WHEN I FIRST SAW the 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.
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.
But you couldn’t make Conan the Barbarian into Conan the Babysitter. He was not a PG character. He was a violent guy who lived for conquest and revenge. What made him heroic was his physique, his skill as a warrior, his ability to endure pain, and his sense of loyalty and honor, with a little humor thrown in. Toning him down to PG might broaden the audience at first, but it would undermine the franchise because the hard-core Conan fans would be upset. You have to satisfy your best customers first. Who were the people who read Conan stories? Who were the Conan comic-book fanatics? They’d made it clear that they loved Conan the Barbarian. So if you wanted to make them love the sequel even more, you should improve the plot, make the story spicier, and make the action scenes even more amazing. Focusing on ratings was the wrong approach.
I made my opinion clear to Dino, Raffaella, and the studio, and we had our discussions. “You are wimping out,” I told them. “You are not being true to what Conan is about. Maybe you should get out of the business of doing a Conan franchise if you are embarrassed about the violence or what the character represents. Just drop it or sell it to someone else! But don’t go and make it something that it is not.” It was no use. In the end I was stuck with their decision because I was bound by a contract.
This time Richard Fleischer was the director. He’d been making movies in Hollywood for forty years, including some very memorable ones like Tora! Tora! Tora! and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It wasn’t his idea to make Conan PG, but at age sixty-six he was happy to have a job and was not about to argue with the studio or Dino. They told him to make the tone more comic-book-like, more fantasy and adventure, and use magic castles instead of the Nietzsche and the gore. On Conan the Destroyer, Richard was a terrific director in every other way, but he was adamant that we stick to those guidelines.
What made the film fun in spite of all this was the chance to work with Wilt Chamberlain and Grace Jones. Raffaella had picked up Milius’s trick of casting interesting nonactors. In the plot of the movie, a sorceress queen promises to resurrect Conan’s lost love, Valeria, if he will retrieve some jewels and a magical tusk. To help on this quest, she lends him her beautiful young niece, who is the only human who can handle the jewels, and the captain of her palace guard, the giant Bombaata, who is supposed to kill Conan once they recover the goods.
Bombaata was Chamberlain’s first movie role. Not only was he one of basketball’s all-time greats, but seven-foot-one Wilt the Stilt was also living proof that weight training does not make you muscle bound. He took a whole stack of weights on the Universal Gym and did triceps extensions with 240 pounds like it was nothing. On the court, from 1959 to 1973, he was so powerful and competitive that no one could push him out of the way, and I saw his athleticism in his sword fighting.
But the most interesting fighting took place between him and Grace Jones. She played a bandit warrior named Zula whose weapon is a fighting stick—with which Grace put two stunt men in the hospital by accident in fight scenes. I knew her from the Andy Warhol crowd in New York: a six-foot-tall model, performance artist, and music star who could be really fierce. She spent eighteen months training for this shoot. She and Chamberlain kept getting into arguments in the makeup trailer about who was really black. He would refer to her as an African-American, and Grace, born and raised in Jamaica, would just explode. “I’m not African-American, so don’t you call me that!” she’d yell.
The makeup trailer is a place on the set where everyone talks. If anybody’s worried about anything, that’s where you see it. Sometimes people come to the trailer and are comfortable, entertaining, and funny; other times they come in looking for an argument. Maybe they’re feeling insecure. Or maybe they have a lot of dialogue in the next scene and they’re scared, and then anything sets them off.
Some big celebrities have their makeup done in their own trailer. I don’t like to do that. Why would I want to sit by myself and not be with the other cast members? I always went to the makeup trailer.
There you hear every conversation that you can think of: concerns about the next scene, complaints about the movie, things that people have to work through.
It’s the mother of all beauty salons, because actresses, of course, have many more problems than the average housewife does. “Now I have to do this scene, and the scene is not clicking, and what does it mean?” Or “I got a pimple today, and how can you get rid of it?” The director of photography may have already told her, “I’m not a surgeon. I cannot get rid of a pimple.” So now she has a hang-up about that and comes back to the makeup trailer.
