Interview: Terminator Zero Creator and Showrunner Mattson Tomlin and Director Masashi Kudo

This year’s Anime NYC featured heavy amounts of welcome Terminator Zero content, including a panel with the show’s staff and a premiere of the first two episodes of the subbed version (voted for via an audience screaming match; you had to be there). Shortly before the panel and the wonderful insights from the staff, we and other members of the press had the opportunity to sit down with Terminator Zero Creator and Showrunner Mattson Tomlin and Director Masashi Kudo. The conversation tackled a lot of aspects of Terminator Zero and its creation; we asked about inspirations, planned divergence from the broader Terminator franchise, the pros and cons of animation vs live action, and whether there were already conversations being had for a second season and more.

Sections of this interview have been lightly edited for clarity.

A Brand New Terminator Experience

The conversation with Mr. Tomlin and Kudo-san started with a simple question: what can new viewers of the franchise expect from Terminator Zero? This is a straightforward but apt question — the series is not tightly linked to the storylines of previous Terminator films and has been marketed as something that old and new fans of the franchise alike can check out. Both guests gave their perspectives on what potential fans can expect.

Mr. Tomlin: For people who have not seen any Terminator movies ever, if those people are out there, they can expect something that is colorful, thought-provoking, violent, visually arresting, well-directed, and hopefully a great story with great characters. For returning Terminator fans, it is a fandom that is extremely passionate and sometimes a little bit angry, and so I hope that they will find a show that doesn’t make them too angry. And for some of them, it just makes them go, oh, this feels good. F*ck yeah.

Kudo-san: For the fans new to the series, it’s going to be a fresh, novel content, so he’s looking forward to wowing them with something new. And for the returning fans, they can be tough critics, but our series is slightly different from anything else that’s been done, in a slightly different direction, and so we hope that they’ll be receptive to the challenges we’re taking on.

When it came to the inspiration both guests feel towards anime projects, they had this to say:

Mr. Tomlin: For me, my gateway into anime was The Animatrix. That hit when I was 12 years old, and it introduced me to a lot of directors, kind of a whole genre that hadn’t been on my radar in the first 12 years of my life. And so, anytime that I go to make anything, I have to try to make it personal, and try to connect to it in some kind of primal way, which is usually connecting to my childhood. A big one for me was just, not even as a visual reference, not even as a story reference, but just kind of wanting to get that same feeling back from the first time that I saw The Animatrix.

Kudo-san: As my career was getting started, I was really mentored by Director Tomino [Yoshiyuki Tomino] of the Gundam series. And so that work is at the core of me as an anime creator, and a person living in the anime field, it’s Gundam‘s Tomino.

Both were quite excited about the characters and the foundations of the story, and even more excited for fans to see both of these things and truly experience every facet of the series. One aspect of that came from using James Cameron’s prior works as a basis to build off of.

Mr. Tomlin: […] When I got the job to work on this, and you get those jobs and you go, f*ck, now I’ve got to do this. I went back and I didn’t just watch the Terminator movies, I actually watched all of James Cameron’s movies, because I felt like, why is this genius always knocking it out of the park? What is going on there? And for Terminator, yes, it’s killer robots, yes, it’s nuclear apocalypse, yes, it’s time travel, it’s great visual effects, it’s all of that stuff. But it really — and I could say this for any one of his movies, and especially the ones that have gone off to make billions of dollars — it’s really great characters and stories about families. And so, once I kind of distilled it into that for me and went, “Okay, I know the things that need to be there in order for it to feel like Terminator,” there was this other component which is that this needs to be a story about those primal relationships between husband and wife, between mother and son, or in this case, it’s parents and children and the way that work gets in between how a family unit operates and then eventually how a war can get in between how a family unit operates.

Kudo-san: I think he covered the story elements already, so I’m going to talk more about what I think about in terms of the direction. In preparing for this role, I really took the time to study in depth and fully digest James Cameron’s T1 – T2, and so I really felt like that was the beginning, and that’s what I need to understand deeply so that I’m able to subtly bring in different elements that may be very subconscious, but those elements are blended into the direction.

