NEED TO KNOW
Arnold Schwarzenegger almost didn’t get the chance to utter one of his most iconic lines in film.
During his conversation with son Patrick Schwarzenegger for Variety’s Actors on Actors series, the two compared Patrick’s work on The White Lotus with creator Mike White to Arnold’s with James Cameron on his 1984 film The Terminator.
It was during the discussion that Arnold revealed he’d fight with the director over lines, but Cameron wouldn’t budge.
“I studied the script for a month, and I have someone that reads the parts with me, and we rehearse and we do reps. It’s from bodybuilding — reps, reps, reps. The more reps you do, the better you get,” Arnold, 77, said.
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“It also comes from the old school. Billy Wilder, the Austrian director, always said, ‘I didn’t hire you to be interpreters. I hired you to be actors.’ The old directors were fanatics about ‘Study your dialogue and hit the mark,’ ” he recalled.
Arnold provided an example of how “Jim Cameron is like that,” recalling when he told him, “I don’t like the line ‘I’ll be back.’ “
“He says, ‘What do you mean you don’t like the line?’ I said, ‘It’s just weird for a German to say, “I’ll be back.” Why not just say, “I will be back”?’ ”
Cameron responded to Arnold by saying, “Oh, you’re trying to tell me how to be a better writer? Because I’m not telling you to be a better actor. Just say, ‘I’ll be back.’ If you want me to do 10 takes because you feel insecure about it, we can do that. But don’t change my writing.” Of course the line stayed, and has been quoted endlessly ever since.
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In 2023, Schwarzenegger commended Cameron’s writing on The Terminator, praising him for predicting the future of artificial intelligence that has now “become a reality,” as he said.
“Today, everyone is frightened of it, of where this is gonna go,” the actor said of current concerns around AI, during An Evening with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles in June 2023. “And in this movie, in Terminator, we talk about the machines becoming self-aware and they take over.”
Schwarzenegger celebrated the “brilliance of writing” in Cameron’s sci-fi film, given that “at that time we [had] scratched the surface of AI, artificial intelligence. Think about that.”
“Now over the course of decades, it has become a reality. So it’s not any more fantasy or kind of futuristic. It is here today. And so this is the extraordinary writing of Jim Cameron,” Schwarzenegger added.