All this stuff comes out about personal relationships. You’re always torn when you go on location for two months or three months or five months, away from home, from your family. So guys complain about kids who are left behind, they complain about the wife who may be cheating.
Everyone schmoozes, and everyone chimes in: the actors, the makeup guy. Then the director comes, and he’s concerned about some actor’s frame of mind. Sometimes you see people naked, getting tattoos put on for the scene. It’s great for comedy and drama. But even for a makeup trailer, Wilt’s and Grace’s arguments were wild. I couldn’t figure out their hostility, but it was there.
“I’m not like you,” she would tell him. “I don’t come from uneducated slaves. I’m from Jamaica, I speak French, my ancestors were never slaves.”
The N-word was thrown around, which shocked me. Wilt would be saying, “There’s nothing black about me. Don’t give me this crap! I live in Beverly Hills with the white guys, I fuck only white women, I drive the same cars as the white guys, I have money like white guys. So fuck you, you’re the nigger.”
At one point I intervened. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, guys! Guys, please, this is a makeup trailer; let’s not have those arguments. See, the makeup trailer is supposed to be all about a soothing atmosphere, because you’re getting ready for the scene. So let’s not get agitated here.
“Furthermore, have you looked at yourselves in the mirror lately? Because how could you argue you’re not black? I mean, both of you are black!”
And they said, “No, no, you don’t understand, it’s got nothing to do with the color. It’s the attitude, it’s the background.”
The points they made got very, very complicated. They were not really talking about color, they were talking about how different ethnic groups came to America. There was something comical about seeing two black people accusing each other of being black. We laughed about it later, at the wrap party, and Grace and Wilt got along really well in the end. They’re both very talented, entertaining people. This was just an argument they had to have.
Mexico quickly became one of my favorite places to film. The crews were hardworking, and their craftsmanship on the sets was unbelievable. It was to the old European standard. And if you needed something right away—let’s say a hillside as a background for a shot—within two hours that hillside would be there, with all the palm trees or pine trees or whatever the shot called for.
Conan the Destroyer involved so much riding that it felt like the horses belonged to us even when we weren’t shooting. Maria would come to visit, and I would take her out on the horses up into the mountains. She is an extraordinary rider who’d grown up doing English-style riding and show jumping. We’d strap our picnic baskets to the horses, and we’d take out the food, the bottle of wine, and just relax on the mountainside, dreaming. We had nothing to worry about, no responsibility.
When I came back from Mexico in February 1984, I was ready to start preparing for The Terminator. I had just a month before we started shooting. The challenge was to lock into the cyborg’s cold, no-emotion behavior.
I worked with guns every day before we filmed, and for the first two weeks of filming I practiced stripping and reassembling them blindfolded until the motions were automatic. I spent endless hours at the shooting range, learning techniques for a whole arsenal of different weapons, getting used to their noise so that I wouldn’t blink. As the Terminator, when you cock or load a gun, you don’t look down any more than Conan would look down to sheath his sword. And, of course, you are ambidextrous. All of that is reps. You have to practice each move thirty, forty, fifty times until you get it. From the bodybuilding days on, I learned that everything is reps and mileage. The more miles you ski, the better a skier you become; the more reps you do, the better your body. I’m a big believer in hard work, grinding it out, and not stopping until it’s done, so the challenge appealed to me.
Why I understood the Terminator is a mystery to me. While I was learning the part, my mantra was the speech Reese makes to Sarah Connor: “Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.” I worked on selling the idea that I had no humanity, no expressiveness, no wasted motion, only will. So when the Terminator shows up at the police station where Sarah has taken refuge, and he tells the night sergeant, “I’m a friend of Sarah Connor. I was told she is here. Can I see her, please?” and the sergeant responds, “It’ll be awhile. You wanna wait, there’s a bench,” you just know it won’t be pleasant.
Cameron had promised to make the Terminator a heroic figure. We talked a lot about how to do that. How do you make people admire a cyborg that lays waste to a police station and massacres thirty cops? It was a combination of how I played the part, how he shot the character, and subtle things Jim did to make the cops look like schmucks. Instead of being competent guardians of public safety, they’re always off base, always a step behind. So the viewer thinks, “They’re stupid, they don’t get it, and they’re arrogant and condescending.” And the Terminator wipes them out.
