Did Ridley Scott turn down Arnold Schwarzenegger movie ‘Conan the Barbarian’?
Action stars and auteurs hardly go hand-in-hand, but Arnold Schwarzenegger did manage to work with at least a couple of them when he was busying himself battling Sylvester Stallone for genre supremacy in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Maybe it was Robert Altman who piqued the bodybuilder’s early interest in working with singular talents after he made an uncredited appearance in 1973’s The Long Goodbye, or perhaps it was working with ‘New Hollywood’ pioneer and Five Easy Pieces director Bob Rafelson on Stay Hungry, which won the ‘Austrian Oak’ a Golden Globe for ‘New Star of the Year’.
Schwarzenegger made magic with James Cameron on the first two Terminator flicks and True Lies, partnered with Paul Verhoeven for the riotous sci-fi Total Recall, headlined Walter Hill’s Red Heat and led the line in Ivan Reitman’s Twins and Kindergarten Cop, but beyond that, nameworthy directors are few and far between in his filmography.
Three of his best efforts came at the hand of a filmmaker who’d perfected the art of helming an Alien movie, but he could have doubled down in that respect had Ridley Scott not turned his nose up at taking the reins on what turned out to be Schwarzenegger’s breakthrough role.
In hindsight, having the beefy behemoth working under Scott’s direction with a screenplay written by Oliver Stone was the stuff ’80s dreams were made of, but it wasn’t to be. As the latter explained to Total Film, he planned for an expansive Conan the Barbarian franchise, but that idea went up in smoke when he shacked up with the wrong producer.
“I had a vision of 12 movies, like a Bond series,” the three-time Academy Award winner explained. “But we couldn’t get Ridley Scott to do the first one.” Instead, the director, hot off the back of Alien, opted to stay in the same genre, which worked out for the best when Blade Runner took precedence over barbarism.
“As a result, we sold it to Dino De Laurentiis, which was a mistake,” Stone offered. “Dino trashed it in two films.” Conan the Barbarian was embraced as a cult favourite and mindlessly enjoyable swords-and-sorcery caper, but follow-up Conan the Destroyer drew a line under the saga, and the less said about Schwarzenegger’s spiritual successor, Red Sonja, the better.
De Laurentiis tells a slightly different story to Stone, though, maintaining in his memoirs that Scott remained interested in Conan even after he’d purchased the script, but there was one vascular point of contention, with the producer recalling how “he assured me that he would sign on right away if I changed my mind about the protagonist.”
As he remembers it, Scott would have gladly taken on Conan if Schwarzenegger was recast, but both of them came out smelling like roses when the director focused his energies on the seminal Blade Runner, while Arnold got to crush his enemies, see them driven before him, and hear the lamentations of their women.
