“Cut!” Milius called. “Arnold, where you looking at?”
“Well, actually,” I said, “it’s the funniest thing. I saw that corner of the room move apart, and I think I saw eyes peeking through.” A guy ran behind the set, and we heard voices. Then Raffaella came out looking totally sheepish. She said, “I’m sorry, but I just had to peek!”
Conan’s true love in the film is Valeria. Sandahl Bergman had never done love scenes either and felt just as awkward as I did. I was somehow supposed to be this weird combination of a barbarian and a gentleman, but not too much of either. It was hard to get in the mood because you don’t have a chance to practice with your costar; you just have to start mechanical and cold. On top of all that, Sandahl and Terry Leonard the stunt chief had fallen in love, and I was intensely aware that he was standing by probably ready to rip off my head. Meanwhile, Milius was working hard to avoid the censors, saying things like, “Arnold, can you move your behind so it’s in that shadow there? And make sure you hide her breasts with your arm, because we can’t have nipples in the shot.”
The action scenes had perils of their own. Conan lives in a world of constant danger. You never know what’s going to attack you in the fantasy world. It could be a snake one day and a wolf-witch the next. When shooting such scenes, I had to be on my toes.
Doing battle with a giant mechanical snake left me sore for a week. The sequence was in the middle of the movie, where Conan and his allies sneak into the Tower of the Serpent and steal some of the cult’s precious jewels. We were supposed to climb the tower (actually a forty-foot-high set built in the abandoned air force hangar) and then lower ourselves into a dungeon ankle deep in garbage and the bones of sacrificial virgins. The snake, thirty-six feet long and two and a half feet wide, was a replica of some kind of boa constrictor, operated remotely and animated with steel cables and hydraulic pumps capable of exerting nine tons of force. It turned out to be pretty hard to control, and the operator hadn’t practiced enough. One time it coiled around me and started slamming me against the dungeon wall. I was yelling to him to ease up. In the script, Conan kills the snake, of course: Subotai crawls out of a tunnel to find his buddy in danger and tosses him a broadsword, which Conan, in a single, swift motion, catches by the hilt and chops into the snake. I had to grab the heavy sword and strike a precise point behind the snake’s head to trigger the exploding blood pack. Conan, of course, has to be totally confident as he does all this. But part of me was thinking “I hope this goes well.” I’m proud to say that two and a half years of training paid off, and I nailed it in the first take.
James Earl Jones was late joining the production because he had to wrap up his commitment on Broadway, but after he arrived, we quickly became friends. By mid-March, when the production moved from Madrid to Almeria to film the battle scenes and the climactic confrontation at Doom’s mountain citadel, I spent days hanging out in his trailer. He wanted to keep in shape, so I helped him with his training, and in return, he coached me on my acting. With his powerful bass voice, James was a wonderful Shakespearean actor, and he’d won both a Tony Award and an Oscar nomination for his performances in
Milius wanted me to add a half page of dialogue that he’d written during the shooting. It was in the quiet before the climactic battle at the Mounds, a Stonehenge-like ancient burial ground of warriors and kings by the sea. Conan and his allies have fortified the monument and are waiting to be attacked by Thulsa Doom and a large troop of savage henchmen on horseback. Thulsa Doom has already killed Valeria, and Conan and his friends are greatly outnumbered and expect to die. So before the battle, Conan is sitting on a hillside with his chin on his fist, looking at the sea and the beautiful blue sky and thinking melancholy thoughts. “I remember days like this when my father took me to the forest and we ate wild blueberries,” he says to Subotai. “More than twenty years ago. I was just a boy of four or five. The leaves were so dark and green then. The grass smelled sweet with the spring wind.
“Almost twenty years of pitiless cumber! No rest, no sleep like other men. And yet the spring wind blows, Subotai. Have you ever felt such a wind?” (
“They blow where I live too,” says Subotai. “In the north of every man’s heart.”
Conan offers his friend the chance to leave and go home. “It’s never too late, Subotai.”
“No. It would only lead me back here another day. In even worse company.”
“For us, there is no spring,” Conan says grimly. “Just the wind that smells fresh before the storm.”
I’d practiced these lines dozens of times, as I always did before a shoot. But I told Milius, “It doesn’t feel natural to me. It doesn’t feel like I’m really, you know, searching and seeing it.” You can’t just recite a monologue like that. It truly has to seem like you are thinking about an earlier time, the memories are coming to you, ideas are popping into your head. In some moments you say things in a rush, and in other moments you just stare. The question was how to create that naturalness.
Milius said, “Why don’t you ask Earl? He does this onstage where the pressure’s even higher because you can’t edit out the mistakes.”
So I went to James Earl’s trailer and asked if he would mind taking a look at the dialogue.
“No, no, absolutely. Sit down,” he said. “Let’s look at that.” He read it and asked me to deliver the lines.
When I finished, he nodded and said, “Well, what I would do is have this retyped two ways. Do it once so the lines are really narrow and go down the entire length of the page. And the second time do it with the paper turned sideways, so that you have the widest lines possible.” He explained that I’d practiced so much that I’d unconsciously memorized the line breaks. So each time I hit one, it came across as a break in thought. “You need to throw off that rhythm,” he explained.
Seeing the lines retyped made me hear them in a different way, which helped tremendously. I came back later in the day, and we dissected and rehearsed the dialogue line by line. “Well, normally after a sentence like this you would pause, because that’s a pretty heavy thought,” he’d say. And, “Here maybe you want to shift position a little bit. Whatever comes to mind, whether it’s a stretch or a shake of the head or just a pause. But you shouldn’t program yourself,” he stressed, “because it could be different from one take to the next, unless John tells you that’ll cause a problem with editing. But usually they only keep a shot until the thought changes, and then they’ll go to another angle.”
Max Von Sydow was generous and helpful too. It was great being able to watch two great stage actors rehearse and fine-tune until they got it right. Working with professionals, you learn a lot of nuances. I realized, for example, that actors often shift gears when the director moves from a master shot, to a medium shot, to a close-up shot, to a micro-shot (which captures, say, the eyes wincing). Some actors pay very little attention to the master shot because they know this is just to establish where they are physically in the scene. Therefore, they don’t overexert themselves. But the closer the shot, the more they perform. You realize how important it is to pace yourself: don’t go all out on the first takes; give just 80 percent. Eventually your close-up will come, and that’s when you really need to act. I figured out that this was also a way to get more close-ups of yourself into the film, because the editing will often pick the shot with the best performance.
Making
I loved the immersion of being on location: sharing the Apartamentos Villa Magna with the other actors, driving from there to the warehouse, learning a whole new way of functioning for six months. I’d never filmed in a foreign country before. I picked up a lot of Spanish because very few people on the set spoke English. At first the work was too intense for me to allow myself to do anything but train, rehearse, and shoot. But after a month or two, I started to relax. I realized, “Wait a minute. I’m in Madrid! Let’s go see some museums, let’s go see interesting architecture, buildings, and streets. Let’s try some of the restaurants everyone talks about and have dinner at eleven at night like the Spaniards.” We discovered boot makers, leather makers, and tailors, and started buying uniquely Spanish things like ornate silver ashtrays and beautifully tooled leather belts.
Working for Milius was a constant adventure. I had to tear apart a vulture with my teeth, for example. This
