Terminator: Relishing nightmares and exposition within action scenes

Watched the first Terminator last night, including the special feature documentaries. Something a commenter (one of the crew) relayed struck me strongly: that James Cameron relished nightmares, because they gave him such powerful imagery, and that he sort of felt like regular dreams were a waste of time.

That resonated with me very much. Makes me wonder about dream journals, or rather, nightmare journals.

Another part of the documentaries that stood out for me was Michael Biehn talking about his character. ‘Reece’ is a storyteller in the movie; all the exposition about what’s happened, happening, and going to happen in the future comes through him. Biehn points out that although exposition is where a movie comes to a grinding halt, Cameron and the other writers inserted exposition in the middle of action scenes, so that it keeps moving. Thinking back on the movie, this is often very true — describing the ‘one possible future’ for example, while trying to hotwire a car and not get spotted by the cops. Very clever.

How might this relate to my novel? There is a lot of back story, quite a bit of which needs to be at least suggested to the reader. But in the context of action, movement, forward motion.

Tonight, watching Terminator 2, the juxtaposition in the above was interesting. The movie is longer and some of that extra is exposition sans action.