Control freaks like Jim are big fans of night shooting. It gives you total command over the lighting because you create it. You don’t have to compete with the sun. You start with the dark and then build. If you want to create a lonely street scene where the viewer can sense at a glance that this is no place to hang, it’s easier to do it at night. So most of The Terminator was shot after dark. Of course, for the actors, night shooting means a tortuous schedule, and it’s not as comfortable or as fun as shooting in the day.
Cameron reminded me of John Milius. He loved moviemaking passionately and knew the history, the movies, the directors, the scripts. He would go on and on about technology. I didn’t have much patience when he talked about technical things that couldn’t be done. I thought, “Why don’t you just direct the movie well? I mean, the cameras are good enough for Spielberg and Coppola. Alfred Hitchcock did his movies and wasn’t complaining about the equipment. So who the fuck are you?” It took me awhile to figure out that Jim was the real deal.
He choreographed everything precisely, especially the action scenes. He hired expert stunt guys and met with them beforehand to explain what he wanted in each shot, like a coach charting a play. Two cars in a chase would burst onto a boulevard out of an alley, say, almost hitting the oncoming traffic, which would be swerving just so, and one of the cars would skid and clip the rear fender of a pickup truck going the other way. Jim would be shooting this as the master shot, and then he would pick up the shots from other angles. He was so knowledgeable that the stunt guys felt like they could really talk shop with him. And then they’d go and take the risks, whatever was necessary, to do those scenes.
I’d probably be asleep in the trailer at three in the morning when they shot; they wouldn’t need me for two hours, so I’d grab a little sleep. But watching the footage the following day, I’d be in awe. It was amazing that a second-time director would have the skill and confidence to pull this off.
On the set, Cameron knew every detail and was constantly on his feet adjusting things. He had eyes in the back of his head. Without even looking up at the ceiling, he’d say, “Daniel, dammit, get me that spotlight, and I told you already to put that flag on it! Or do I have to climb up there and do the fucking job myself?” Daniel, ninety feet up, would just about fall off his scaffold. How did Cameron know? He knew everyone’s name and made it very clear that you couldn’t fuck with him or cheat. Don’t ever think you’ll get away with it. He’d scream at you and punish you publicly and make a scene, all the while using precise terminology that made the lighting guy feel, “This guy knows more about lights than I do. I’d better do exactly as he says.” It was an education for someone like me, who does not pay attention to such details.
I realized, though, that Cameron wasn’t just a detail man—he was a visionary when it came to the storytelling and the bigger picture, especially the way women are shown on screen. In the two months before we made The Terminator, he wrote the screenplays for both Aliens and Rambo: First Blood Part II. Rambo shows he could do macho, but the most powerful action figure in Aliens is a woman: the character Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver. Sarah Connor in The Terminator becomes heroic and powerful too.
This wasn’t just true of Jim’s movies. The women he married, even though it turned out to be a long list, were all women you didn’t want to mess with. The Terminator’s producer, Gale Anne Hurd, married him later during the making of Aliens. It was her job to bring in our project on budget—which ultimately got stretched to $6.5 million. But even that figure was extremely tight for a movie this ambitious. Gale, who was in her late twenties, had gotten into production after graduating from Stanford and starting out as Roger Corman’s secretary. She was passionate about movies and devoted to the project. Early on, she and her pal Lisa Sonne, one of the production designers, came by our house at three in the morning to wake me up and talk about the film.
“So where are you guys coming from?” I asked.
“Yeah, we just came from a party,” they said. They were a little high. All of a sudden I found myself deep in conversation about The Terminator, what needed to be done, how they needed my help. Who comes to do this at three in the morning? I thought it was fantastic.
Gale would seek me out to talk about the script, the shooting, and the challenges. She was professional, and she was tough, but she could turn on the sweetness if she thought it would help. She’d be sitting on my lap in my trailer on the set at six in the morning, saying, “You’ve worked really hard this whole night, and do you mind if we have you another three hours and keep shooting? Otherwise we’re not going to make it.” I always think the world of people who make a project their own and are on it twenty-four hours a day. She needed all the help she could get, too, because it wasn’t like she had produced five thousand movies before. So whereas a lot of actors would have been on the phone complaining to their agent, I gladly gave her the overtime.
