In almost every version of The Terminator franchise, a lone hero is sent to help a person at the time they need it most. Just like one of those heroes, Terminator Zero came into Mattson Tomlin’s life at the very moment he needed it.
Tomlin had just spent a few whirlwind years ascending the Hollywood screenwriting ladder to become one of the busiest scribes in town. Netflix turned his spec Project Power into a big budget movie starring Oscar winner Jamie Foxx. IFC released his sci-fi romance Little Fish to strong reviews. It seemed like almost every studio in Hollywood was hiring him for one project or another. And most notably, Matt Reeves tapped him to work on the script for The Batman, while also backing Tomlin’s very personal directorial debut, Mother/Android.
It was a meteoric rise, and it was all happening before Tomlin was 30.
But when the writer sat down to pen Terminator Zero in the summer of 2021, he admits he found himself in a cloudy head space. About a year earlier, a WGA arbitration determined he would not get credit on The Batman. Intellectually, he knew that’s just part of the business — he joined the dream project late in the game, and was told upfront that credit was unlikely. But it still hurt, and set him down a path many creatives can relate to, into a dark well of self-doubt.
As he worked on Terminator Zero, part of him feared he had peaked, and his career would be boiled down to a footnote about a guy who once worked on a Batman movie.
“All the scary thoughts came. The imposter syndrome came,” says Tomlin.
Amid these doubts, he put his head down to write the anime Terminator Zero, turning in an episode every ten days or so. Skydance, Netflix and Production I.G gave him no guardrails, and he crafted a personal tale focusing on three siblings. He chose to set it in Japan, as most of the creative team would be Japanese, including director Masashi Kudō.
The result is a different flavor of Terminator, not just because it is animated, but because of its cultural specificity. It also straddles two timelines. In 1997, the three siblings must flee a Terminator using them to get to their scientist father, the creator of an AI he hopes will save humanity against Skynet. In 2022, a group of humans face off against machines in a post-apocalyptic world.
Now, three years after that summer of writing, the show arrived on Netflix Aug. 29 and debuted with a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Tomlin has plans for several more seasons, should it get renewed.
“It will be a story that follows these three kids as they grow up through this war that eventually evolves into the future war, and how their various relationships to humans and machines are evolving and radically different from each other,” says Tomlin.
He has also moved on from the worst doubts of the summer of 2021 (well, he’s moved on as much as any writer can). He’s back for The Batman Part II, this time starting from the ground floor, with Reeves inviting him six weeks after The Batman hit theaters in March 2022. “There was such a tremendous emotional catharsis for me, because Batman means a ton to me,” he recalls of getting that call.
And he has a new mentor on another big project: Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin, whom he’s working on a pilot for Aegon’s Conquest, telling the story of legendary king Aegon I’s conquest of the Seven Kingdoms.
Read the full conversation with The Hollywood Reporter below.
What was going on in your life when Terminator Zero crossed your desk?
It’s been four years. I was in the middle of shooting Mother/Android. I get in the car to go home. I see that I have these missed calls from my team, and they’re like, “We got a call about doing an animated Terminator project. We just assume that this is a pass because of everything that you’d been saying.”
What had I been saying? Mother/Android was a robot apocalypse, and there were killer robots in it, but it was really about my birth mother and that whole story. [Editor’s note: Tomlin was born in Romania amid the Romanian Revolution and was later adopted by an American couple.] And so, I was walking around like an asshole just being like, “Guys, this movie is not my audition for Terminator.” I said it so many times that then they were like, “So we assume you don’t want anything to do with this.” I was like, “Wrong assumption. I absolutely want something to do with this.”
When you boarded, Skydance, Netflix and Production I.G had already agreed to work together on an anime. Were there any guardrails for you to follow as you conceived of the story?
They were like, “It would be nice if there was a character that was Japanese, or maybe a scene that takes place in Japan. You could do some kind of flash forward, flashback, whatever.” I felt, “I’m going to be one of the few Americans working on this. I feel like we should set this in Japan to really take advantage of that lived experience of who is actually making this thing.”
‘Terminator: Zero’
Netflix
It’s common these days for a new installment of a long-running franchise to ignore many of the previous entries. How did you decide not to sidestep the previous movies?
