Arnold Schwarzenegger Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

when I read the I'll be back line I said the gym camera is it the me it sounds weird when I said I'll be back as it's about how would you say that's it I will be back and he says no pumping iron well interestingly enough pumping iron was a documentary about explaining bodybuilding it was not about me because you never know who is going to win doing stay hungry the film that it did before pumping iron I had to reduce my body weight down to 210 so the question was really can I come back again with 240 pounds and didn't win the mr. Olympia gains if there was questionable so therefore no one really focused on me per se but they focused more on bodybuilding itself I just happened to emerge as the personality in the bodybuilding field and so that's why the cameras were didn't warn me I happened to win the competition against some tough competitions against do for ignore for instance in surgeon to pray and Franco Columbu and guys like that they were really tough competitors I think it was all that lent itself for me being myself so I think that people didn't onlys just see me and stay hungry as an actor but this all of a sudden what I'm really like so I got you know the Conan the Barbarian because of pumping iron it was like the movie where I showed my personality and hit Pressman saw that movie pumping iron and said this finally thought we found the guy that is the personality and has the acting ability and has the body they be able to play Conan the Barbarian Franco is pretty smart but Franco is a child and when it comes to the day of the contest I'm his father he comes to me for advisors so it's a dead heart for me to give him the wrong advises the saying in a milk is for babies and you know I drink beer you know that is because of me Munich days so when I moved from Austria to Munich to train between the age of 19 and 21 other teams always would have milk bottles all over the windows that were empty or half for for that bodybuilders will be drinking in our gym Mia downstairs a restaurant and we always got the huge Stein's of beer so we had just beer all around the windows and around the gymnasium and I refused to drink in the milk because I hated milk and so beer was really for me to drink to have while I was working out [Music] bumping on is being shown just about in all the gyms around the world 24 hours a day so it doesn't matter which generation you talk about the new generation that is walking and now into the gym still see pumping on and it still see me winning and so when they come to gorgeous gym here now in Venice you know they know everything about me I think that this movie is has his life is his own life and he will go on forever I think and I think that it is really one of those greater commanders that really has established bodybuilding in a big way because bodybuilding was kind of like a you know a hidden kind of a sport it was no one really understood it no one really could explain what it is about and I think that pumping iron did all of that did explain that Conan the Barbarian my goal was to be a leading man and I was told many times by managers and agents and studio executives that this will never happen that someone with an accent like me has never become a real leading man and a big star in America that Americans like to hear people sound like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood but not like me that may be good for Hogan's Heroes if they ever make a remake or something like that but definitely not for any other movie and also that my body is way too big that I'm too large and so here over sudden is Conan the Barbarian where my accent was welcome because I talk different than everyone else and it looks like from some prehistoric time and the body looked like an action hero somewhat something that like Frank Frazetta when he drew the Conan characters in the comic books he always drew him with the huge muscles very defined and rip but then those days there was no act around the devil could play that role so here was me so over setting those two things that they always were complaining about and said that that will never make you a star because you have too big of a body guys like Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino and Woody Allen there's at the in guys in the 70s not a big body like that and the accent doesn't work all of this became an asset rather than a liability so I proved to the world again never listen to the naysayers and always just plow ahead and do exactly what his you vision my vision was to become a big star and to become not only a big star but we've become the highest paid entertainer ended field which I eventually then became when they did Batman and Robin twenty years of pitiless Kumbha no rest no sleep I got a man this was really the only movie where I had more responsibility of doing my own stunts than any other movie because there was no one around no stunt guy that hit the same body so Terry Leonard the time of the wide shots meant from far away when you see conan riding under horse or something like that he would do that because you know with the war paint and with the camouflage paint on and all that stuff we got away with it but then close-ups there was no way because he had an ordinary kind of athletic body but not a bodybuilders body like I had or like the Tollman body so I had to end up doing a lot of the force a lot of the sword fights loved the things and horses that big barrels and horses off this crashing together with versus falling off the worst of the stuff I had to do myself and luckily I was young enough to sustain the punishment because there were a lot of injuries at that time I remember the first day I shot I had to get stitched up I had 12 stitches on my back because some wolf pulled me down from the rocks and I fell with my back on rocks it was all of it from the beginning that I had really wild and the great experience and John Milius the director loved it he says this is exactly what it's all about this is a tough movie to shoot and this is a colony era and this is exactly the way we want it noticer he really got off on all those kind of things terminator when I was hired to do Terminator I really think I mean the day maybe the studio executives that were around then and that and various different people will tell it differently because they always say I told you so a type of thing but the reality of was I think the treated is like as a b-movie as a be action movie it's just another one because of the year before came out exterminator now it was terminated and then what else is gonna be next type of thing right but when I shot the film and Jim Cameron showed me some of the footage and then when he had like 20 minutes edited and I saw the film I said to myself wait a minute this is a really intense this is wild I mean I don't think we've ever seen anything like this before in a way it was shot the way it was lit the way it was directed everything the way it was written he was just really very very special and so I thought then I think this could be bigger than we all think and then sure enough when it came out he was a huge hit and even Time