Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

really over the hill or can he do it?

For my next movie, The Tomb, I shift from being the law to being an outlaw. I play Emil Rottmayer, a security expert who gets locked up and put under interrogation for plotting cyberterrorism. The prison is a nightmarish, privately owned super-high-tech dungeon in an unknown location, where Western governments remand people who pose a threat to the establishment. Rottmayer is tortured because he won’t betray his boss, the rebel mastermind, who is still at large. Into this scene comes Sylvester Stallone as the prison world’s top “structural security” expert, Ray Breslin. His specialty is going undercover into ultramax prisons and exposing their weaknesses by breaking out. Only this time, he’s been betrayed by a business partner who stands to make a fortune if the Tomb is escape-proof and Sly never succeeds in escaping. After some confrontations Sly and I team up, and the action takes off from there. To get the hardcore huge industrial prison look, our director, Swedish filmmaker Mikael Hafstrom, is shooting most of The Tomb in a former NASA plant in Louisiana. The common area for the prisoners, called Babylon, is a cavernous 200-foot-tall chamber where until recently rocket-makers assembled the external fuel tank for the space shuttle. Today the space is empty and intimidating, the perfect backdrop for a movie that pits the heroes against the evils of the global establishment.

Back in real life, I’m taking on a big, fresh challenge. This summer we announced a major new institute at the University of Southern California, the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy. So even though I left office, I will continue to promote the policies that were closest to my heart: political reform, climate change and the environment, education reform, economic reform, and health care and stem cell research.

Just as presidential libraries continue the legacies of former presidents with research and scholarship, our institute will seek to add to the public discourse and inspire change. We will work with some of the best minds in public policy to produce studies and offer recommendations on a world stage.

USC is a perfect fit: it prides itself on being neither conservative nor liberal but open minded. It operates by promoting discussion to draw the best ideas from the brightest minds across the political spectrum. We’ll host summits and workshops and sponsor research in areas where I focused as governor and where California has made historic progress.

I will also have the great honor of being appointed the first Governor Downey Professor of State and Global Policy, a chair named after California’s first immigrant governor, USC cofounder John G. Downey. Professorship will enable me to travel the world and give lectures representing USC and the Schwarzenegger Institute.

My term as governor had to end, but with the institute, I will extend and expand on the work I started in office. I find this compelling because I’m never happy until I can share what I’ve learned and experienced. I think back to Sarge and Eunice, and the way that they always encouraged me to focus on causes bigger than myself. Sarge said it best in a great speech he gave at Yale in 1994. He told the graduating class, “It’s not what you get out of life that counts. Break your mirrors! In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. You’ll get more satisfaction from having improved your neighborhood, your town, your state, your country, and your fellow human beings than you’ll ever get from your muscles, your figure, your automobile, your house, or your credit rating. You’ll get more from being a peacemaker than a warrior.” I think about those words all the time. The great leaders always talk about things that are much bigger than themselves. They say working for a cause that will outlive us is what brings meaning and joy. The more I’m able to accomplish in the world, the more I agree.

CHAPTER 30 Arnold’s Rules

I ALWAYS WANTED TO be an inspiration for people, but I never set out to be a role model in everything. How could I be when I have so many contradictions and crosscurrents in my life? I’m a European who became an American leader; a Republican who loves Democrats; a businessman who makes his living as an action hero; a tremendously disciplined superachiever who hasn’t always been disciplined enough; a fitness expert who loves cigars; an environmentalist who loves Hummers; a fun-loving guy with kid-like enthusiasm who is most famous for terminating people. How would anybody know what to imitate?

People often assume I should be a role model all the same. When I ride my bicycle around Santa Monica without a helmet, there’s always someone who complains, “What kind of an example is that?” It isn’t meant to be an example!

Usually the objection to my cigars is that I’ve been on a fitness crusade for decades. But I remember once in Sacramento a reporter said, “We zoomed in with the camera on the label of your cigar. It said Cohiba. That’s a Cuban cigar. You’re the governor. How can you flout the law?”

“I smoke it because it’s a great cigar,” I said.

The same with movie violence. I kill people onscreen because, contrary to the critics, I don’t believe that violence on-screen creates violence on the street or in the home. Otherwise there would have been no murders before movies were invented, and the Bible is full of them.

I do want to set an example, of course. I want to inspire you to work out, keep yourself fit, lay off junk food, create a vision and use your will to accomplish it. I want you to throw away the mirror like Sargent Shriver said, get involved in public service and give back. I want you to protect the environment rather than mess it up. If you’re an immigrant, I want you to embrace America. In these ways, I’m very happy to take the torch and be a role model for others because I’ve always had great role models myself—Reg Park, Muhammad Ali, Sargent Shriver, Milton Berle, Nelson Mandela, and Milton Friedman. But it’s never been my goal to set an example in everything I do.

Sometimes I prefer being way out there, shocking people. Rebelliousness is part of what drove me from Austria. I didn’t want to be like everyone else. I thought of myself as special and unique and not the average Hans or Franz.

Being outrageous is a way to succeed. Bodybuilding was a nowhere sport when I was Mr. Olympia. We were struggling to get media coverage. So I started telling reporters that pumping up your muscles was better than coming. It was a crazy statement but it made news. People heard that and thought, “If working out is better than sex, I’m going to try it!”

No one could put me in a mold. When I was governor and people would say, “This is what other governors do” or “You can’t do that if you’re a Republican” or “No one smokes in the capitol, it’s not politically correct,” I’d take that as a signal to go the other way. If you conform, then people complain you’re acting like a politician. The way we ran the governor’s office was unique. How I dressed, how I talked—I always looked for my own way of doing it. People elected me to solve problems and create a vision for our state, yes, but also they wanted things to feel different. They wanted a governor and a Governator. Of course, being different was right up my alley. I didn’t have the same body as everyone else or drive the same car as everyone else.

I’ve never figured this all out. I’m sure a shrink would have a good time with it. Definitely Sigmund Freud, my fellow Austrian, would have a good time talking about the cigars—he smoked stogies too. But life is richer when we embrace the multitudes we all contain, even if we aren’t consistent and what we do doesn’t always make sense, even to us.

When I talk to graduating classes, I always tell a brief version of the story of my life and try to offer lessons everybody can use: have a vision, trust yourself, break some rules, ignore the naysayers, don’t be afraid to fail. Woven through the stories in this memoir are some of the principles of success that have worked for me:

• Turn your liabilities into assets.

When I wanted to star in movies, the Hollywood agents I talked to told me to forget it—my body and my name and my accent were all too weird. Instead, I worked hard on my accent and my acting, as hard as I’d worked at bodybuilding, to transform myself into a leading man. With Conan and The Terminator, I broke through: the things that the agents said would be a detriment and make it impossible for me to get a job, all of a sudden made me an action hero. Or as John Milius said when he directed Conan the Barbarian, “If we didn’t have Schwarzenegger, we would have to build one.”

• When someone tells you no, you should hear yes.