We’ve had six Terminator movies, and they’ve all taken place on the U.S.-Mexico border. Rewatching them, there’s mention of nuclear strikes coming from Russia, but there’s very little about what’s going on in the rest of the world. There have been so many of the Terminator sequels that have said, “Just pay attention to these movies and ignore those.” And I don’t feel comfortable being that guy, because I don’t feel like I’m better or smarter than those who have come before me. And I think that there’s something good in all of the movies. I’m kind of like, “I’m just over here in my little animated pocket on the other side of the world, and I don’t need to negate anything.” And so that kind of really freed me up to then go, okay, so what is the story I do want to tell?”
What did you quickly latch onto?
Telling a story about a family that goes through Judgment Day and see seeing the effects of war. I always have to make it personal. It always kind of comes back to being adopted and the Romanian Revolution and all of this stuff that’s built into me. In the event that I get to do multiple seasons, it will be a story that follows these three kids as they grow up through this war that eventually evolves into the future war, and how their various relationships to humans and machines are evolving and are radically different from each other.
In your early career, you would usually be juggling multiple projects at once. When you got stuck on a script during the day, you’d just move on to a different one. Were you writing other things while working on Terminator?
I wrote it in the summer of 2021, and it was kind of a weird time for me. Mother/Android hadn’t yet come out, Batman hadn’t yet come out. The arbitration happened, so I knew I wasn’t getting credit on the movie. And so, I was really in my feelings about that. And I kind of had this moment where I was … I know this sounds kind of silly, but there was a kind of downturn and I felt like, “Oh, was that the flourish of my career, and is it over? And now I just kind of have this thing?” I sat down and wrote the whole thing. And the first draft of this season, it was doing an episode every week and a half. About every 10 days, I would send in another episode and another episode and another episode.
And what I would say to the studio is, “I’m going to send them to you, but don’t give me notes until I get to the end. Once I get to episode eight, I want to go back and revise all of them having seen if I can stick the landing here.” And they were really gracious. Then we had a notes process. I just have to say, between Netflix and Skydance, if there are things that people don’t like in this show, it’s my fault. If there are things that people love in this show, it’s my fault. All of their notes were really just, “Oh, we don’t quite understand that. Can you clarify?” Those are the biggest notes that I got.
It sounds like some of the fun you had writing comic books where this really can feel like it’s you, along with the artists.
It is very similar. Just as in comic books, there’s always a collaborator, and for me, it’s director Kudo, it’s Production I.G. I would give them my writing and give them lookbooks and give them little side documents to try to convey the vision. And then they take that and sometimes they execute what I write, and it’s like, “Oh, wow, you pulled it off.” And then other times they change it — and it elevates it so much.
On the Spider-Verse movies, they write the movie until basically the end of post-production. What about you? Are you tweaking things late in the game?
I’m not rewriting as far as action. I’m not suddenly going, “Guys, we need a submarine.” The thing that did happen and was, at first, a real mindfuck: I wrote the scripts in English, and they were translated. That translation is what was animated. “Hello” in Japanese, “konichiwa,” versus “hello” in English —there are more syllables. And so when you’re animating that, it’s more lip flaps. When the animation started coming back and it was time to go do the English dub, there were a lot of times where it’s like that thing in Lost Translation where Bill Murray is shooting the whiskey commercial. The director talks for two minutes, and then the translator says, “Move your left arm.” And he goes, “Is that all he said?” So I had to go through this process pretty recently, to re-adapt my dialogue.
At first, I was really frustrated because I was like, “I wrote these scripts and this was the dialogue and this is what I wanted.” I was talking to Lee Bermejo, my collaborator on my book, A Vicious Circle. I was kind of complaining to him about it, and he just completely flipped the switch from my brain and made it so much easier. He was just like, “Oh, dude, this is just the lettering process in comics. You wrote the script, and then I drew it, and now, OK, you put the dialogue in there, and you go, oh, you don’t need to say that, or you could say this. It’s just another step to try to make it good.”
You haven’t spoken with Terminator creator James Cameron, but he recently expressed support for the project in an interview with THR. I imagine you were appreciative?
I really appreciate Cameron’s generosity towards, not me per se, but towards the project just as far as it’s still his, in tandem with Skydance. He could have killed this. And instead he said that article, “I want to see what people pick up and I want to see what they do with that.” And I think that that’s a really cool attitude to have.
When you started writing the show, the Batman WGA arbitration happened. Now you’re back co-writing The Batman Part II. Clearly Matt Reeves loves working with you. Did being invited back mend any hurt feelings you had?