Coming from a huge, expensive Universal Studios shoot abroad to the nighttime penny-pinching world of The Terminator was a whole different experience. You weren’t part of this giant machine; you didn’t feel like just the actor. I was together with the moviemakers. Gale was right next door in her trailer producing, and Jim was always there and would include me in a lot of the decision making. John Daly, who’d put up the money, was around a lot as well. There was no one else beyond that. It was us four slugging it out. We were all in the beginning stages of our careers, and we all wanted to make something successful.
The same was true of key people on the crew. They were not really known and hadn’t made much money yet. Stan Winston was getting his big break by creating the terminator special effects, including all the moving parts for the scary close-ups; the same was true for makeup artist Jeff Dawn and for Peter Tothpal, the hairstylist who invented ways to make the Terminator’s hair look spiky and burned. It was a wonderful moment that got us all worldwide recognition for our work.
I didn’t try to build chemistry with Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn, who play Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. Just the opposite. They get a lot of screen time, but they were irrelevant as far as my character was concerned. The Terminator was a machine. He didn’t care what they did. He was just there to kill them and move on. They would tell me of scenes they shot when I was not there. That was all good, as long as the acting was good and they sold their stuff. But it was not a situation where we had a relationship. The less chemistry, the better. I mean, God forbid there’s chemistry between a machine and a human being! So I kept my mind off them. It was almost like they were making their own drama that had nothing to do with mine.
The Terminator was not what I’d call a happy set. How can you be happy in the middle of the night blowing things up, when everybody is exhausted and the pressure is intense to get complicated action sequences and visual effects just right? It was a productive set where the fun was in doing really wild stuff. I’d be thinking, “This is great. It’s a horror movie with action. Or, actually, I really don’t know what it is, it’s so over the top.”
Much of the time, I had glue all over my face to attach the special-effects appliances. I have strong skin, luckily, so the chemicals never ruined it much, but they were horrible all the same. Wearing the Terminator’s red eye over my own, I’d feel the wire that made it glow getting hot until it burned. I had to practice operating with a special-effects arm that was not mine, while for hours my real arm was tied behind my back.
Cameron was full of surprises. One morning, as soon as I was made up as the Terminator, he said, “Get in the van. We’re going to go shoot a scene.” We drove to a nearby residential street, and he said, “See that station wagon over there? It’s all rigged. When I give the signal, walk up to the driver’s side door, look around, punch in the window, open the door and get in, start the engine, and drive off.” We didn’t have the money to get permission from the city and to properly set up the scene of the Terminator jacking a car, so that’s how we did it instead. It made me feel like I was part of Jim’s creativity, sneaking around the permit process to bring in the movie on budget.
Lame ideas really irritated him, especially if they involved the script. I decided one day that The Terminator didn’t have enough funny moments. There’s a scene where the cyborg goes into a house and walks past a refrigerator. So I thought maybe the fridge door could be open, or maybe he could open it. He sees beer inside, wonders what that is, drinks it, gets a little buzz, and acts silly for a second. Jim cut me off before I could even finish. “It’s a machine, Arnold,” he said. “It’s not a human being. It’s not E.T. It can’t get drunk.”
Our biggest disagreement was about “I’ll be back.” That of course is the line you hear the Terminator say before it destroys the police station. The scene took a long time to shoot because I was arguing for “I will be back.” I felt that the line would sound more machinelike and menacing without the contraction.
“It’s feminine when I say the I’ll,” I complained, repeating it for Jim so he could hear the problem. “I’ll. I’ll. I’ll. It doesn’t feel rugged to me.”
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Let’s stick with I’ll,” he said. But I wasn’t ready to let it go, and we went back and forth. Finally Jim yelled, “Look, just trust me, okay? I don’t tell you how to act, and you don’t tell me how to write.” And we shot it as written in the script. The truth was that, even after all these years of speaking English, I still didn’t understand contractions. But the lesson I took away was that writers never change anything. This was not somebody else’s script that Jim was shooting, it was his own. He was even worse than Milius. He was unwilling to change a single apostrophe.
