"Terminator 3" co-screenwriter John Brancato has enjoyed a successful ten-year partnership with Michael Ferris that comprises more than a dozen films. These include "The Net" and "The Game". They're also working on the forthcoming "Catwoman", with Halle Berry in the title role, and a remake of "Westworld", starring one Arnold Schwarzenegger.

There must be a lot of pressure involved with tackling a third "Terminator" movie after the massive success of the previous two films...

We developed a case of amnesia and tried really hard not to think about it. As soon as you get anxious about expectations, it becomes impossible to do anything. One of the first decisions came after I watched the first two movies and paid attention to what I really liked about both of them. And then I forgot about them. We said "OK, let's start with John Connor, what's it like to be him?", and tried to forget everything else, to just tell the story through him.

The theme of assassins travelling through time wears a little thin after two films. If they can keep sending Terminators back to kill John Connor, they are eventually going to get him, aren't they?

Oh sure, why not send someone back to kill his grandmother? You could go on and on. The whole logic gets pretty goofy when you're dealing with time travel. Initially we wondered if we could do it without time travel and killer robots, but that's what makes the "Terminator" movies. We tried all sorts of wacky scenarios that completely ignored the basic engine of the first two movies - which was the Terminator coming after them. But to be honest it just wasn't working. We couldn't get something that felt like it would be a satisfying instalment of the franchise without that notion of something coming back from the future.

Who thought of making the all new T-X a woman?

I think the producers had that idea years ago. There was an earlier draft of the script that they had developed, and when director Jonathan Mostow was hired he pretty much decided that, while he liked the idea of doing a "Terminator" movie, that wasn't the script he wanted to use. But we kept the idea of a female-looking terminator from that script because it offered us more possibilities.

Were you a fan of the earlier films when they came out?

Absolutely. One of the most amazing thing about the original film was that it was effective on an immediate, really dumb level, appealing to the widest possible audience, while also having a lot of fun ideas. So it was smart and stupid. That's the challenge for the screenwriter. For something that costs this much money you have to appeal to a wide audience, but you try and make sure that more alert people watching it can enjoy it and have something to think about afterwards.