The Terminator at 40: How Arnold Schwarzenegger Became an Icon
The Terminator at 40: How Arnold Schwarzenegger Became an Icon
James Cameron sold The Terminator's script for one dollar. Four decades later, his visionary film remains as thrilling and relevant as ever.
Jamie Paul here. Readers may have noticed an unusual number of guest/contributor posts of late. This does not reflect any new format, just a number of good — and time-sensitive — pieces coming in at the same time. Regular programming will resume next week.
This piece is a guest post by Jacob Bielecki in honor of the 40th anniversary of The Terminator.
The Terminator (1984) was released 40 years ago, and yet it somehow still feels not only contemporary but also ahead of the times with its terrifying look into humanity’s future in the age of AI. The strength of James Cameron’s writing and directing is why the film remains so rewatchable to this day, but what drew audiences to The Terminator in 1984 was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s irresistible charisma. And once they saw him on the screen, they couldn’t get enough. The Terminator is the perfect example of a director and actor, both determined to make their names in Hollywood, coming together at the precisely the right moment in time to make something truly magical.
In the years after James Cameron dropped out of Fullerton College, he worked as a truck driver, machinist, and high school janitor. When Cameron wasn’t smoking marijuana and dropping acid, he took up writing as a hobby and became interested in film. Cameron read every book he could get his hands on about filmmaking and the technology behind it. Upon seeing Star Wars (1977) in theaters, Cameron decided to give a career in filmmaking a shot. Luck was on his side. His subsequent sci-fi short, Xenogenesis (1978), attracted the attention of producer Roger Corman, who’d given Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese their first big breaks.
After several years under Corman’s tutelage handling special effects for films like Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), Cameron was given an opportunity to direct his first feature-length film, Piranha II: The Spawning (1982), by producer Ovidio Assonitis. However, Cameron was not hired because of his technical acumen or visionary perspective, but because Assontis wanted an inexperienced filmmaker he could easily replace. Indeed, Assontis fired Cameron a few days into filming and assumed control of the production.
Being undercut for what was supposed to be his directorial debut was a demoralizing ordeal. Still involved in the production though no longer at its helm, Cameron fell ill shortly after filming.
“I was sick and dead broke in Rome, Italy with a fever of 102, doing the final cut of Piranha II,” Cameron said in a 1984 interview with the now-defunct science fiction magazine Starlog. “That’s when I thought of Terminator. I guess it was a fever dream.”
“It was the image of a chrome skeleton emerging from a fire,” Cameron recounted in a 2021 interview with the British Film Institute. “When I woke up, I began sketching on the hotel stationery. The first sketch I did showed a metal skeleton cut in half at the waist, crawling over a tile floor, using a large kitchen knife to pull itself forward while reaching out with the other hand. In a second drawing, the character is threatening a crawling woman. Minus the kitchen knife, these images became the finale of The Terminator almost exactly.”
Cameron envisioned The Terminator as a low-budget slasher film inspired by John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Instead of an unstoppable knife-wielding killer like Michael Myers, the Terminator character would be an indestructible machine gun-toting killer robot disguised as a human. The idea was Cameron’s baby, and he refused to sell the script unless he was hired to direct. Studios balked at the prospect of taking a chance on an unproven director until Gale Anne Hurd, who first worked with Cameron on Corman’s productions, took him up on his offer, but with a catch. She purchased the screenplay for one dollar (which Cameron would later regret) and produced the film under her recently founded film company Pacific Western Productions. Cameron agreed to these conditions. As part of their arrangement, Hurd also received a screenwriting credit despite not contributing to the script. With Hurd’s backing, they secured the necessary connections to ensure the film’s funding and distribution.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was the top choice for the lead role — not as the Terminator, but as Kyle Reese, the human soldier sent back in time to protect Sarah Connor (played by Linda Hamilton), the mother of humanity’s future savior from the robot apocalypse. To that point, Schwarzenegger had achieved every goal he made for himself. The Austrian native became an American citizen and conquered the world of bodybuilding by winning the Mr. Olympia title seven times, a record later exceeded by only two other competitors. By becoming bodybuilding’s first superstar celebrity, Schwarzenegger, with his magnetic charm and humor, brought mainstream attention to the previously niche sport. After retiring from bodybuilding, Schwarzenegger set his sights on accomplishing his final goal, to become an American movie star.
