Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

At home we had a party for our friends. I put on an American flag shirt and an American flag hat and I couldn’t stop smiling with the joy of being officially an American at last. It meant that I could vote, and I could travel with an American passport. I could even run for office someday.

WHEN I FIRST SAWthe mock-up for The Terminator movie poster, the killer robot pictured was O. J. Simpson, not me. A few weeks earlier, I’d run into Mike Medavoy, the head of Orion Pictures, which was financing the project, at a screening of a picture about a police helicopter.

“I have the perfect movie for you,” he said. “It’s called The Terminator .” I was instantly suspicious because there’d been a schlock action movie called The Exterminator a few years before.

“Strange name,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “we can change it. Anyway, it’s a great role, a leading role, very heroic.” He described a sci-fi action movie where I would be playing a brave soldier named Kyle Reese, who battles to save a girl and protect the future of the world. “We’ve pretty much got O. J. Simpson signed up to be the terminator, which is like a killing machine.

“Why don’t we get together?” Medavoy suggested. “The director lives down in Venice near your office.”

This was in the spring of 1983. I’d been reading lots of scripts with the idea of doing a new project in addition to the Conan sequel, which was supposed to start shooting near the end of the year. I was being offered war movies, cop movies, and even a couple of romances. A script about Paul Bunyan, the mythical lumberjack and he-man, was tempting. I liked it that he went around righting wrongs, and I thought that having a blue ox for a sidekick would be funny. There was also a folk hero script called Big Bad John , based on country singer Jimmy Dean’s 1961 hit song. It was about the legend of a hulking, mysterious coal miner who uses his strength to save the lives of fellow miners during a mine collapse but doesn’t make it out himself. Now that I’d done a big movie connected with names like Dino De Laurentiis and Universal Pictures, studios and directors were courting me and the projects I was being offered were getting better and better all the time. Shortly before Conan came out, I changed agents, signing with Lou Pitt, the powerful head of motion picture talent at International Creative Management. I felt bad leaving Larry Kubik, who’d helped me so much when I was nowhere in my movie career. But I thought I had to have a major agency like ICM behind me because it handled all the big directors and big projects and had the connections. And it was satisfying, of course, to come in at the top of one of the giant agencies that had turned me down just a few years earlier.

My mind quickly adjusted to the new world I was in. I’d always told Maria that my goal was to make $1 million for a movie, and with the second Conan movie, the money was locked in. But I no longer wanted to be just Conan. The whole idea of making a few Hercules-type movies and then taking the money and going into the gym business like Reg Park went right out the window. I felt I had to aim higher.

“Now that studios are coming to me,” I said to myself, “what if I go all out? Really work on the acting, really work on the stunts, really work on whatever else I need to be onscreen. Also market myself really well, market the movies well, promote them well, publicize them well. What if I shoot to become one of Hollywood’s top five leading men?”

People were always talking about how few performers there are at the top of the ladder, but I was always convinced there was room for one more. I felt that, because there was so little room, people got intimidated and felt more comfortable staying on the bottom of the ladder. But, in fact, the more people that think that, the more crowded the bottom of the ladder becomes! Don’t go where it’s crowded. Go where it’s empty. Even though it’s harder to get there, that’s where you belong and where there’s less competition.

It was very clear, of course, that I would never be an actor like Dustin Hoffman or Marlon Brando, or a comedian like Steve Martin, but that was okay. I was being sought out as a larger-than-life character in action movies, like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, and John Wayne before them. Those were my guys. I went to see all their movies. So there would be plenty of work—and plenty of opportunity to become as big a star as any of them. I wanted to be in the same league and on the same pay scale. As soon as I realized this, I felt a great sense of calm. Because I could see it. Just as I had in bodybuilding, I believed 100 percent that I’d achieve my goal. I had a new vision in front of me, and I always feel that if I can see it and believe it, then I can achieve it.

Lou Pitt and I were already looking at war movies and heroic movies as a fallback in case Conan ever lost steam. Otherwise, it was more of a speculative exercise, because under the terms of my current contract, Dino De Laurentiis owned me for ten years. It called for me to make one Conan movie every two years for as long as Dino chose, up to five movies, and to take no other roles. So if Conan became the success we all wanted, we would do a third movie in 1986, a fourth in 1988, and so on, and we’d make a lot of money. As to being tied up, Lou told me, “Don’t worry about that. If we need to, we can renegotiate.” So I put that worry aside as the idea of going from muscles to mainstream action movies gained stronger and stronger appeal.

Mike Medavoy arranged for me to have lunch with the director of The Terminator , as well as the producers, John Daly and Gale Ann Hurd. I read the script before I went. It was really well written, exciting and action packed, but the story was strange. A woman, Sarah Connor, is an ordinary waitress in a diner who suddenly finds herself being hunted down by a ruthless killer. It is actually the Terminator, a robot encased in human flesh. It has been sent back in time from the year 2029, an age of horror where the world’s computers have run amok and set off a nuclear holocaust. The computers are now using terminators to wipe out what’s left of the human race. But human resistance fighters have begun turning back the machines, and they have a charismatic leader named John Connor: Sarah’s future son. The machines decide to eliminate the rebellion by keeping Connor from ever being born. So they use a time portal to send a terminator to hunt down Sarah in the present day. Her only hope is Reese, a young soldier loyal to John Connor, who slips through the time portal before it is destroyed. He is on a mission to stop the terminator.

James Cameron, the director, turned out to be a skinny, intense guy. This whole weird plot had come out of his head. At lunch that day, we hit it off. Cameron lived in Venice, and like a lot of the artists there, he seemed much more real to me than the people I met from, say, Hollywood Hills. He’d made only one movie, an Italian horror flick called Piranha II: The Spawning , which I’d never heard of, but I got a kick out of that. He told me how he’d learned moviemaking from Roger Corman, the low-budget producing and directing genius. Just from Cameron’s vocabulary, I could tell he was technically advanced. He seemed to know everything about cameras and lenses, about the way you set up shots, about lights and lighting, about set design. And he knew the kinds of money-saving shortcuts that let you bring in a movie for $4 million instead of $20 million. Four million was the amount they were budgeting for The Terminator.

When I talked about the movie, I found myself focused more on the Terminator character than on Reese, the hero. I had a very clear vision of the terminator. I told Cameron, “One thing that concerns me is that whoever is playing the terminator, if it’s O. J. Simpson or whoever, it’s very important that he gets trained the right way. Because if you think about it, if this guy is really a machine, he won’t blink when he shoots. When he loads a new magazine into his gun, he won’t have to look because a machine will be doing it, a computer. When he kills, there will be absolutely no expression on the face, not joy, not victory, not anything.” No thinking, no blinking, no thought, just action.