With 1991’s James Cameron-written and -directed “Terminator 2: Judgement Day,” Arnold Schwarzenegger may have notched his highest-grossing feature to date and cemented himself as an action icon. But he still remembers feeling “suspicious” about something missing from the script.
He wanted to kill more people.
Not just kill more people — “massacre” them, he admitted at a “Terminator 2” screening hosted by the Academy Museum on Wednesday. “I was killing 68 people in the first one — the second one, I have to kill 150. We go up with the count and the massacre, and we cut their throats and kill them and shoot them and the cannon and this and that — run them over with the car. I said, ‘I’ve got to outdo Stallone!’ I’ve gotta be No. 1 in killing the amount of people on the screen.”
His thirst for blood was so intense, Schwarzenegger said, that Cameron had to talk him down. “He says, ‘Arnold, stop it. You’re a very sick guy,’” he recounted, humorously.
Schwarzenegger spoke on his experience making “Terminator 2” and why it’s become an enduring genre classic as part of the Los Angeles launch of his two-volume book published by Taschen, “Arnold.” The centerpiece of the sold-out evening was a wide-ranging conversation between he and the book’s editor, Dian Hanson, followed by a 3D screening of the film.
Today, the actor, activists and former California governor credits Cameron with coming up with the “brilliant idea” of having his Terminator be a protector instead of an assassin in his 1991 sequel. But he corroborated Wednesday previous interviews with Cameron (and expanded on revelations he shared in his Netflix documentary, “Arnold”), saying that at first, he was frustrated with the plot twist.
“‘Terminator 2,’ the reason why it became a big hit was No. 1 Jim Cameron. I mean, Jim Cameron is a genius writer,” Schwarzenegger said. “They always say, ‘What is not on the page is not on the stage.’ And so he’s a great writer. He wrote the first one, and he did a fantastic job, and he came up with this brilliant idea — even though in the beginning I was suspicious — he said, ‘I want to make you a good Terminator.’ I said, ‘What do you mean a “good” Terminator?’
“He said to me, ‘I am going to make sure that in “Terminator 2,” you’re not going to kill one single person.,’” he continued. “And I said, ‘Well, that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. How can we do “Terminator 2” with me killing nobody? C’mon, just a few token bodies we throw in there.’ No, no. ‘The whole idea,’ he says, ‘is that you come back as a machine, but this time you have to protect Linda Hamilton and you have to protect this child of hers. Your mission is different.”
The actor then detailed the decision in the movie to only have his Terminator shoot people in the knees and shoulders. “You disable them, but you don’t kill anybody. And there’s this great scene in the movie where I say to the kid, ‘I swear I will not kill anybody.’ And he made me swear to him not to kill anybody. It’s the brilliance of Jim Cameron, he’s just such an extraordinary writer and he’s such an unbelievable director.”
Watch the full conversation with Schwarzenegger, which was live streamed, in the video above.
