From xenomorphs to graboids, terminators to the literal walking dead, producer Gale Anne Hurd’s path from Roger Corman’s assistant to one of the most trustworthy pairs of hands in Hollywood is the stuff of movie legend. An early champion and collaborator of James Cameron, a survivor of endless tinseltown fuck-ups and the woman at the production helm of not one, not two, but seven of the genre world’s most celebrated cornerstones (and yes, we’re including Dante’s Peak in that mix).
So it’s no wonder that she’s named this year’s Forbidden Worlds Legend, lionised by a film festival devoted to projecting the biggest, boldest and silliest in sci-fi and horror, on an old IMAX screen the size of a building. It’s somewhat fitting of her character too that Hurd made the journey to collect the award in person, refusing any half-measures and happily spilling all about a very long, very dramatic, and very storied career.
And luckily for us, we weren’t just in the audience as she dropped truth bombs left right and centre before screenings of some of her most crowd pleasing hits – Tremors, Aliens and one of her earliest credits, 1980’s Battle Beyond the Stars – either. As part of a roundtable discussion, Hurd took us deep into the very recesses of her incredible path through Hollywood, never mincing her words, and never passing up an opportunity to sing the praises of many of the below-the-line heroes that helped craft some of her most famous projects.
“Pam Dixon!” She shouts, immediately after being lauded for her work on Cast A Deadly Spell – the 1991 TV movie that would give an early career role to one Julianne Moore, and for which the aforementioned Pam Dixon was the casting director. “To me a producer is there to tell the best version of a story, and they believe they can put together the team that will tell that story best on screen… I don’t claim the successes, it’s a team effort. But if something goes wrong, it’s my fault and my job to solve it.”
After all, that is the sort of collaborative philosophy to filmmaking that you might expect from someone who rose through the Roger Corman School at New World Pictures. The daughter of industry veterans – her mother a secretary to MGM’s chief make-up artist Jack Dawn, her aunt an extra and stunt double in classic Hollywood movies like The Good Earth – Hurd was poached from Stanford University to be Corman’s assistant, working on all sorts of early schlock from Humanoids of the Deep, to Battle Beyond the Stars, where she would meet future collaborator (and husband) James Cameron.
Looking back at those early years now though, the reality of just how dire the industry has become beats even louder. Is there still a world like Roger Corman’s, that can train and mentor young talent like Gale once was? In a word, “No.” (again, this is a woman who does not mince her words).
Hurd’s advice instead? “Have a day job, look at this as something you can’t live without doing, but don’t bet the farm on this being a stable source of income. Yes it is for a few people. But you cannot count on the exceptions. With the advent of AI and the desire for networks and streamers and studios to get rid of as many human beings as possible, which I think is abhorrent- I’m not a fortune teller, I can’t tell you how bad it’s going to get, but it’s certainly never going to be like it was when I started out. I have a lot of interns who come through my company, and I make sure I have a whole program for them and I always counsel them with the same thing, which is make sure you have a skillset you can be paid for. With each person it’s going to be different because it depends on their skillset.”
After earning her first co-producer credit in 1981 on the genuinely terrible Smokey Bites the Dust (“I implore you to not watch it”), Hurd was let loose by Corman and set about starting her own company. Its first production? A somewhat clairvoyant little science-fiction movie called The Terminator, which Hurd would co-write with Cameron, fighting tooth and nail to get it finished and out into the world, only for it to immediately catch fire and make Cameron a hot property.
And despite not claiming to be a fortune teller, The Terminator’s doomsday warnings around the rise of AI have only gotten more and more pertinent in the 40+ years since they made it.
“What speculative fiction allows you to do, is comment on what the world we’re living in now is facing. Not just preach to the choir of people who believe what you already do, but perhaps invite people who don’t to reconsider their world views.”
Following Terminator’s runaway success, Cameron famously moved straight on to what would soon become another legendary sci-fi franchise – Aliens. Taking the reigns from Ridley Scott and shifting the film’s tone away from straight horror to what Hurd herself describes as “a combat movie”, Cameron fought to keep Hurd as his producer with the top brass at 20th Century Fox. And his success in doing so not only maintained their growing relationship as creative collaborators (along with other Corman graduates, like composer James Horner) but also set them both on a collision course for what would be a famously tough production in the UK. Culminating in numerous make-it-or-break-it moments for Hurd; firstly when original Hicks actor James Remar was arrested for buying heroin from an undercover cop (“there was no way we couldn’t fire him”), but most importantly when the crew threatened to walk out over disagreements with Cameron.
If ever there’s a reckoning for a young producer (Hurd was barely 30 during shooting) it’s a crew mutiny. But after calling a town hall and letting everyone speak, Hurd famously managed to smooth things over with the local tradesmen. “You better god damn learn the lesson the first time, because you might not ever get an opportunity to relearn it, if you learn it wrong. I learned the art of compromise. That’s the most important thing… We all listened to each other.”
And the result was not only a huge box office taking, but seven Academy Award nominations too (resulting in 2 wins for sound and visual effects). If it wasn’t already clear before, now it was certain – Gale Anne Hurd had very much arrived as the Hollywood powerhouse producer she was born to be.
What followed was not only another celebrated collaboration (and another notoriously impossible shoot) with Cameron on The Abyss (“we were all crazy, nothing existed… We had to have crews working 24 hours a day”), but a string of other soon-to-be genre classics, including Ron Underwood’s underrated creature feature Tremors. In fact, whether she realised it at the time or not, between 1984 and 1990, Hurd effectively served as godmother to three major franchises which would go on to have upwards of at least five further sequels each, although largely without her input.
“Once you realise that you’re a gun for hire, like we were on Aliens, you accept that going in. It was harder with the Terminator franchise, not being involved with that any more. So I don’t watch them. Because then if someone asks me what I think, I can say I haven’t seen them.” It’s no surprise then that Hurd’s opinion of the much maligned Tremors 2: Aftershocks is a simple “I haven’t seen it.”
As the ’90s stretched on into the new millennium, Hurd’s filmography grew full of not just sure-fire hits like Armageddon, but fascinating curios too. Not least Ang Lee’s Hulk, 90s Williams/Dunst cult favourite Dick and both of the 21st-century’s takes on The Punisher before the MCU came knocking. Possibly more bafflingly though, is that in 2010, with such a storied career in filmmaking behind her, Hurd would finally land a jump to television too, as one of the core executive producers on The Walking Dead, a sprawling empire of shows which she continues to have a hand in even now, many decades later.
Gale Anne Hurd’s career is varied to say the least, but as I’m sure even Roger Corman would note, it’s essential if you want to stick around as long as Hurd has (coming up on 50 years in the business). Despite so many projects though, there is one unifying theme tying them all together. “It’s a Joseph Campbell type of thing. An ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances, who doesn’t believe they have the skillset or mindset to survive, much less (in some instances) save the world.”
Not that dissimilar then, than a young woman plucked from college and set on a path to not only learn how to produce movies in a male dominated space, but to ultimately save and elevate genre movies from the realms of low rent schlock, too?
Gale Anne Hurd is the Forbidden Worlds Legend of 2025. Aliens, Tremors and Battle Beyond the Stars were all screened as part of Forbidden Worlds Film Festival 2025, for more info on the festival and future events, head to forbiddenworldsfilmfestival.co.uk
