Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

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.”