Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

I told him how the actor would have to prepare for that. In the army, we’d learned to field strip and reassemble our weapons by feel. They’d blindfold you and make you take apart a muddy machine gun, clean it, and put it back together. “That’s the kind of training he should do,” I said. “Not too different from what I was doing in Conan.” I described how I’d practiced for hours and hours learning to wield a broadsword and cut off people’s heads like it was second nature. When coffee came, Cameron said suddenly, “Why don’t you play the Terminator?”

“No, no, I don’t want to go backward.” The Terminator had even fewer lines than Conan—it ended up with eighteen—and I was afraid people would think I was trying to avoid speaking roles, or, worse, that a lot of my dialogue had been edited out of the final film because it wasn’t working.

“I believe that you’d be great playing the Terminator,” he insisted. “Listening to you, I mean, you could just start on the part tomorrow! I wouldn’t even have to talk to you again. There’s no one who understands that character better.” And, he pointed out, “You haven’t said a single thing about Kyle Reese.”

He really put on the hard sell. “You know, very few actors have ever gotten across the idea of a machine.” One of the few to succeed, he said, was Yul Brynner, who played a killer robot in the 1973 sci-fi thriller Westworld . “It’s a very difficult, very challenging thing to pull off, from an acting point of view. And Arnold, it’s the title role! You are the Terminator. Imagine the poster: Terminator: Schwarzenegger .”

I told him that being cast as an evil villain wasn’t going to help my career. It was something I could do later on, but right now I should keep playing heroes so that people would get used to me being a heroic character and wouldn’t get confused. Cameron disagreed. He took out a pencil and paper and began to sketch. “It’s up to you what you do with it,” he argued. “The Terminator is a machine. It’s not good, it’s not evil. If you play it in an interesting way, you can turn it into a heroic figure that people admire because of what it’s capable of. And a lot has to do with us: how we shoot it, how we edit …”

He showed me his drawing of me as the Terminator. It captured the coldness exactly. I could have acted from it.

“I am absolutely convinced,” Cameron said, “that if you play it, it will be one of the most memorable characters ever. I can see that you are the character, and that you are a machine, and you totally understand this. You’re passionate about this character.”

I promised to read the script one more time and think about it. By now the check for lunch had arrived. In Hollywood the actor never pays. But John Daly couldn’t find his wallet, Gale Anne Hurd didn’t have a purse, and Cameron discovered that he didn’t have any money either. It was like a comedy routine, with them standing up and searching their pockets.

Finally I said, “I have money.” After having to borrow plane fare from Maria, I never left the house without $1,000 in cash and a no-limit credit card. So I paid, and they were very embarrassed.

My agent was skeptical. The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that playing a villain is career suicide. Besides, once I’ve locked in on a vision for myself, I always resist changing the plan. But for a lot of reasons, The Terminator felt right. Here was a project that would get me out of a loincloth and into real clothes! The selling point would be the acting and the action, not just me ripping off my shirt. The Terminator was the ultimate tough character, with cool outfits and cool shades. I knew it would make me shine. I might not have a lot of dialogue, but at least I’d expand my skills to handling modern weapons. The script was great, the director was smart and passionate, and the money was good: $750,000 for six weeks of shooting right in LA. Yet the project was also low-profile enough that I wouldn’t be risking my entire reputation by trying something new.

I thought if I did a great job with The Terminator , it would open more doors. The key thing was that the next role after that could not be a villain. As a matter of fact, I shouldn’t do another villain for quite some time. I didn’t want to tempt the movie gods by playing a villain more than once.

It took me just a day to call back Jim Cameron to say I’d play the machine. He was as happy as he could be, although he knew that before anything could proceed, we needed to get Dino De Laurentiis’s release.

When I went to see Dino at his office, he wasn’t the hot-tempered little man I’d insulted a few years before. His attitude toward me seemed benevolent and almost fatherly; I’d felt the same thing from Joe Weider many times. I pushed to the back of my mind the way that Dino had clawed back my 5 percent of Conan at the beginning of our relationship. It wasn’t important, I decided, and I always prefer to be driven by what’s positive. Standing in his office, I didn’t focus on the big desk anymore but on the statues and awards from all over the world: Oscars and Golden Globes, Italian awards, German awards, French awards, Japanese awards. I admired Dino tremendously for what he’d achieved. He’d been involved in more than 500 movies since 1942 and had officially produced something like 130. Learning from him was much more important than making back that stupid 5 percent. Besides, he’d stuck to the deal to pay me $1 million for Conan II , enabling me to achieve my goal. I was grateful for that.

I didn’t have to say anything for him to figure out why I was there. He knew I was getting other offers, and I think other people in Hollywood wanting me made him appreciate me more. He’d also realized that I think more like a businessman than like a typical actor, and that I could understand his problems. “I’m seeing tremendous opportunities, and I want to be free enough to do some of these other things in between the Conan movies,” I told him. I reminded him that we could only do a Conan every two years because the marketers needed two years to reap each installment’s potential. “So there’s time for other projects,” I argued. I told him about The Terminator and a couple of other movies that interested me.

Dino could easily have kept me tied up for ten years. Instead, he was flexible. He nodded when I finished my pitch and said “I want to work with you and do many movies with you. Of course I understand your thinking.” The agreement we worked out was to keep making Conan installments as long as they were profitable. And if I would commit also to make a contemporary action movie for him, to be specified later, then he would free me to pursue other projects. “Go and do your movies,” he said. “When I have a script ready, I call you.”

The only other caveat was that he didn’t want me distracted from Conan II , so I wasn’t released until that movie had been filmed. I had to go back to Cameron and Daly and ask if they’d be willing to postpone the Terminator shoot until the following spring. They agreed. I also cleared it with Mike Medavoy.

Compared to Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer felt like a trip to Club Med. We were shooting in Mexico, on a budget about equal to the first Conan ’s, so there were great settings and plenty of money to work with. What was missing was John Milius, who wasn’t available to write or direct the sequel. Instead, the studio took a much more active role, leading to what I thought were big mistakes.

Universal had E.T. on the brain. The company had made so much money on Spielberg’s blockbuster that the executives decided that Conan , too, should be made into family entertainment. Somebody actually calculated that if Conan the Barbarian had been rated PG instead of R, it would have sold 50 percent more tickets. Their idea was that the more mainstream and generally acceptable the movie, the better it would succeed.