When James Cameron dreamed about a chrome skeleton emerging from a fire in Rome in 1981, he immediately sketched the image on hotel stationery. Cameron, sick with fever, was working on Piranha 2: The Spawning, with a famously difficult Italian producer who had fired his predecessor.
But his dream gave him the image of a villain for the film that would make him one of the world’s richest and most famous directors – and Arnold Schwarzenegger into a seriously bankable star.
Source: How James Cameron created ‘The Terminator’ from a fever dream