A second aspect of that was from really bringing the screenplay to life, as both explained.

Mr. Tomlin: These characters, they’re real to me. I’ve lived with them for a long time. We have lived with these characters for a really long time and in the same way that the characters from the original movies mean a lot to you or Matt Smith means a lot to you, fine. For me the hope is that there will be some people that fall in love with characters that we’ve created to the same degree. I have my favorite character and I really hope that that character — once the show is out in the world — I’d love to come back and see people cosplaying as characters that we’ve created. That to me is very exciting, because the gateway in for me was to make these characters as real as possible and to tell an emotional story.

Kudo-san: We’ve been really able to turn the screenplay that we’ve received into life. We’ve turned it into life, we’ve brought it to life, we’ve given it energy, we’ve given it all the elements that make a story into a world and so that’s what we’re most proud to present to the audience. All the elements of the horror, the action, the drama, the humanness of everything, it’s really expressed as a world to present to you.

Direction, Genre Blending, and Animation as a Medium

Terminator Zero is different from other works in the franchise in a lot of key ways: it’s animated, it takes place in Japan, and it doesn’t follow the Connor family. The press asked Mr. Tomlin and Kudo-san more about these differences. I especially wanted to know more about how the lack of Connors in the story affected its planning and execution.

Mr. Tomlin: For me, it frees me from some franchise baggage, because all of the stories so far in the Terminator live action movies have been about this Connor family. When I got hired, I was the last piece. Skydance and Netflix had already partnered, Production IG had already partnered, and so it was already told, we want to do not just an animated series, but we want it to be an anime, and it was presented to me as “You can do whatever you want, but we would love for there to be some Japanese component to this show.” I think that the soft pitch was kind of like have a Japanese character, and I thought, “Well, he’s [Kudo-san] the one that has to execute this by directing it, and the Production IG and all of these wonderful artists are going to be in Japan for years making this.” It’s the location and going, we’ve had 6 Terminator movies, but they were all focused on this one part of the world, and sort of go, “What’s going on on the other side of the planet?” That was very freeing and allowed me to start to daydream about what a story could be that — look, I’m just one guy, and I’m certainly not smarter than James Cameron, and I don’t feel like I’m smarter than any of the other filmmakers that have been in this franchise that have come before me. I don’t feel its my place to go “Just pay attention to these movies and f*ck those ones.” I don’t think that’s my job here, and so instead to go, all of that’s fine, all of that’s valid, take what you want, leave what you want. I’m over here and trying to do something that is a love letter to the feeling that you get at the highest highs of watching this franchise.

Kudo-san: So the thematic backbone is still about family. It’s not the Connors, it’s a different family, but it’s still a story about a family. The spirit definitely lives on in that sense. Because it’s an illustrated animation, the feeling of acceptance that it is a different family and it’s okay to have a different family may be easier for the audience to recognize and accept and love a new family because it is not a live action situation. It’s a different feel, different media, and so we hope that you’ll love our family just as much as you have loved the Connors of the past.

In terms of the genre and style of that thematic background, the guests were also asked about whether Terminator Zero was going to go more in the direction of a thriller, a horror project, or an action-heavy one.

Mr. Tomlin: There’s a version of this franchise that if Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t become one of the biggest movie stars of the 90s, you get to the end of T1 and the last 20 minutes, Arnold Schwarzenegger ain’t in it. It’s a stop-motion puppet, and you can’t do that when it’s a movie star, as evidenced by the fact that in T2, they make this side of his face look cool, but it’s him. The fact that Terminator 2 became the action movie, it set the franchise on this course where now Terminator is synonymous with $100 million plus blockbuster action film. For me, I saw the first film first when I was 8 years old, and it scared the sh*t out of me. It gave me nightmares. When I got the job and it was time to go do this, again, back to the whole, I have to connect to it in a primal way, Terminator for me is not synonymous with action. It’s synonymous with I’m scared. I always go back to that great Kyle Reese quote that is just, “listen, this thing, it cannot be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse, and it is going to never ever stop until you are f*cking dead.” That to me is just kind of like, it doesn’t get better than that because I keep using this word, I’m so sorry, but it’s so primal. It’s just so kind of like, you can’t f*ck with it. And so this show for me is very much kind of the people want action. It has action. We’re doing our Judgment Day. We’re doing all of that stuff, but at its core, the thing that I was very, very excited about was to go back to what that franchise could have been had it not become one of the action franchises of the last 40 years.

