Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

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