James Cameron Reveals He Came Up with 'Terminator 2' Plot While 'High' on Ecstasy 

James Cameron's story idea for Terminator 2: Judgment Day came with the help of a specific substance.

In an oral history of the film published by The Ringer on the film's 30th anniversary, Cameron revealed he was "high on E" [ecstasy] and "writing notes for Terminator" when he "was struck by Sting's [1985] song ['Russians'], that 'I hope the Russians love their children too.'"

The song helped Cameron, 66, come up with the idea of giving his heroine, Sarah Connor, a son, John.

"I thought, 'You know? The idea of a nuclear war is just so antithetical to life itself,'" Cameron recalled. "That's where the kid came from."

Cameron called Linda Hamilton, who had portrayed Sarah in the original 1984 film.

"I called her up and I said, 'Look, they want to pay us a lot of money to make a sequel. Are you in or are you out? But just between you and me, I don't really want to do it if Sarah doesn't come back and I don't want to recast Sarah, so you got to say you're in,'" Cameron said. "And she and I weren't involved. We hadn't really hung out all that much since the first film. She was making a movie somewhere down South."

Terminator 2 was released in 1991; Cameron and Hamilton were married from 1997 to 1999.

Cameron said Hamilton had just one request if she were to reprise her role as the mother of the future resistance leader, John Connor.

"She said, 'Yeah, in principle, I'm in, but I want to be crazy,'" Cameron recalled. "I said, 'Well, what do you mean, crazy? How crazy?' She said, 'Crazy, like I've been driven crazy.' I said, 'Like you're in an insane asylum, like you're institutionalized?' She said, 'Yeah, sure. Let me play crazy. Let me go nuts.' I said, 'All right. Well, you're going to get my version of nuts,' and she said, 'All right. I'm down.'"

Cameron added the franchise is about humans having "zero compassion."

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"Terminator, ultimately, isn't about machines," he said. "It's about our tendency to become machines."

Terminator 2 follows Sarah Connor and her 10-year-old son John (Edward Furlong) as they're pursued by a more advanced Terminator – a shape-shifting T-1000 (Robert Patrick), which is on a mission to kill John and prevent him from becoming the leader of the human resistance in the future.

The resistance sends back their own less-advanced Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to protect John.

The film became a massive hit and is regarded as superior to the first film. It grossed $520 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing film of 1991 and of Schwarzenegger's career.

In October 2019, Hamilton, 64, told PEOPLE she spent three months getting fit for Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

"In Judgment Day, it was just the beginning of the fat-free diet," she said. "I ate no fat for all those months. More than a year. I would never do that again, because the brain needs fat, the body needs fat. But we didn't know any better."