When Conan the Destroyer hit the theaters that summer, I went all out to sell it. I went on as many national and local talk shows as would book me, starting with Late Night with David Letterman, and gave interviews to reporters from the biggest to the smallest magazines and newspapers. I had to lean on the publicists to line up appearances abroad, despite the fact that $50 million, or more than half, of the first Conan movie’s box office had come from outside the United States. I was determined to do everything in my power to make my first million-dollar role a success.
The second Conan outearned Conan the Barbarian in the end, breaking the $100 million mark in worldwide receipts. But what was good for my reputation was not such great news for the franchise. In the United States, Conan the Destroyer made it onto fewer screens than the original and grossed $31 million, or 23 percent less money. Our fears had come true. By repackaging Conan as what film critic Roger Ebert cheerfully called “your friendly family barbarian,” the studio alienated some of our core audience.
I felt like I was finished with Conan; it was going nowhere. When I got back from my publicity tours, I sat down again with Dino De Laurentiis and told him definitively that I didn’t want to do any more prehistoric movies, only contemporary movies. It turned out he had cooled off on Conan too. Rather than pay me millions for more sequels, he’d rather I make an action movie for him, although he still didn’t have a script. So for now I was free to do more projects like The Terminator.
It was very agreeable and just as we had talked about the previous fall—except that, being Dino, he had a favor to ask. Before I hung up my broadsword for good, he said, “Why don’t you just do, you know, a cameo?” He handed me a script called Red Sonja.
Red Sonja was Conan’s female counterpart in the Conan comics and fantasy novels: a woman warrior, out to avenge the murder of her parents, who steals treasure and magic talismans and battles evil sorcerers and beasts. The part that Dino had in mind for me wasn’t Conan but Lord Kalidor, Red Sonja’s ally. A big part of the plot has to do with his lust for Sonja and her virginity. “No man may have me unless he’s beaten me in a fair fight,” she declares.
Maria read the script and said, “Don’t do it. It’s trash.” I agreed, but I felt I owed Dino a favor. So at the end of October, just before The Terminator was due for release, I found myself on an airplane to Rome, where Red Sonja was already filming.
Dino had searched for more than year to find an actress Amazonian enough to play Sonja. He finally found Brigitte Nielsen on the cover of a magazine: a six-foot twenty-one-year-old Danish fashion model with blazing red hair and a reputation for being a hard partyer. She had never acted, but Dino just flew her to Rome, gave her a screen test, and cast her as the star. Then to make the movie happen, he brought in veterans from the Conan team: Raffaella as producer, Richard Fleischer as director, and Sandahl Bergman as the treacherous Queen Gedren of Berkubane.
My so-called cameo turned out to involve four whole weeks on the set. They shot all the Lord Kalidor scenes with three cameras, and then used the extra footage in the editing room to stretch Kalidor’s time onscreen. So instead of making a minor appearance, I ended up as one of the film’s dominant characters. The Red Sonja poster gave twice as much space to my image as to Brigitte’s. I felt tricked. This was Dino’s way of using my image to sell his movie, and I refused to do any promotion the following July when Red Sonja appeared.
Red Sonja was so bad that it was nominated for three Golden Raspberry awards, a kind of Oscar in reverse for bad movies: Worst Actress, Worst Supporting Actress, and Worst New Star. Brigitte ended up “winning” as Worst New Star. Terrible movies can sometimes be hits at the box office, but Red Sonja was too awful even to be campy, and it bombed. I tried to keep my distance and joked that I was relieved to have survived.
The biggest complication of Red Sonja for me was Red Sonja. I got involved with Brigitte Nielsen, and we had a hot affair on the set. Gitte, as everyone called her, had a personality filled with laughter and fun mixed with a great hunger for attention. After the shoot, we traveled in Europe for a couple of weeks before parting ways. I went home assuming our fling was over.
In January, however, Gitte came to LA to do the looping of the movie—the rerecording of dialogue to make it clearer on the soundtrack—and announced that she wanted a continuing relationship. We had to have a serious talk.
