Arnold trailer interview

Arnold Schwarzenegger invited press into his personal trailer for an interview at the conclusion of his Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines shoot. The night before, he had just finished shooting his fight with the Terminatrix (Kristanna Loken), his final scene of principle photography. Now, he had a chance to relax.

We interrupted a chess game Schwarzenegger was playing with his four-year-old son, Christopher, on the kitchen table. Since he was losing, Schwarzenegger was happy to postpone the game. He put the wooden chess set aside and pulled up chairs for the reporters and even offered them beverages from his personal stash. He wore khaki shorts, revealing a scab on his left knee, as he reclined on a lounge chair.

Sitting on his lap during the interview, Christopher would tug on Schwarzenegger's ear, but Arnold just kept talking. When he got bored, Christopher opened up the trailer's video cabinet, the bottom part of a wood-paneled TV unit, and a quick glimpse inside revealed titles such as Grease, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Batman Returns (though not Batman and Robin) and, of course, Conan, the Barbarian.

So, how'd the big fight go yesterday?

Everything has gone extraordinarily well, except we took a little bit more time, I think, than anyone expected because there were so many visual effects shots. It's going to be a real spectacle because we've never really seen a fight scene of two people, who are actually machines, one weighs two thousand pounds and one a thousand pounds.

Every move you make towards any piece of wall or door or anything immediately breaks, so everything has to be rigged in such a way. For instance, there's a scene where I grab her by the jaw, lift her up in the air and then just throw her down on the ground. As soon as I throw her down into the ground, the tiles on the ground just break. And then I lift my foot up really high and just step down on her head and that then makes her whole head crush into below the floor of the bathroom.

You have to rig all that stuff, and then you have to cut, and then you have to put the dummy down because I can't step on her head otherwise it breaks her nose. So you have to split it up, all those things.

Do you have to get over the chivalry aspect of you not wanting to hit women?

No, because the thing is you realize that you're playing a machine and it's not really a female. It looks like a female but in fact it's not. And the male, it looks like a male, but it's not. He's just a machine. You know, they don't have the sex organs that identify man and woman and there's no reason for them having sex organs.

They come to this world, there's specific reasons that they look the way they do, so they can blend in, and become just one of the human beings. That's the way she has arrived, so she can dress like a model or whatever, a woman, and be very disarming, but immediately when she touches you and then kills you and takes on your look and your personality and everything like that, she becomes very effective this way.

It is a machine, two machines fighting, but visually, it makes it interesting because it is visually a man fighting against a woman. Then the woman actually ends up becoming extremely sophisticated and strong because her abilities of fighting are uch greater than mine. I'm a model that still works well, but is definitely an outdated model versus her being the new model.

So, there's no Terminator sex?

No, sorry to say. Again, I was robbed of the opportunity.

Was this harder for you than the previous Terminator films?

I would say that in some ways it is harder, in other ways it easier. Easier because in the old days, if you fly through the room, you have to fly through the room. Now, it's totally a visual effects shot, so the risk of injury is now less.

But then again, when we did the motorcycle stuff, there again was the high risk of injury because visual effects cannot do that. You have to do a lot of the motorcycle stuff yourself, which means that you drive very close to the camera truck, with the camera arm coming out in front of you, and sometimes not being very well coordinated, and hitting your motorcycle and stuff like that.

So, I think that it's both. Sometimes it's more difficult and sometimes it's easier, but I've noticed in a lot of the stunts you don't have to do the kind of things that you used to do because now you can do a face replacement, head replacement and all those kinds of things with digital visual effects.

But at the same time therefore, you can go much more extreme with the action. You literally can make up anything today, and say that's what I want to shoot. I want to shoot two motorcycles crashing and both of the guys fly twenty feet through the air and land on top of a swimming pool. You can make it up and exactly make it happen and show that visually, because of the special effects that you can do today.

Were you injured at all?

Yeah, but little things, nothing major.

What's that scab from?

This is from crawling around on the truck, on top of the truck, going from one side of the big crane, I jump on top of the crane, and go from one side, and climb over to the other in a low position back and forth twenty times while we're riding up and down the road, and I was refusing to put knee pads on, so that was my problem.

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