News culture James Cameron explains his meeting with Arnold Schwarzenegger and you will be surprised…
Some “obvious” cinema collaborations came about out of luck. This is exactly what happened between James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger on the set of the movie Terminator!
The magic of cinema also lies in offering us an almost perfect symbiosis between an actor and his role, as if there were some kind of evidence between a character | the features, the build it shows. Examples of the genre are numerous: Daniel Radcliffe in the role of Harry Potter, Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek or Jim Parsons who plays Sheldon in the series The Big Bang Theory. Another good example: Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator, a cult SF feature film directed by James Cameron (and released in 1985)… To this day, the actor cannot be separated from his role as a cybernetic assassinwhich he played for the fifth time in Terminator: Dark Fate in 2019.
Unexpected meeting
But how did the Canadian director come to work with Schwarzenegger, who was previously known for his role as Conan the Barbarian? During an invitation to the Cinémathèque française as part of an exhibition dedicated to him (which lasts until January 2025), Cameron recounted his encounter with the actor… Allocated brings us this anecdote:
“Arnold was recommended to me by one of the producers of Terminator but to play a different character, the one that ended up being played by Michael Biehn (Kyle Reese, editor’s note). A character who talks a lot and very quickly, with 20 pages of dialogue. I didn’t know Arnold at all, and when I saw him he didn’t immediately strike me as this very talkative guy.”
“I turned to my colleagues and said, ‘Don’t I owe you money?’ Because I’m going to have to fight with Conan to tell him I’m not putting him in the movie.” I went to lunch with Arnold and he was charming. While making the film we became very close friends and still are.”
– James Cameron, during a meeting at the Cinémahèque française in April 2024 (via Allociné)
Friendly love at first sight
During the conversation, Schwarzenegger confesses to Cameron that his favorite role in “Terminator” is the “cybernetic assassin” who gives the film its name – and who is sent back in time to kill John Connor’s mother before the human resistance years later … “Arnorld liked the script, he liked what we prepared,” remembers the filmmaker. “And while we were talking, I looked at this face. I found it so unique, so undeniably real, there was a kind of brutality there. It was at that exact moment that I told myself he could play the Terminator.”. You know the rest: Ultimately, the stars of Cameron’s science fiction film will not be OJ Simpson, Lance Henriksen, Mel Gibson, or Sylvester Stallone, but Schwarzenegger!