“Gitte, this was on the set,” I told her. “It was fun over there, but it wasn’t serious. I’m already involved with the woman I want to marry. I hope you understand.
“If you’re looking for a serious relationship with a Hollywood star,” I added, “there are guys around who are available, and they will flip over you. Especially with your personality.” She wasn’t thrilled, but she accepted it. Sure enough, later that year, she met Sylvester Stallone and it was love at first sight. I was happy for her that she’d found a good partner.
The Terminator had become a sensation in my absence. Released just a week before Halloween 1984, it was the number one movie in America for six weeks, on its way to grossing close to $100 million. I didn’t quite realize how successful it was until I got back to the United States and some people stopped me walking down the street in New York.
“Oh man, we just saw The Terminator. Say it! Say it! You’ve got to say it!”
“What?”
“You know, ‘I’ll be back!’ ” None of us involved in making the movie had any idea that this was going to be the line people remembered. When you make a movie, you can never really predict what will turn out to be the most repeated line.
Despite The Terminator’s success, Orion did a terrible job of marketing it. Jim Cameron was bitter. The company was focused instead on promoting its big hit Amadeus, the story of the eighteenth-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which went on to win eight Oscars that year. So without giving The Terminator much thought, the marketers positioned it as an ordinary B movie even though there were signs from the start that it was much more. Critics wrote about it as a major breakthrough, as if to say, “Wow, where did that come from?” People were amazed at what they saw and how it was shot. And it wasn’t just guys who liked it. The Terminator was surprisingly appealing to women, partly because of the powerful love story between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese.
But Orion’s advertising campaign was pitched to action fanatics, and featured me shooting and blowing everything up. The TV commercial and the movie-house trailer would make most people say, “Ugh, crazy, violent science fiction. That’s not for me. My fourteen-year-old might like it. Oh, but maybe he shouldn’t go. It’s rated R.” What Orion telegraphed to the industry was “This is a bread-and-butter movie to help pay the bills. Our classy movie is about Mozart.”
Cameron went nuts. He begged the studio to expand the promotion and raise the tone before the movie came out. The ads should have been broader, with more focus on the story and on Sarah Connor, so the message would be: “Even though you may think it’s crazy science fiction, you’ll be quite surprised. This is one of our classy movies.”
They treated him like a child. One of the executives told Jim beforehand that “down-and-dirty action thrillers” like this usually had a two-week life. By the second weekend, attendance drops by half, and by the third week, it’s over. It didn’t matter that The Terminator opened at number one and stayed there. Orion was not going to increase the promotional budget. If its executives had listened to Jim, our box office could have been twice as big.
Nevertheless, from an investment point of view, The Terminator was a big success, because it made $40 million domestic and $50 million abroad, and cost only $6.5 million. But our profits weren’t in E.T.’s league. For me, in a weird way, it was lucky that the movie wasn’t bigger. Because if it had earned, say, $100 million right off the top in US theaters alone, I would have had a tough time getting cast as anything but a villain. Instead, it fell into the category of “that was a great surprise.” It made Time magazine’s list of the year’s ten best movies. For me personally, the fact that both Conan and The Terminator each took in $40 million at home demonstrated that the American public accepted me as both a hero and a villain. Sure enough, before the year was out, Joel Silver, the producer of the Nick Nolte–Eddie Murphy hit 48 Hrs., came to my office and pitched me on playing Colonel John Matrix, the larger-than-life hero in an action thriller called Commando. The pay was $1.5 million.
The fling with Brigitte Nielsen underlined what I already knew: I wanted Maria to be my wife. In December she acknowledged that she was thinking more and more about marriage. Her career was taking off—she was now an on-air correspondent for CBS News—but she would be turning thirty soon and wanted to start a family.
Since Maria had been quiet about our marrying for so long, I didn’t need for her to signal twice. “This is it,” I told myself, “the end of dating, the end of telling people ‘I believe in long escrows,’ and all this bull. Let’s take this seriously and move forward.” Literally the next day, I asked friends in the diamond business to help design a ring. And when I wrote down my list of goals for 1985, at the very top I put, “This is the year I will propose to Maria.”