magazine listed it amongst its top ten movies of the year so no one expected that in those days like for instance when you open up a film to four million dollars a weekend it was big time and you know especially in the fall and then the next weekend it was again for a million dollars and then the next weekend it was again for a million so it didn't have any drop so oh my god what's going on here so the movie was highly successful a lot of people saw it and it was actually in this particular case it was the audience that demanded a sequel nice night for a walk wash day tomorrow nothing clean right nothing clean right this guy's a couple kids short of a six-pack your clothes give them to me now when I read the I'll be back line I said the gym camera is it the me it sounds weird when I said I'll be back as this is about how would you say that's it I will be back and he says no I think it sounds better I'll be back I said well it's more machine like music I will be back is this look I don't correct you acting don't correct my writing okay and that there was it and so he says look we just say ten times in a row I say we just say it and say it said and then we get it right and then we can pick one or the other I understand that you don't feel comfortable we did it yeah how enorus but lettuce chewy and so that's what we did but not first of all I thought it was a clumsy or or a line and number two and of course had no idea that anyone would ever repeat it period when the movie came out people coming up to me and says say the line say the line now Road and I said what lionesses help you back and I said I'll be back and said no no no the way you said it in the movies the way you say in the movie there was opposite such as in the mood okay I'll be back you say yeah yeah yeah oh my god and it was like amazing the excitement that you saw amongst people when I said this line and then more and moist are picking up and other people started using it and now I think it became the most used line ever in the movie history I'll be back I think that we don't know ahead of time in the email - it hasta la vista baby I think it may be the way I say it that makes him ten kind of unique because it's like also when we did the movie in a kindergarten carping us into the kids it's not a tumor it's not a tumor at all it's like the way I said to Mullen orders like it's just been out choppa you know they don't pronounce the EOS and all this kind of stuff and I think that is a lot of times the way I say but I don't think you ever know when you look at the script that this line will be repeated very often Terminator 2 Jim Cameron is just a genius right now because to come up with this idea to make the Terminator become a protector that hangs out with this kid and because of that relationship he starts learning human behavior how to be more cool in other high five and you know and how to say certain things certain sayings and orders made it very very precious I think because he was of trying very hard you know when the kid says he never smile you never smile smile just let's just smile and I would go like this he says oh my god alright I did was a good try and if someone comes up to you with an attitude we say eat me and if you want to shine them on its hasta la vie stop baby hasta la vista baby it really lends itself to some funny moments so I think that it was really important in moving I think this is why the movie really was so successful because it was a totally different spin he is terminated all of a sudden not the killing machine but a protector what an interesting spin he was programmed differently and I think that people really enjoy that even though I never killed anybody in Terminator 2 I only shot people at the knees and just you know broke their backs or whatever and blew up the police cars but it didn't really kill anyone because the promis'd is the kid that I would not kill anybody twins the movie twins which was originally called the experiment was developed specifically for me because when I met Ivan Reitman I said to him I want you to direct me I want to get into comedy no one will hire me for comedy because everyone is making a lot of money of me with action movie so it's very hard for me to cross over because people don't want to take the risks so he said I think that you're very funny and I think that we should develop some stuff for you so he developed five scripts and one of them was the experiment I fell in love with that idea and then we changed it to twins and they came up with the idea to have Danny DeVito play not only someone that behaves opposite of me but also looks totally the opposite I thought that it was very very funny and because all your to do is kind of show the poster obtaining leaning against me and saying you know only their mother can tell them apart I made it made everyone laugh in the cells so it was hugely successful it was unbelievable and I was so happy because he was actually my first movie that made mastica Lee over a hundred million dollars and he was a comedy not an action movie so from then on of course I could offer a lot of action movies but Danny and I be rehearsed those scenes but we just had so much fun on the set in the rehearsing the scenes and doing all the same things and having all the same mannerism in the scratching our butts at the same time and doing all this kind of stuff so I think it was great and it was brilliantly written I was 12 years old she was a nun Kindergarten Cop whenever someone says to me this is difficult you can't do it that motivates me then twice as much there's nothing that we do and that should really be scary because I'm not afraid of failure so if the me was like kind of like okay if people think that it is difficult to work with kids I mean animals I'm one of as many animals in the set as possible and as many kids as possible and I'm gonna show them that it can't be done and it was it's difficult but we do it Ivan was just a genius direct and he knew how to control the kids and then he had asked me that when there was downtime and it was time for setting up the new shot to hang with the kids and I think was the smartest thing because I was not an expert with kids I've made my own kids yet this was kind of really a great way of learning how to deal with kids and how to entertain them now to make them trust you and then just like out of nowhere out of all of this kind of commotion and fun with the kids you know of a sudden Ivan I saw I've been going like this that he's roaring and we just continued on they're having the fun with the kids so we can have a very successful with the children they were great actors and some of them became the great actors later on and so on [Music] but what I liked about Kindergarten Cop was that it was a very brutal movie in the beginning the hunt down this drug the Lord and there's no good guy it gave me the opportunity to come in as the toughest cop and then have to develop this other side of me because I'm not stuck with the kids I have to now deal with the kids I cannot deal with them like I did in the beginning like I would deal with the grown-up but you know I I realized that's not the way we really to deal with the kids