‘Thor,’ ‘Game of Thrones’ Director Up For ‘Terminator Genisys’

In 2011, Alan Taylor directed the final two episodes of “Game of Thrones” freshmen season to universal acclaim. He would then join GOT as Executive Producer for season two, as well as directing four more episodes. He garnered his third Emmy nomination for his work on the series.

In 2013, Taylor took on Marvel’s “Thor: The Dark World” which grossed over $640 million dollars worldwide.

Now, the action director sets his sights on reimagining the iconic Terminator franchise with Paramount Pictures’ action-thriller “Terminator Genisys” which stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Jai Courtney, J.K. Simmons Matthew Smith, and Byung-hun Lee.

In the film, when John Connor (Jason Clarke), leader of the human resistance, sends Sgt. Kyle Reese (Courtney) back to 1984 to protect Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) and safeguard the future, an unexpected turn of events creates a fractured timeline. Now, Sgt. Reese finds himself in a new and unfamiliar version of the past, where he is faced with unlikely allies, including a new T-800 terminator, the Guardian (Schwarzenegger), dangerous new enemies, and an unexpected new mission: To reset the future…

The ‘dysfunctional family’ and its love story, the potential obliteration of the entire human race, the filmic feats of illusion – these are the same story hooks that resonated for Alan Taylor.

For Taylor, some of the appeal of making the film was the sheer challenge of working out how to do it: “It’s funny,” admits Taylor, “I was looking at various potential projects but this was the first one that felt like I couldn’t at the beginning tell exactly how to do it: it was a puzzle to solve it and that made it exciting and interesting. There’s so much to love in the James Cameron’s original mythology, and so much that the audience we’re hoping to reach is already in love with. At the same time the story’s moving forward – it’s got to get bigger and go into new directions and unlike other sequels this felt like a whole new ballgame and I wanted to see how we could pull that off.”

Frequent Taylor collaborator (and his future Sarah Connor), actress Emilia Clarke, sees the director’s accomplishment in his honoring the subject matter while giving it a new relevancy. Clarke observes, “Alan manages to get a beautiful marriage of old meets new, but also puts a very sensitive, intelligent spin on it. I think one of his goals with this movie is to ask what it is to be truly free as a human being, and the choices these characters have to make in deciding that. I think we are paying a lot of respect to the Terminator that has been before, and bringing it to this new audience today.”

“What we’ve tried to do,” says Taylor, “is to begin in timelines that we know from the mythology and then take them in new directions, and do it in a way that makes sense so we see a future that we saw glimpses of in the previous movies and then we dive to a past that we’ve seen glimpses of in the past movies but this film tries to take us into new territory behind that while not contradicting any of the things we already know about this mythology.”

“It’s interesting,” concludes Taylor. “We’re sort of letting the audience know that we know what they are expecting and then, ‘Whoosh!’ [laughs] trying to flip it. And that’s something that goes deep into the DNA of the Terminator movies: Cameron’s first movie uses Arnold’s character in one way and then he completely inverted for the second and nobody saw it coming. You can go into new territory with characters that you already have a feeling for but they take you somewhere that you never saw coming.”

Opening across the Philippines on July 01, “Terminator Genisys” is distributed by United International Pictures through Columbia Pictures.