Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

We also had to contend with camels. I’d never been around a camel, much less ridden one, but the script demanded exactly that. A week before we were due to shoot the scene, I told myself, “You’d better make friends with the camel and figure this out.” I discovered quickly that they’re very different from horses. They get up on their back feet first and throw you forward. And you can’t just tug on the reins as you would with a horse, because if you do, the camel will turn its head 180 degrees until it’s face to face with you. It might spit in your eye, and if it does, the saliva is so caustic that you need a doctor. And camels bite—usually the back of your head, just when you’ve forgotten they’re around.

In addition to the mechanical snake that had its way with me, I had to contend with real snakes too. They were some sort of water snake, and their handler worried that they were getting dehydrated. So he put them in the apartment house swimming pool. In the United States, the department of health or animal welfare would have been there in two seconds, and also the water would have been full of chlorine, which wouldn’t have been good for the snakes’ skin. But in Spain and around Milius, these kinds of things happened all the time.

Milius always pushed the envelope. Environmentalists complained that our sets disrupted the salt marshes, and the producers had to promise to restore the sites. Animal-protection advocates complained because Conan included scenes in which a dog gets kicked, a camel gets punched (by me, but it was just a fake punch), and horses get tripped. None of that would have been allowed in the United States. The production had excellent stunt riders who knew how to turn the horse during a fall so that it would roll and not break its neck, but even so, those stunts were dangerous for both the horses and the people; I saw many bruises and cuts and split heads. Such stunts have since been outlawed from movies.

Even so, the bloodshed in Conan seems tame by today’s standards. At the time, however, the film introduced a whole new dimension of violence on screen. Up until then, swordfights had always been a little too tidy: characters would crumple to the ground, and maybe you’d see a little blood. But Milius was strapping five-quart blood packs on actors’ chests. Five quarts is about as much blood as you have in your entire body. When a battle-axe struck one of those packs, blood flew everywhere. And anytime blood was being spilled, he was insistent about making sure it was against a light background so that you could really see the carnage.

Milius didn’t think he needed to apologize for this. “It’s Conan the barbarian . What do you expect?” he told reporters. But after the shooting wrapped in May and we came home, the issue continued to percolate. The decision makers at Universal were worried that advance word of excessive violence would drive away viewers.

At that point, they were considering Conan for a November or December holiday release. That was until Sid Sheinberg, the president of Universal, who was famous for discovering director Steven Spielberg, saw a rough cut in August. He watched me hacking people apart, blood everywhere, and halfway through the screening, he stood up and said to the other executives sarcastically, “Merry Christmas, guys,” and walked out. So Conan was pushed back: Universal’s Christmas 1981 releases were On Golden Pond , the family drama starring Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, and Katharine Hepburn, and a horror flick.

We all knew that Conan would be controversial, and the puzzle was how to market it and present it to the media. I watched Milius give some of the early interviews, drawing reporters into the macho fantasy. One of his big talking points was Friedrich Nietzsche; the epigraph at the beginning of Conan, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” is paraphrased from the German philosopher’s 1889 book Twilight of the Idols . The other big talking point was steel. “Steel gets harder and more durable the more you pound it,” John would tell the reporters. “It’s no different than the character of a human being. It needs to be tempered. It needs to overcome resistance. The more a man struggles, the stronger he is. Look at people who come from war-torn countries or tough city neighborhoods. You can see the struggle in their faces. A makeup artist can’t do that. And that’s what makes Conan the fiercest and most powerful warrior, what he went through as a child. Luxuries and comforts are evil for humans.” For Milius, Conan was making a statement that went way beyond action movies and comic books. It all tied back to Nietzsche.

He’d show the reporters one of his samurai swords and say, “You know, a samurai sword is heated and pounded on an anvil seven times so that it has the necessary strength. The samurai warriors would practice on criminals. They’d take them out and make them stand and cut off the head with a single swing.” He would act out this whole drama as the reporters took notes. And I would be thinking, “How does he come up with this shit?” My approach was much more direct. I sold the entertainment aspect, the joy of Conan as a fun ride and epic adventure, like a Star Wars set on earth.

To promote the movie, it was important to work every possible angle. We used special-interest magazines to build an audience—stories on sword fighting for the martial-arts magazines. Stories for horse magazines. Stories for fantasy magazines that were into swords and sorcery. Stories for bodybuilding magazines on how you needed top conditioning to be Conan.

The movie, of course, needed a rating before it could be released. I was really annoyed by the way that powerful studio executives kowtowed to the members of the ratings board. The board was made up of Motion Picture Association of America appointees whose names were never even publicly announced. Most were middle-aged people with grown kids, but they reacted to Conan like a bunch of old ladies: “Oh, ah, ah, the blood! I’ve got to close my eyes!” The word came down that we had to edit out some of the gore.

I said to myself, “Where did they get these squeamish idiots? Let’s have some young, hip people rate it.” I asked one of the studio guys, “Who is in charge of this? There must be someone in charge. Why don’t you go and get them fired?”

“No, no, no, no,” he said. “You don’t want to rock that boat.”

No one was willing to fight back on anything.

I didn’t understand there was a chess game being played. Universal had in the works Spielberg’s E.T. , which the studio was counting on as its summer blockbuster of 1982. It didn’t want to do anything to antagonize the raters. It wanted to be loved, it wanted Spielberg to be loved, it wanted E.T. to be loved. So then here come Milius and Schwarzenegger, slaughtering all these people on the screen. Milius is already Hollywood’s bad boy, with his right-wing Republicanism and his reputation for saying outrageous things. And, of course, the studio is ready to say, “Let’s cut those Conan scenes right now, so that when we bring E.T. to the rating board next week, we don’t get crucified,” even though there was no harm in E.T. at all.

I was mad as hell because I felt that every one of the killings in Conan was well shot and extraordinary. So what if the first thing you see is Thulsa Doom raiding Conan’s boyhood village and that his mother’s head goes flying through the air? You could say we needed that scene to make Thulsa Doom the ultimate villain, so that when Conan hunts him down, it’s justified. But you fall in love with your own work. In hindsight, I think that making us tone down the violence helped bring more people to the film.