that you have to understand them you have to communicate with them and you have to also you didn't grow a certain love for them in a certain heart for them and then what I was able to show the softer side or the more feminine side of me and so that's I think what's made it really work well in the movie it's not a tumor that's been robbing well interesting enough my motivation there was originally to work with Joel Schumacher I thought that his style of directing was so brilliant and there was a certain kind of intensity they always in his movies but also certain casualness so I watched him one time and I said directing and I saw his style and I loved it when he always said to the actors and the and he says let's do one for the artists meaning like do you own take whatever you want to do and I thought it was just fantastic because every act that was once in kind of his own way a take rather than being directed or controlled and and children provided that and the other thing was if George Clooney was a upper coming star in the national star he was brilliant to work with it was very very nice and then we learned of a guy to work with so we had a great time the only thing was that that being mr. freeze I had to sit for five hours in makeup and getting all this outfits on and everything else every single day so it took a lot of discipline and a lot of hard work completely I just finished a movie eraser for Warner Brothers and they were so happy with my performance in the eraser that they came to missus would you play opposite of George Clooney and play the main villain you know the Jack Nicholson display the Danny DeVito is played and so on then if a long list of great stars and a faithless kind of rose and I said yes I mean I read the script I thought it was a very entertaining a great script and I said yes jingle all the way what again I was very heavily into the idea of doing one action movie where we used the biggest guns and the biggest actions and the biggest amount of killings and stuff like that but then again to come back with something totally opposite which is a very entertaining movie because of its comedy the Christmas movie a jingle all the way was one of those great scripts that was offered to me and I thought that the world of it you know me just running after this toy and then running in and having someone trying to do the same thing and the obviously creates a huge fight between us so there was action there but very comedic action and very touching also because I'm trying to satisfy my son that they'd have promised that this turbo man toy and so it was all about that that the craziness of chasing that Christmas is around the corner and I have to get it now and they're sold out and all this kind of I interested a great time doing that and it is thought the day the favorite Christmas movie that people are playing and every single December this movies being played on television and overseas also did extremely well on your way out just tell it would be a few minutes late but you shouldn't worry but they cook it down now a lot of times people have me repeat the line you know this can you say deadline but it's again one of those things you know you say it and you have no idea but I remember czar standing there and screaming but they cook it down now you know it and people just loved it predator predator was an interesting project because it read really well it was very intense but was it was an ensemble piece it was very clear that there will be like you know five six guys who went going into the jungle and did with the screen time would be split up amongst all of us to me I think that in the beginning I was hesitant about that idea and then when I was actually in Mexico and shooting in the jungle as it was unfolding the story I enjoyed it more and more because it's so much fun to work with a bunch of guys like that they were all really cool guys and they were easy to work with and there were certain thin AMEX that everyone had and developed and I thought it was brilliantly written Sean McTernan who directed the film has only directed one other film beforehand which I think was called nomads and so it took a lot of faith from the studio and from all of us but the man he pulled it off he was so good in directing he was so thought for with the way he moved the camera to make it suspenseful indoors the atmosphere created in the jungle with that fog all the time it was kind of scary and never to show the predator until the very end I thought that was just brilliantly done and it was just unbelievable the amount of action that allowed me to do you know this is where of course where we had this line stick around in a way I just a guy came up in the right side of me and I saw me my peripheral vision and they took my knife nailed him through the heart and he could stuck in this pole and I said him stick around and as I was just another one of those really cool lines that I liked that I made up in this particular case [Music] it was really amazing when I when we finally showed the predator and it was created by Stan Winston who was one of the most brilliant kind of makeup special effects guys I think they didn't want the Academy word twice and stuff like that but he built that and he created that and it was like so well done it was really tall and had a basketball player and that it was like seven foot two that was carrying this kind of you know mask and and his outfit it looked scary too slimy it looked weird it looked so bad that I he came natural to me to say you are some ugly mother you know calf did they became kind of natural it was kind of improvised deadline and then they kept in the movie [Music] Total Recall I was after Total Recall for many many years Dino De Laurentiis owned the movie and he was going to do it with Jeff Bridges so I was very happy when Dino De Laurentiis had financial troubles at one point and had to sell some of the projects and one of the projects he sold was the you know Total Recall I called the you know Andy Vanya and Mario Kassar immediately and I said you got to buy this project for me that afternoon when I called them they bought the project from Dino and at then I ran into Paul Verhoeven a few days later it was like oh like meant to be I ran into Paul beare over a few days later in the restaurant and I said Paul I just saw Robocop it's unbelievable said what a great job you did I said would you ever want to work with me and he says absolutely I said well I maybe have a project for you can I send it to you so then the afternoon I had karoku get in touch with him said to his agent that the script he fell in love with it he came on board and that's how the whole thing came about he was smart also to take it to Mexico because Mexico City has it's a fantastic location very futuristic kind of buildings and looks to it that you can use and also you're very free to use the city and there were great great benefits there and great workmanship also and I think the film came out fantastic he was 53 million dollars or whatever the budget was for those days it was a lot but today it is not really that much and it opened up to a huge box of his success he's almost like 30 million dollars of the