Much of the time, I had glue all over my face to attach the special-effects appliances. I have strong skin, luckily, so the chemicals never ruined it much, but they were horrible all the same. Wearing the Terminator’s red eye over my own, I’d feel the wire that made it glow getting hot until it burned. I had to practice operating with a special-effects arm that was not mine, while for hours my real arm was tied behind my back.
Cameron was full of surprises. One morning, as soon as I was made up as the Terminator, he said, “Get in the van. We’re going to go shoot a scene.” We drove to a nearby residential street, and he said, “See that station wagon over there? It’s all rigged. When I give the signal, walk up to the driver’s side door, look around, punch in the window, open the door and get in, start the engine, and drive off.” We didn’t have the money to get permission from the city and to properly set up the scene of the Terminator jacking a car, so that’s how we did it instead. It made me feel like I was part of Jim’s creativity, sneaking around the permit process to bring in the movie on budget.
Lame ideas really irritated him, especially if they involved the script. I decided one day that The Terminator didn’t have enough funny moments. There’s a scene where the cyborg goes into a house and walks past a refrigerator. So I thought maybe the fridge door could be open, or maybe he could open it. He sees beer inside, wonders what that is, drinks it, gets a little buzz, and acts silly for a second. Jim cut me off before I could even finish. “It’s a machine, Arnold,” he said. “It’s not a human being. It’s not E.T. It can’t get drunk.”
Our biggest disagreement was about “I’ll be back.” That of course is the line you hear the Terminator say before it destroys the police station. The scene took a long time to shoot because I was arguing for “I will be back.” I felt that the line would sound more machinelike and menacing without the contraction.
“It’s feminine when I say the I’ll,” I complained, repeating it for Jim so he could hear the problem. “I’ll. I’ll. I’ll. It doesn’t feel rugged to me.”
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Let’s stick with I’ll,” he said. But I wasn’t ready to let it go, and we went back and forth. Finally Jim yelled, “Look, just trust me, okay? I don’t tell you how to act, and you don’t tell me how to write.” And we shot it as written in the script. The truth was that, even after all these years of speaking English, I still didn’t understand contractions. But the lesson I took away was that writers never change anything. This was not somebody else’s script that Jim was shooting, it was his own. He was even worse than Milius. He was unwilling to change a single apostrophe.
_ When Conan the Destroyer hit the theaters that summer, I went all out to sell it. I went on as many national and local talk shows as would book me, starting with Late Night with David Letterman, and gave interviews to reporters from the biggest to the smallest magazines and newspapers. I had to lean on the publicists to line up appearances abroad, despite the fact that $50 million, or more than half, of the first Conan movie’s box office had come from outside the United States. I was determined to do everything in my power to make my first million-dollar role a success.
The second Conan outearned Conan the Barbarian in the end, breaking the $100 million mark in worldwide receipts. But what was good for my reputation was not such great news for the franchise. In the United States, Conan the Destroyer made it onto fewer screens than the original and grossed $31 million, or 23 percent less money. Our fears had come true. By repackaging Conan as what film critic Roger Ebert cheerfully called “your friendly family barbarian,” the studio alienated some of our core audience.
I felt like I was finished with Conan; it was going nowhere. When I got back from my publicity tours, I sat down again with Dino De Laurentiis and told him definitively that I didn’t want to do any more prehistoric movies, only contemporary movies. It turned out he had cooled off on Conan too. Rather than pay me millions for more sequels, he’d rather I make an action movie for him, although he still didn’t have a script. So for now I was free to do more projects like The Terminator.
It was very agreeable and just as we had talked about the previous fall—except that, being Dino, he had a favor to ask. Before I hung up my broadsword for good, he said, “Why don’t you just do, you know, a cameo?” He handed me a script called Red Sonja.
Red Sonja was Conan’s female counterpart in the Conan comics and fantasy novels: a woman warrior, out to avenge the murder of her parents, who steals treasure and magic talismans and battles evil sorcerers and beasts. The part that Dino had in mind for me wasn’t Conan but Lord Kalidor, Red Sonja’s ally. A big part of the plot has to do with his lust for Sonja and her virginity. “No man may have me unless he’s beaten me in a fair fight,” she declares.
Maria read the script and said, “Don’t do it. It’s trash.” I agreed, but I felt I owed Dino a favor. So at the end of October, just before The Terminator was due for release, I found myself on an airplane to Rome, where Red Sonja was already filming.
Dino had searched for more than year to find an actress Amazonian enough to play Sonja. He finally found Brigitte Nielsen on the cover of a magazine: a six-foot twenty-one-year-old Danish fashion model with blazing red hair and a reputation for being a hard partyer. She had never acted, but Dino just flew her to Rome, gave her a screen test, and cast her as the star. Then to make the movie happen, he brought in veterans from the Conan team: Raffaella as producer, Richard Fleischer as director, and Sandahl Bergman as the treacherous Queen Gedren of Berkubane.
My so-called cameo turned out to involve four whole weeks on the set. They shot all the Lord Kalidor scenes with three cameras, and then used the extra footage in the editing room to stretch Kalidor’s time onscreen. So instead of making a minor appearance, I ended up as one of the film’s dominant characters. The Red Sonja poster gave twice as much space to my image as to Brigitte’s. I felt tricked. This was Dino’s way of using my image to sell his movie, and I refused to do any promotion the following July when Red Sonja appeared.
Red Sonja was so bad that it was nominated for three Golden Raspberry awards, a kind of Oscar in reverse for bad movies: Worst Actress, Worst Supporting Actress, and Worst New Star. Brigitte ended up “winning” as Worst New Star. Terrible movies can sometimes be hits at the box office, but Red Sonja was too awful even to be campy, and it bombed. I tried to keep my distance and joked that I was relieved to have survived.
The biggest complication of Red Sonja for me was Red Sonja. I got involved with Brigitte Nielsen, and we had a hot affair on the set. Gitte, as everyone called her, had a personality filled with laughter and fun mixed with a great hunger for attention. After the shoot, we traveled in Europe for a couple of weeks before parting ways. I went home assuming our fling was over.
In January, however, Gitte came to LA to do the looping of the movie—the rerecording of dialogue to make it clearer on the soundtrack—and announced that she wanted a continuing relationship. We had to have a serious talk.
“Gitte, this was on the set,” I told her. “It was fun over there, but it wasn’t serious. I’m already involved with the woman I want to marry. I hope you understand.
“If you’re looking for a serious relationship with a Hollywood star,” I added, “there are guys around who are available, and they will flip over you. Especially with your personality.” She wasn’t thrilled, but she accepted it. Sure enough, later that year, she met Sylvester Stallone and it was love at first sight. I was happy for her that she’d found a good partner.
_ The Terminator had become a sensation in my absence. Released just a week before Halloween 1984, it was the number one movie in America for six weeks, on its way to grossing close to $100 million. I didn’t quite realize how successful it was until I got back to the United States and some people stopped me walking down the street in New York.
“Oh man, we just saw The Terminator. Say it! Say it! You’ve got to say it!”
“What?”
“You know, ‘I’ll be back!’ ” None of us involved in making the movie had any idea that this was going to be the line people remembered. When you make a movie, you can never really predict what will turn out to be the most repeated line.
Despite The Terminator’s success, Orion did a terrible job of marketing it. Jim Cameron was bitter. The company was focused instead on promoting its big hit Amadeus, the story of the eighteenth-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which went on to win eight Oscars that year. So without giving The Terminator much thought, the marketers positioned it as an
