post-production.