opening weekend and he made one hundred and thirty million dollars domestically and worldwide almost three hundred million dollars so it was really very very successful and people are very happy with her with the way it came out and he tried to copy it some of that the remake of it how stupid is that I mean he's go Hagan you got what you want give this people air my friend in five minutes you won't give a about the people fired up doc excuse me doctor so you gonna remember any of this not a thing oh really yo Sheeran son was a hard-working actress you know she really made me shine in a movie she played this wife of mine that was doing evil things to me and I couldn't wait to get rid of her you know then it was the famous in a scene we were finally shot her as a considered as a divorce there was at one of my favorite lines consider that a divorce true lies well again we were very fortunate to have Jim Cameron I showed him a French movie Latu Tao which was a million dollar movie was made four million dollars in France but the concept that was there was so brilliant Jim saw it and he says let's do it you know which is very hard to do for Cameron to commit the movie he fell in love with and he went out and wrote the script and he wrote it of course huge as you can see took us six months to film we were all over the place you know from Los Angeles Washington and Miami and the keys and and I mean everywhere but it was wonderful to work with Jamie Lee Curtis because I knew Jamie liquor isn't skied winter and Sun Valley so we have a home up then Sun Valley and so we knew each other very well so when she was hired I was very excited about it because I thought that she was really she's a really good actress so it was great to work with her in this film and I think that she's also very very funny pours off the comic that the comedy in the movie because that the whole thing was a very intense movie but it had his funny moments that the very fact that my wife did not know what my job was and that I as the husband did not know that her desires to do something similar there like that to be a secret agent so I think that's what made it really funny yes it's hairy I know it's explained but I can explain were you actually riding a horse in those scenes yes so I would say there was only one who was seen which was a jump of a fountain which I'm happy it didn't do because the professional horseback rider wiped out and dead and smashed his head and had like in the 20-some stitches on his face because of it so right away there's something off there because it was so wet and horses then slip when it's wet and so I said I'm not gonna do it let someone else do that particular thing but every other scene in the elevator on top of the rooftop as through Georgetown in Washington through the park off the scenes were done I am I rode the horse terminated dark fate you know and in Terminator you know I can do this Terminator movies From Here to Eternity the trick of it is is and I think it's very smartly done the body underneath the endoskeleton the metal skeleton all that stuff stays the same so the abilities his abilities that stay the same but outside the flesh age is just like any other human flesh does so that makes me get away with looking older and to know that you can do a movie like that 30 years later that's the great thing about the writing and I love to in the Terminator movies especially when there is continuous growth in the character and what you will see in this terminal is that he has been just like in Terminator 2 where there is a little bit of human behavior that he starts adopting and this one is even much more that has certain kind of effect the way he was programmed at what point does he override his own programming laws off those kind of issues we're dealing with in this movie says really fascinating you mean well written again Cameron was involved with that and as you know that I'm just I think the world of his career dividend is his thinking and his talent and so he's very passionate about terminator got involved with it's got Linda Hamilton to come back to the project wrote her into the project as a main main character and so we had a wonderful time with Tim Miller directing it I can see you're very upset I'm going to help you protect the girl you know it really doesn't make any difference to me I think each one has advantages and disadvantages I think that it's the advantage of playing a hero obviously is that you the heroic guy that wins and I ant and all that stuff as a villain you have the advantage that you can go all out then to things that you normally cannot do as a hero because it would not be a certain thing you can be certain cruelty or the way you kill people and all that stuff that's why this was was attractive about being the Terminator because he's a machine so he just steps out with toys he just you know and that you know goes and rips out your heart as I have shown in Terminator 1 so he will just tear your head off and wouldn't think twice about blood squirting around or anything like that isn't that's what is concerned so everything it doesn't even show in his face any satisfaction whatsoever when he kills five people within one second and people really enjoy watching villains and watching kind of nasty things being done where they say oh my god I have to close my eyes I love that there is nothing that they love more than when I do a film and I've seen it in Terminator we've seen it in Total Recall where certain things that people just close their eyes and says I cannot take it you know because that is really than entertaining it has been a great honor for me to be involved in a movie where you get voted as one of the top ten heroes but at the same time one of the top villains I don't think there's anyone out there that has been but in that kind of category before I don't really have a favorite because I don't know really what the definition of that is you know for everyone is different I think undoubtedly that my favorite of making of the movie was twins in Kindergarten Cop we were laughing the whole day it was entertaining like being with Danny DeVito and twins of being in kindergarten cop with a bunch of kids that always kind of throw you off because they always say don't work with kids and don't work with animals but that I had the greatest time working with those kids it was really fantastic and you know you gives it in a lot of space for improvisation because the kids are improvising they're not staying with the script they wouldn't even know how to stay with the script so I think it makes it very lively so I had the greatest time doing those two movies but when it comes to my favorite many the outcome then you have to add also of course True Lies or Terminator that some of the Terminator movies that they have done if it's one or two or the last one dark fade you know there's a whole bunch of movies then that come into that field but it's very hard always to just say this is my favorite well thanks very much for listening to my kind of spiel about my iconic characters that they've played for missed any of the movies we're gonna talk about it maybe in the future okay hasta la vista baby [Music]

