Arnold Schwarzenegger has released a new self-help book and memoir titled Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life and in that book shares some of the insane things that he had to do for some of the film projects he worked on. One of the wildest films that he worked on was Conan the Barbarian, and he reveals some of the crazy things that director John Milius forced him to do, “terrible shit”, like biting into a real dead vulture! He said:
“I learned to ride horses and camels and elephants. I learned how to jump from large rocks, how to climb and swing from long ropes, how to fall from a height. I basically went to another vocational school, this one for aspiring action heroes.”
He then talked about the darker side of the experience saying:
“Then on top of that, Milius had me doing all kinds of terrible shit. I crawled through rocks, take after take, until my forearms bled. I ran from wild dogs that managed to catch me and pull me into a thorn bush. I bit a real, dead vulture that required I wash my mouth out with alcohol after each take. (PETA would have a field day with that one.). On one of the first days of filming, I tore a gash on my back that required forty stitches.”
So, that sounds like it would’ve been fun! Regardless of the pains he had to endure, he wasn’t scared to do it all over again and jumped at the chance to make the sequel, Conan the Destroyer. That first Conan movie really launched his career, so I guess all those sacrafices paid off.
He also talked about James Cameron’s The Terminator and how is was forced to perform every stunt featuring a gun with a blindfold on. He explained:
“On ‘The Terminator,’ it was becoming a machine: blindfolding myself until I could do every gun stunt with my eyes closed, and shooting so many rounds at the range that I no longer blinked when my gun fired. On ‘Terminator 2,’ it was practicing the shotgun cocking flip so many times my knuckles bled for what amounted to two seconds of screen time. I didn’t complain.”
I love those older Arnold Schwarzenegger movies! He sure did make some great films over the course of his epic career.