Monday, June 17, 2013

Television and Cinema Verities #74


"Initially, I didn’t really want Arnold. I’ll never forget telling my roommate, ‘I’ve got to go have lunch with Conan and pick a fight with him.' That was my agenda: to get in an argument and come back and say he was an asshole. But he was so charming and so into the script. Even though he made me smoke a cigar that made me sick for six hours.Funny thing was he even had to pay for lunch, because I was this loser who didn’t have any money. Casting him shouldn’t have worked. The guy is supposed to be an infiltration unit and there’s no way you wouldn’t spot a Terminator in a crowd if it looked like Arnold. But that’s the beauty of movies. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.”
-Director James Cameron discusses casting Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (1984) in an interview with Jonathan Crocker at Total Film.

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