Yeah, I’ll be honest about it. It was a painful thing to have happen. I put a lot of time and a lot of heart in. I had a really, really great time working with Matt on that first movie. And when I got brought in, it was kind of said, “Look, we’re so late in this process that you’re probably not going to get credit.” So nobody did anything to me. I wasn’t screwed over. We ended up doing so much, not just on the third act, but then heightening things in the mystery, and the first two acts — that then there was kind of a moment of, “Oh, wait, maybe there’s a chance [I’ll get credit].” But that’s all that it was. And then my name got out there in public, which is always kind of a bad idea. So, then I’m associated with this thing.
So I found out the day that the Fandome trailer came out [in August 2020]. On the one hand, it was like, “Wow, there it is!” And on the other hand, it’s like, “…and I don’t have anything to do with this anymore.” And that was a little bit of a heartbreak, and there was a level of, dare I say, having to grow up and having to go, “You know what? They paid me. I’m a professional, so be a professional and try not to take that too hard.”
The day that the movie came out, [Matt Reeves] and I talked on the phone for an hour or two, and he was just talking about the process of making the movie, and I think just kind of processing the experience that he had had. And I had an impulse to go like, “OK, but are you going to ask me to do the sequel?” And I didn’t go there. Instead, it became very clear to me, he just wants to talk about what he’s just been through. So just be a good dude, be a good friend, celebrate that he still treating me like it’s something that I was a part of, because I was. And so just enjoy that. And it was about six weeks later that he called me and said, “So, sequel time. You want to do this all the way this time?”
There was such a tremendous emotional catharsis for me, because Batman means a ton to me. And I think that when you’re a writer, a director, a creator, you’re trying to do things that matter to you, but also that matter to audiences. And all the scary thoughts came. The imposter syndrome came, and the thoughts of, “Oh, am I going to be the footnote in a Wikipedia article of, ‘Oh yeah, he had something to do with that one, and that was his career?’” All that dark, scary stuff happened. And it’s still there, by the way, but it was kind of this moment of, “OK — it’s not even a redemption arc. It’s more like, now I get to prove myself. Now I get the big boy job.” And so, all of that is to say, I am I forever, forever in debt to Matt Reeves. He’s changed my life three times over now.
I love hearing David Benioff and D.B. Weiss talk about how nervous they were with their first meeting with George R.R. Martin — they desperately wanted to make Game of Thrones and he held the keys. Do you have a version of that story now that you are developing Aegon’s Conquest for HBO?
I’m kind of shocked that he knows who I am. And anytime that I get a text message from him, I’m like, “It seems incorrect that you text. I feel like we need to correspond through handwritten letters, and I need to hire a calligrapher.” Of all of the creators, all of the cool people that I’ve gotten to meet and gotten to work with, I haven’t worked with anybody that has done what he has done — to really truly create a universe with such depth and such breadth. Going and meeting him, I just had to be honest. “I’ve read your books, I’ve seen the shows, and I’m not an encyclopedia of it. I have only come to this as somebody wanting to be entertained, and now I’m coming to it as a potential creator. And in doing so, I feel like it’s incumbent on me to acknowledge that you’re the one that’s done all of this. We’re all here because of you, dude.” I really take what he says as, “God is speaking to me.” I really do. Because at the end of the day, any question that I could have, anything I don’t understand, there’s a guy who has the answer.
What was your way into Aegon’s Conquest?
I figured out a way to make it personal. And a lot of what won me the job was relating it to real life. And talking about the Romanian Revolution and talking about my mother and talking about sometimes a conquest can happen and it can be very good for the people that are being quote unquote “conquered,” but also it can split apart families. And I had things to say beyond, “the dragons come.” And that’s not an easy thing to do, because you’re also trying to do a faithful adaptation in which the dragons come. And so having something to say that was really personal, I think that that’s why he in part chose me. And so was I nervous to get the job? of course, because for me, it’s kind of like you want these jobs, but then if you get them, then there’s this moment of going, “Now I actually have to do this.”
I’m in the middle of writing the pilot now. I’m in touch with George all the time, and I feel really, really lucky to just have the God of this world in my texts, and I can just shoot him a text and go, “What does this mean? Please help me.” And then he will send me an encyclopedia of information. So it’s all with respect and reverence and just what I want more than anything is to get to make this show and have it be something that he’s extremely proud of.