I liked having the diamond in the middle, bookended by smaller diamonds on the left and right sides. I asked my friends in the jewelry business to come up with ideas along those lines and sketched for them what I envisioned. I wanted the main diamond to be a minimum of five carats and the others to be maybe a carat or two each. We worked on that idea, and then within a few weeks, we had designs. And in another few weeks, I had the ring.
From that day on, I kept it wrapped up and ready in my pocket. Everywhere we went, I was just looking for the right moment to propose. I almost asked Maria at various points in Europe and Hyannis Port that spring, but it didn’t feel quite right. I was actually planning to propose when I took her to Hawaii in April. But the minute we got there, we met three other couples who all said, “We’re here to get engaged,” or “We’re here to get married.”
I thought, “Arnold, don’t propose here, because every schmuck’s coming over here to do the same thing.”
I had to be more creative. I knew my wife would be telling the story to my kids someday, and my kids would be telling their kids, so I had to come up with something unique. There were many options. It could have been on an African safari or on the Eiffel Tower, except that going to Paris would be a dead giveaway. The challenge was to make it truly a surprise.
“Maybe I should take her to Ireland,” I thought, “where she actually traces her ancestry—maybe some castle in Ireland.”
In the end I just proposed spontaneously. We were in Austria in July visiting my mom, and I took Maria out rowing on the Thalersee. This lake was where I’d grown up, where I’d played as a kid, where I’d learned to swim and won trophies for swimming, where I’d started bodybuilding, where I’d had my first date. The lake meant all of those things to me. Maria wanted to see it, since she’d heard me talk about it. It felt right to propose to her there. She started crying and hugging and was totally surprised. So it was exactly the way I envisioned it; the way it ought to play out.
After we got back to shore, of course, all kinds of questions came into her mind: “When do you think we should get married?” “When should we have an engagement party?” “When should we make the announcement?”
And she asked, “Have you talked to my dad?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s a tradition in America that you have to talk to the father and ask him.”
“Maria,” I said “do you think I’m stupid? Ask your father and he will tell your mother and your mother will blabber it to you immediately. What do you think, their loyalty is to me? You are their daughter. Or she will tell Ethel, and she will tell Bobby, and she will tell everybody in the family before you even find out. I had to have my chance to actually propose. So of course I didn’t talk to them, nobody.”
I did call her father that evening. “Normally I know I’m supposed to ask you first,” I said, “but I was not about to ask you anything because I know that you would tell Eunice and Eunice would tell Maria.”
“You’re goddam right. That’s exactly what she would have done,” said Sarge.
“So I’m just asking you now.”
He said, “Arnold, it is a great pleasure to have you as a son-in-law.” He was very, very gracious, Sargent, always.
Then I talked to Eunice and told her, and she acted very excited. But I’m sure that Maria had called her before I ever did.
We spent a lot of time with my mom. We hung out, we took her to Salzburg, and traveled around and had a great time. Then we went home to Hyannis Port. We had a little party to celebrate, with everyone sitting around the dinner table: the Shriver family, Eunice and her sister Pat, Teddy and his then wife, Joan, and many Kennedy cousins as well. They always had those long extended tables and a lot of people for dinner.
I had to tell in minute detail exactly how it came about. That was fun. They were hanging on every word and there were all these sounds: “Oh! Ahh! Fantastic!” And bursts of applause.
“You went on a rowboat! Jesus, where’d you find a damn rowboat?”
Teddy was boisterous and very loud and having a good time. “That’s amazing! Did you hear that, Pat? What would you have done if Peter had asked you to marry him in a rowboat? I know Eunice would have preferred the sailboat. She’d say, ‘A rowboat? That’s no good! I want action!’ ”
“Teddy, let Arnold finish the story.”
Everyone was asking questions.
“Tell me, Arnold, what did Maria do then?”
“What was the expression on her face?”
“What would you have done if she’d said no?”
Before I could answer, someone else said, “What do you mean, said no? Maria couldn’t wait for him to propose!”
It was this very Irish way of relishing the smallest details and turning everything into great fun.
Eventually Maria got a chance to speak. “It was so romantic,” she said. And she held up the ring for everyone to see.