But Schwarzenegger’s Hollywood aspirations met with skepticism within the film industry. Agents and producers told Schwarzenegger that his freakishly muscular physique, thick Austrian accent, and jawbreaker of a last name would prevent him from ever being a star. After years of taking on minor roles, Schwarzenegger had his first hit as a leading man in Conan the Barbarian (1982), though it did little to establish his viability as an A-list actor. Schwarzenegger’s dialogue was kept to a minimum, with only 24 lines in the movie. Instead, director John Milius chose to focus on the visuals of Schwarzenegger’s Herculean body, which was left mostly exposed during the movie’s entire runtime. Whether Schwarzenegger could carry any movie with actual dialogue or whether Conan the Barbarian was a bizarre one-off hit was a question mark.
Orion Pictures, the company that financed The Terminator, believed Schwarzenegger had potential and lobbied for him to be cast, but James Cameron felt he wasn’t right for the role of Kyle Reese. Michael Biehn, who was eventually cast as Reese, later said “Arnold was not a superstar. He was basically a bodybuilder […] all he had done at that time was Conan, and people didn’t take him particularly seriously as an actor.”
Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson were among those offered the Terminator part, but they refused. O.J. Simpson was also considered for the role, but James Cameron amusingly couldn’t picture Simpson as a convincing killer. Meanwhile, as Schwarzenegger read the script, he gravitated toward the role of the villain.
Cameron went into his meeting with Schwarzenegger intending to provoke him into an argument so he could tell Orion that the big man lacked the temperament to work on the film. Yet in the back of his mind, Cameron thought Schwarzenegger might make a good Terminator, and Arnold’s charisma quickly won the director over. As the two talked, Cameron realized Schwarzenegger had put more thought into the Terminator character than he had. Schwarzenegger said the character should move like a machine, not a human, and suggested a robotic way for him to get on his motorcycle and fire guns. Cameron had found the Terminator. Though Schwarzenegger was interested in the role, he and his agent had reservations over the limited screen time and dialogue. Their concerns were partially allayed by the fact that it was the title character, and when Cameron sent over a drawing he did of Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, Arnold signed onto the film.
Cameron initially envisioned the film’s horror element stemming from the Terminator being a killing machine disguised as an ordinary man who could blend in with a crowd. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s casting immediately changed the film’s visual tone. The villain was no longer a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but rather a conspicuously hulking colossus. While Cameron did not alter any of the story or dialogue, he filmed the Terminator as a larger-than-life character to match Schwarzenegger’s screen presence. The result was a villain that audiences wanted to cheer for at times. Even as we watch the Terminator rampage through a police station and murder virtually everyone in his path, audiences remain thrilled rather than horrified. Cameron also shot the earlier Tech Noir shootout scene to make Schwarzenegger look as cool as possible with stylish poses while brandishing a submachine gun.
During pre-production and filming, Cameron and Schwarzenegger decided the Terminator had to move with total fluid efficiency — there could be no wasted movement whenever the character pulled out a gun and fired it. Schwarzenegger trained to pull out a pistol from his jacket, cock it, and fire in one smooth motion without moving his shoulder and while looking straight ahead. Determining how to show the Terminator’s evil nature without the character showing human emotions, they settled on facial expressions that demonstrated the machine’s predatory laser-focus on its target. In the scene where the Terminator is driving a stolen police car searching for Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor in a parking garage, Schwarzenegger came up with the idea to move his eyes first and then his head, like a shark scanning for its prey. Cameron loved the idea, as the eye and head movement reminded him of surveillance cameras.
