Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

The president became very enthusiastic. “When we get back to Washington on Monday,” he said, “I want you to meet with the White House staff and get this under way.” I also proposed restoring the presidential awards program, the fitness certificates and medals that JFK had handed out. “People were very proud of those certificates and medals,” I said. “They lead to challenges in schools, and that’s how you get the kids involved in the movement.” He liked that idea too.

My own mission, I explained, should be to get out and promote. Digging into the realities of fitness in United States, I’d realized that I would have to address it both state by state and locally. Some states had a governor’s council on fitness, some didn’t. Some had statewide programs, others left it up to local governments and the schools. Only one state actually required daily physical education in schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I felt very strongly that I had to carry to all fifty states the message that fitness was a national priority.

“You’re going to all fifty states?” he asked.

“You’ll see,” I told him. “I love being on the road and meeting people and selling. That’s what I do best.”

At the first meeting at the White House to plan the Great American Workout, about fifteen government officials were present. And they all said no. The guy from the parks department said no because so many people would ruin the lawn. The guy responsible for public safety said, “The weather in Washington can get very hot in May. People will be fainting, and they’ll need water and food, and we don’t have a budget for that.” The guy from the Secret Service said, “We can’t cover that many people if the president is moving from station to station. Too much risk.”

Afterward, I told Jim Pinkerton, the White House policy advisor I’d been working with, that it was the worst meeting I’d ever had. “Let me explain this to the president, and you should talk to him too,” he said. I saw President Bush a couple of days later and described the official reaction I’d gotten.

“Oh, that’s typical government.” He laughed. “It always starts out like that. But don’t be discouraged. Let me talk to them.”

At the next planning meeting, they all sat down and said, “It’s a great idea. We found a way around the problems. It’s very complicated, but the president wants to do this.”

So on Tuesday, May 1, 1990, at precisely 7:19 a.m., President and Mrs. Bush emerged from the White House to join what he declared was the first annual Great American Workout. Two thousand visitors were already on the South Lawn doing the activities we’d set up across four or five acres: aerobic dancing, exercise machines, horseshoe pitching, hoop shooting, soccer, and ball playing. The cameras followed as the president and Barbara went from activity to activity. We’d put together a spectacle that would have impressed even JFK. It put across both the importance and the joy of physical activity.

We’d done a walk-through the day before. I didn’t think about it at the time, but watching the preparations, I learned things that I would put to use later in my own campaigns. I saw firsthand how to plan and stage the event for the media: figuring out where you want them to be part of it, where you don’ t want them to be part of it, and when and how they would be invited. The Great American Workout was officially open from seven to nine o’clock in the morning. The reason the president joined at 7:19, I learned, was that 7:19 was the moment of peak viewership on the Today show and Good Morning America. Until then, I’d made dozens of appearances on morning TV and never paid any attention to what time I was scheduled to be on the air. But from then on, I would always insist on appearing sometime right around 7:30.

Not long after the Great American Workout, I took time out from being fitness czar to fly to Cannes. I went primarily to promote Total Recall , which was scheduled for release that June. But the ride over, on the Carolco jet, was all about Terminator 2 . Jim Cameron had just finished the script with his coauthor and had promised to bring it along for everyone to see. He handed it out after we took off. By the time we landed, we’d read it and were jumping all over the airplane in excitement about how big and technologically sophisticated the story was. I never expected T2 to be just an ordinary sequel: Cameron is a big believer in surprising the audience, and I felt confident that Terminator 2 would be as amazing and unexpected as the original. But this script blew me away. I asked a lot of questions about the shape-shifting Terminator 1000 that my character would be fighting against—it was a challenge even to imagine a machine made of liquid metal alloy. That’s when I realized that Cameron’s knowledge of science and the world of the future went way beyond the ordinary. After we reached Cannes, the foreign distributors flipped over the script and couldn’t wait to sign up. No one batted an eye that Terminator 2 would cost $70 million to produce—more than ten times as much as the original. They knew it was going to be a huge success.

T2 was always meant to be much bigger than The Terminator . Not only did it have a giant budget, but also it took eight months to shoot rather than six weeks. We were in a race against the clock: the movie had to be ready for summer 1991 to meet its financial commitments. The preproduction was so complicated that filming couldn’t start until October 1990, and by the time production finished in May 1991, T2 had become the most expensive film project in history, at $94 million.

Cameron told a reporter, “Every time I start a film, I have a fantasy that it will be like a big family, and we’ll have a good time, and we’ll have all of these wonderful, creative moments together. But that’s not what filmmaking is; it’s a battle.” What made my character challenging is that this time the Terminator is adopting human behavior patterns as the plot unfolds. It was typical Cameron genius to have character development in a machine. The kid says to the Terminator, “No more killing; promise,” and orders me to talk less like a dork and more like a person. So the part has me transforming from being a killing machine to something that’s attempting to be human but not always getting there. I’m not very convincing the first time the kid gets me to say “Hasta la vista, baby.” Gradually the Terminator becomes humanized, but only to a certain extent. It’s still very dangerous and causes a lot of mayhem. Still, compared to the T-1000, I am definitely the good guy.

We were shooting the scenes out of sequence, so we were always having to figure out the right degree of humanity for the Terminator to show for that stage in the plot. For the first several weeks, I was constantly asking Jim, “Is he too human now, or not human enough?”

T2 opened whole new possibilities in visual effects. The T-1000 is made of liquid metal and can morph before your eyes to mimic any person or object it touches. The computer-graphics guys handled that challenge. But the movie also required grueling work from the actors and stunt doubles. Cameron would push his brother Mike, who was creating props and stunts, and Mike would push the envelope and us.

We started rehearsing the stunts months in advance. In the spectacular chase scene in the dry Los Angeles drainage canal, the Terminator is supposed to blast away one-handed with a sawed off ten-gauge lever-action shotgun while driving a Harley: pull out the gun, aim, fire, spin it to recock it, fire again, and so on. It all sounded great in the script, and it was doable—just a matter of reps, reps, reps. But the preparation was pure pain and discomfort. I couldn’t wear a glove because it would get stuck in the gun mechanism, and I tore the skin off my hand and fingers practicing a hundred times until I mastered the skill. Then I had to learn to do it while riding the Harley. Then I needed to put the riding and the gun skill together with the acting. It’s hard to watch where you’re driving and look where the director wants you to look at the same time. In one shot, I had to bring the front wheel of the moving bike almost to the lens of the camera on a truck in front of me. Simultaneously I was supposed to be shooting out, not looking down. And it would ruin the shot to have my eyes darting around.