Cameron turns tables on Schwarzenegger when stunt went wrong
JAMES Cameron once made Arnold Schwarzenegger wear a bone and bark like a dog.
The 64-year-old filmmaker turned the tables on his frequent collaborator when a stunt in ‘True Lies’ went wrong because he issued him the same punishment the actor used to dole out to the stunt team.
Cameron said: “He used to like his practical jokes and I remember on ‘True Lies’ he had this thing where if any of the stunt guys made a mistake — because he was always very close with the stunt guys — they had to bark like a dog and wear a dog bone. A big rawhide bone that went over your neck on a rope, right?
“So I’m choreographing the bathroom fight with the machine gun shooting the stalls and all that, and Arnold had to rip a hand dryer off a wall and clock this guy in the face with it.
“With fight choreography, I always try to get in there and do parts of it myself because I need to feel the body dynamics of it, and I’ve done a lot of martial arts so I know a lot of the moves.
“So I grabbed this hand dryer, pulled it off the wall and swept it around in an arc and my hand hit the side of the bathroom counter. I’m like, ‘Alright, don’t do that. When you pull it off, sweep it around here and backhand him with it.’ Arnold says, ‘Yeah, yeah, I got it.’
“First take, BAM. He tore open the whole back side of his hand.
“It swelled up to this crazy size. I now couldn’t shoot the scene. So I said, ‘Arnold...’ and he goes (barking noises). He had to wear the bone.”
The director is heavily involved with the upcoming sixth ‘Terminator’ movie, having sat out work on the last three instalments of the franchise, and made it a condition that Schwarzenegger had to be back too.
Asked why he returned, he told Empire magazine: “It was a chance to get the band back together I guess.
“I made it an absolute necessity that if I was involved, Arnold had to be involved. And we didn’t know how much or how little he was gonna be in the film.
“Then we started to explore the whole thing and it turned out there was a really wonderful approach to his character. He’s been programmed for bad, programmed for good. So what was left to do? And I think we came home with something pretty cool.
“Then Linda (Hamilton) and I talked and she said, ‘Yeah, if you do the things you’re talking about with (Sarah Connor) then I’d like to do it.” — BANG Showbiz