Cameron and Schwarzenegger only had one disagreement during production. Arnold refused to say the line “I’ll be back” right before the scene where the Terminator annihilates the police precinct. He told Cameron that a robot would not use a contraction, and that his accent made “I’ll” sound weird, instead suggesting the line “I will be back.” Cameron refused to change the line. After several more minutes of arguing, Cameron put his foot down and asked Schwarzenegger “What does the goddamn script say!?” When Schwarzenegger responded “I’ll be back”, Cameron said “Then say the fucking line, okay?! I don’t correct your acting so don’t correct my writing!” Schwarzenegger acquiesced, and the rest is history. “I’ll be back” is now one of the most iconic lines in cinema, linked not only with The Terminator franchise, but with Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. It was the scene that made him a star.
According to James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, production on The Terminator truly came together when Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived on the set two weeks into filming. Schwarzenegger’s work ethic and enthusiasm for the movie rubbed off on both the crew and producers, who gained more faith in Cameron’s abilities. Arnold’s on-set humor and jokes kept morale high even during shooting difficulties.
40 years on, The Terminator still plays realistically while also coming off like a horror film because Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique and performance are a constant reminder that the Terminator is not human. Even Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent, which many in the film industry believed was his biggest weakness, became his greatest asset. “Somehow, even his accent worked,” Cameron later said. “It had a strange, synthesized quality, like they hadn’t gotten the voice thing quite worked out.”
Orion Pictures hated The Terminator upon seeing a rough cut in the summer of 1984. Chairman Arthur Krim believed James Cameron had made a B-movie like the ones his mentor Roger Corman was infamous for churning out. Orion initially refused to promote the film, but Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, and Michael Biehn, who had become loyal to Cameron, employed their agents to lobby for giving the movie a strong marketing campaign. Krim eventually relented and gave the film a modest promotional campaign after Michael Biehn’s agent, Ed Limato, threatened that his clients, which included Mel Gibson and Richard Gere, would no longer do business with Orion.
Critics were polarized when The Terminator was released. The Hollywood Reporter praised the film, and Time placed it on their Top 10 Films of 1984 list. Local newspapers in the US also gave largely positive reviews. Other outlets, however, panned The Terminator. Janet Maslin of The New York Times thought it was forgettable monster-movie schlock and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Desmond Ryan predicted Hollywood would stop entertaining Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie star delusions.
The Terminator defied everyone’s expectations when it hit theaters on October 26, 1984 by topping the box office in its first week of release. It held the number one spot for an additional week before slowly slipping off the charts. The Terminator fell just outside of the top 20 grossing films of 1984, finishing at 21st place with $38,371,200 in total domestic earnings. Orion Vice President Barbara Boyle, the only executive who had confidence in The Terminator from the very beginning, later said the film could have easily made $100 million if her fellow executives had been willing to give it a proper marketing campaign.
In interviews years after the film’s release, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Biehn pointed out that while The Terminator did well at the box office, it found its largest audience in the rapidly growing home video market. The Terminator was the second most rented video of 1985 and the film’s audience expanded again when it premiered on television in September 1987.
The Terminator was the most consequential film of both Arnold Schwarzenegger’s and James Cameron’s careers. It turbocharged Cameron’s reputation and opened innumerable doors for later successes, and it determined exactly what kind of movies audiences wanted from Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film solidified him as a global icon, and helped him achieve what now seems like a quaint and fantastical version of the American Dream. Born into an impoverished family in post-War Austria with an abusive father, Schwarzenegger sought fame and fortune in America through the only means at his disposal: bodybuilding. Schwarzenegger overcame his unusual accent, physique, and last name through his relentless commitment to sheer excellence and became the biggest movie star on the planet. His partnership with James Cameron on The Terminator culminated in a movie still stirring, relevant, and celebrated four decades later. In today’s flooded landscape of watered-down mediocrity, the film industry could learn a thing or two from one of cinema’s most enduring hits.
See also: “‘We live and we die. We control nothing beyond that.’”
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