Channel: GQ

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Keywords: arnold schwarzenegger, iconic, arnold schwarzenegger movies, iconic characters, arnold schwarzenegger gq, arnold schwarzenegger interview, arnold schwarzenegger 2019, arnold schwarzenegger movie, arnold schwarzenegger iconic, arnold schwarzenegger iconic characters, arnold schwarzenegger character, arnold schwarzenegger terminator, arnold schwarzenegger predator, arnold schwarzenegger mr freeze, arnold schwarzenegger twins, arnold schwarzenegger pumping iron, gq, gq magazine

Id: srksXVEkfAs

Length: 33min 31sec (2011 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ahmadinebro]

I'll never get tired of hearing Arnold repeat his most famous one-liners.

[u/MrBoliNica]

love hearing him go over pumping iron, and the whole thing with the Ill Be Back line.

[u/AWildEnglishman]

I know this is about his most iconic roles but I would love to hear more about his time working on Last Action Hero.

[u/Lachie07]

God Damn Arnie's been in some good movies, is it bad that my two favourite are Kindergarden Cop and Twins, given he is primarily a action guy?

[u/Goosojuice]

I feel like Arnold is insanely humble. Name dropping dudes we don’t know or shouldn’t know because he wants us to know them. I mean, there’s the story of him being the one to suggest Curtis get top billing alongside of him for True Lies. Getting someone to bat for you in the industry like that is awesome.

[u/Xcopa]

"And who can forget my SUPER SMASH HIT! JINGLE ALL THE WAY!"

[u/chinaNumOne]

During the Conan segment, there's an inset pic of 'Frank Frazetta'.

It's not Frank Frazetta.

[u/bojack2424]

Ha, damn he openly admits to disliking the Total Recall remake

[u/megablast]

Why the fuck are they censoring this. Motherfuckers!