Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  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 o
ther 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 twen
ty-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.