The iconic line Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to change: “It sounds weird”
In the school playgrounds of the UK in the 1980s, there were a few choice phrases you had to have in your armour in order to make sure you were cool enough not to get hung up on a peg by your trousers before PE.
One was saying ‘chinny reckon’ if you didn’t believe something someone said. Another was calling someone a ‘durr-brain’ if you didn’t think they were very clever. And the rest were basically lines from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
It could be “Get to the choppa!” or “Dillon, you sonofabitch” or even “It’s not a toomah!” – didn’t really matter as long as it was clear that you had seen movies like Commando or Predator way, WAY before you really should have been allowed to, or if you hadn’t you at least knew enough of the lines to survive the cut-throat world of Thatcherite education.
Of course it was entirely necessary to do your best appropriation of a Germanic/Austrian accent while delivering these lines too, without doubt the most famous of which was “I’ll be back” from the original Terminator, the 1984 movie that along with its sequel stands as one of the finest sci-fi movies of all time, ranking up there with Alien and Blade Runner.
It’s a sign of just how well the writer and director James Cameron knew his source material and the impact it would have on audiences that he resisted Schwarzenegger’s attempts to have the line changed, to a more robotic “I will be back”, which wouldn’t have worked half as well shouted at your best mate when going for a wee in between maths and geography.
Schwarzenegger told GQ about the conversation with Cameron about the iconic line, revealing, “I said, ‘To me it sounds weird when I say I’ll be back.’ He (Cameron) says, ‘Look, I don’t correct your acting, don’t correct my writing, okay?’ And then that was it. And so he says, ‘Look, let’s just say it ten times in a row, we’ll get it right, then we can pick one or the other.’”
Which sounds, of course, like someone appeasing their lead actor so they’ll stop going on about something and just do what they’re told. In the end, thankfully, Cameron was proved right, and it is now the kind of line that has moved into the public lexicon, with some people no doubt using it without even knowing where it came from.
Schwarzenegger added, “I thought it was a clumsy line, and number two, I, of course, had no idea that anyone would ever repeat it, period. When the movie came out, people were coming up to me and going, ‘Say the line, say the line, Arnold.’ Oh, my God. It was amazing the excitement that you saw amongst people when I said this line, and then more people started using it, and now I think it became the most used line ever in movie history.”
While Arnold is a bit quieter on the work front these days than back in the ‘80s, he’s been seen doing a bit of press to support the Edgar Wright remake of The Running Man (which is a great action movie). He makes an appearance in the new film, but it couldn’t even really be described as a cameo, more of an easter egg of sorts.
He has filmed The Man With the Bag, a Christmas movie in which he plays Santa, though, and if it ever gets out of a production dispute, he also plays the US President in a film called Kung Fury 2 with Michael Fassbender and David Hasselhoff. It was originally shot in 2019, but legal issues have prevented its release.