Kudo-san: So it really depends on the scene and the moment during the story where it’ll be more horror elements you see, more action elements you see, you’ll also see the human drama elements, so this is not just one influence, not just one direction, but really a combination of all of the elements that have made the Terminator franchise so successful. But without any spoilers, there may definitely be more feelings of horror in the beginning that you see, but there’s definitely action as well.

Along the same thread of how characters are presented and what genres that lends itself toward, a question was posed about to what extent, if at all, the staff planned on anthropomorphizing robots within Terminator Zero. This led to one of my personal favorite sets of answers throughout the entire conversation.

Mr. Tomlin: So the series in large part is about this scientist named Malcolm Lee. and Malcolm is haunted by these prophetic dreams of the future where he believes that Judgment Day is a thing that’s going to happen and in order to try to stop Judgment Day he decides to create a weapon that can fight against Skynet and that’s going to be another AI. It’s going to be this AI called Kokoro. And so Kokoro, voiced by Rosario Dawson, it’s her character, that was a really interesting journey to create a face for her and to figure out what that avatar was going to look like and it was very much a collaboration between the two of us. Kokoro, that name. It connects to the ideas of the mind, the heart, and the spirit, but all being as one and so it was Director Kudo’s idea to take this character that was one character and kind of split her into three that were these three avatars representing these three parts of a person. And so we came up with something that is a kind of ghostly, spectral, feels like imagery you’ve seen in Terminator before but not quite and we ran with it from there. Thats part of the answer and then the other part of the answer is that in the movies, there is a kind of innate humanity to Arnold Schwarzenegger and particularly in T2, that relationship that he has with John Connor where it really flips the whole idea of “these are killing machines” on its head where suddenly it’s like — Sarah Connor says it in one of the voiceovers where she’s like, “I’m looking at this machine that has the face of my killer years ago and yet right now I just see a guy who’s gonna be a better father to my son than anybody I could ever meet so what the f*ck do I do with that?” And so that instantly injects a certain amount of humanity into the machine side as well. So I’m very excited for people to watch the show because I was not on a war path to just tell a story that said “robots equal bad” because that’s actually not what I think the original movies were trying to do either.

Kudo-san: So not only is there kind of this humanizing of robots, but there’s the aspect that as recipients we have a dialogue — even right now with Siri, we tend to humanize who we speak with and so yes it’s AI, yes it’s just algorithms but in the process of dialogue we as humans humanize our partners, our machines or robots. Aside from what we may intend as creators in terms of whether or not these robots like Kokoro are humanized, the viewers may feel that because there’s dialogue there’s humanization.

Both of those answers spoke to another key difference mentioned earlier: that this series is animated as opposed to being live action. While animation for adults is quite common in Japan, it’s less common here in the United States. Both Mr. Tomlin and Kudo-san were asked whether Terminator Zero is likely part of that rising tide of adult animation popularity in the Western world.

Mr. Tomlin: I hope so. Here we are. If the show works, if people show up for it, I get to do more seasons. I would love that. I can say that I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who have been in that mindset of “cartoons are for kids,” and then they look at something like Terminator, and they go, well, Terminator, that’s for me, and then when the trailer came out and they see, “oh, it’s not doing the kid version, it’s still pretty adult.” I think that we are one of many that are happening and something that’s animated, it doesn’t necessarily have the connotation of Saturday morning cartoon that you might have. Somebody smarter than me knows the overall global position that we’re in as far as the tide turning there. I can only say that for the people who haven’t been watching any animated work, this can be their gateway drug in, great, and if somebody else was the gateway drug and this is the follow up then I’m happy with that too.

Kudo-san: So anime in Japan is for adults. It’s very much a content entertainment not just for children, it’s really for the entire spectrum of audiences. So for me its really business as usual to try to gauge the interest of adult audiences and capture adult audiences. If anything, that’s my area of strength and expertise to target adult audiences.

Keeping that in mind, I asked both whether there were aspects of the show they felt were particularly aided or impeded by the animation format as opposed to live action.

Mr. Tomlin: As far as what’s aided, we write this show, write all the scripts, and then it all gets sent to Production I.G and then there’s about a year where they are doing character designs and building the worlds and starting the animatics but I’m not seeing any of that. […] the second that I saw anything move I just went “I’m saved” because he [Kudo-san] is just going to make it f*cking awesome and he’s just going to make me look so smart and so as far as anything visual, with the action, with the production design, with all of it — there’s something that happens when you watch something animated where it doesn’t look like our world so then you buy into the reality of that world and so i think you’re instantly invited into “this is what the world is now, come in” and he makes it very easy to come into that world. As far as what’s challenging, when it’s live action you have the benefit of looking at the most interesting thing in the world and that is a human being’s face when they are going through something emotional. A great director and a great actor in the right moment you could hold on somebody’s face for six minutes straight as they tell you their life story or as they have an emotional moment and you won’t want to look away. It’ll be just as compelling as any moment of action but harder to do when it’s animated. And so there was this thing of okay, I want to be able to hit high highs and low lows as far as the emotional character, human register. But an animated character crying — that’s hard to do and it’s hard to do in a sustained way. They do a great job but its also my job as a writer to not ask more than the medium can can support at the same time. So I think that for me was the biggest challenge of knowing I want there to be moments where characters are crying, where characters are upset, where characters are afraid and making sure that I wasn’t asking too much of both the medium and then also the people who actually had to execute it to instead not get us to the point where we’re watching an emotional moment and then kind of going “Oh I’m watching a drawing cry.” You never want to get to that point and so [a challenge was] making sure that that’s not what I was ever asking to be delivered.

Kudo-san: So, in animation and live action the difference of what you can and can’t do is blending a lot. You can even make Arnold look younger now through CG; anything is possible. But there is something unique to hand-drawn illustrations and it’s really to make the audience step back a little bit more and accept the world they’re seeing. So this is based in Japan, but you don’t need to know Japan to get invited to our world, our hand-drawn world of Japan. It is a very isolated world where you don’t need a background, you don’t need to relate in order to relate to the reality of Japan — in order to live in our world of Japan in the hand-illustrated version. And so we feel that that’s an aspect that’s different from live action in illustration, hand-drawn illustration. You step back from reality and accept the world that you’re seeing through the hand-drawn images. As far as what you can’t do, it’s a little bit impeded, it’s a little hard to say, but it’s really the humanness, the human expression, similar to what you [Mattson Tomlin] were saying. And there we really rely on the voice actors to bring that primordial core of emotion. So emotion is driven by the act of the voice actors.

Season 2 and Beyond

Looking toward the future of the franchise, the press also wanted to know whether there were already conversations being had about a second season or even further beyond that. Mr. Tomlin and Kudo-san both explained that it’ll depend on how well this first season does.

Mr. Tomlin: It’s a TV show, and so when you get hired to make a TV show, the people putting lots of money into it are always going to go, “do you know where you’re going?” What I’ll say is that right now it’s just this: people have to show up, they’ve got to watch the first season and hopefully those numbers will grant me an opportunity to keep on going. I would love to go five, six seasons. I have a story — because one of the questions that you have to ask yourself when you’re doing something that was live action as animated is why does this have to be animated? For me part of that answer was telling a generational story. There’s this family and these children at the center of the story and being able to see them grow up, get older, endure the war, go through the war, and then see how all of that wraps up — that’s very appealing to me and its something that hasn’t quite been done not just in this franchise but the way I want it done hasn’t quite been done, period. The only other thing that I can say is that whether or not it’s a two season situation, a six season situation, I know what the last episode is.

Kudo-san: It’s up to Netflix.

With that in mind, be sure to check out Terminator Zero on Netflix, support the series, and position the project so it can continue into seasons for years to come. The entirety of Season 1 released on August 29th and is available to view on Netflix.

Featured image courtesy of Nick Morgulis/Den of Geek