2. He apprenticed with Roger Corman, Vince Lombardi, and Napoleon. Cameron, who has been Schwarzenegger's pal since 1984's The Terminator jet-propelled both their careers, first heard about La Totale! from Arnold in spring 1992 over breakfast at the superstar's Santa Monica restaurant, Schatzi on Main. Cameron liked the idea of a comedy about a spy who conceals his true profession from his mousy wife, and once he saw the French film he recognized what had appealed to Schwarzenegger — the chance to play off his larger-than-life persona. Cameron explains: "I thought it would be easy to take Arnold and build him up into an Ubermensch — good at everything, never loses a fight, ultra-smart and suave and charming — who completely crumbles when the one thing in his life he really cares about, his Achilles' heel, his wife, is taken away from him."
While Schwarzenegger embarked on Last Action Hero, Cameron, who learned his craft in the early '80s at the Roger Corman school of seat-of-the-pants moviemaking, let his pyrotechnic writer's imagination run wild. "I just try to be outrageous," he says. "I come up with great action scenes that I've always wanted to see." Among the challenges he conceived: a Harrier jet hovering next to an office tower in downtown Miami and a flame-strewn land-air chase on the Seven Mile Bridge that connects two islands in the Florida Keys. "Something has to keep you going," he says. "But we had to go out there and shoot the stuff."
When he starts a movie, Cameron tells his crews he wants them to perform like a team going to the Super Bowl. "Not doing your best is hurting the movie, not hurting me," he says, as if still at work. "I care about the film. I'm sure people call me an asshole, too, thank you very much."
It's a good bet. There are Cameron survivors all over Hollywood who swear they'll never work for him again. Even those who return to his sets compare them unhappily to military campaigns. For cinematographer Carpenter, 40, a Cameron rookie, ending the seven-month True Lies shoot last March "was like coming home from the Crusades," he says. "Jim does not accept anything as being as perfect as Jim imagined it was going to be. One minute he'd tell me I didn't know how to read a light meter properly. The next he'd be designing a shot. Working for Jim you have to know you're an extension of his vision."
With his $15 million salary (plus a reported 15 percent of the gross), Schwarzenegger is among the faithful. "You can see the respect," says Tia Carrere, the film's Bond-style beauty gone bad. "If Jim says, 'Mug and cross your eyes,' Arnold will trust him. Because he knows he hasn't done him wrong."
"He expects perfection all the time," says Schwarzenegger, "but if you make the mistake of asking, 'How did the scene go?' he'll say, 'S---ty, but as good as a human being can do it.'"
3. Like Abu Nidal, he knows that mayhem takes planning. The three days of greatest pressure for the roughly 200-person crew occurred in November, while working with two Marine Corps vertical-landing Harrier jets worth $33 million apiece (usage rate: $20,000 an hour), not to mention four helicopters, numerous cranes, and 15-minute traffic windows on the Seven Mile Bridge. Before each day's shooting (and strafing and missile attacks and ground-to-air defense), Cameron and his team would get up at 0300 hours and travel by helicopter to Key West Naval Air Station for a briefing with the pilots. "We wouldn't see them again until they arrived at 500 knots," Cameron recalls. "We had to have everything rehearsed to a T with models and video cameras. I'd be up in a helicopter talking on the radio. We shot formations and landed them on the blocked highway. Logistically, that was a pretty wild circus."
The Miami sequences that form the can-you-top-this climax of the film were done with Harrier replicas of varying sizes. Schwarzenegger wasn't so fond of the 46-foot-long model that dominates the movie's finale. The actor and his four-ton toy were swung around on a 120-foot crane next to a Miami office building. Six flights up and unable to get out to go to the bathroom, the actor recalls, "The hardest thing was sitting in a cockpit for hours and days and weeks. It was 100 degrees inside and the canopy was closed. That was torturous."
Jamie Lee Curtis had no complaints about her big, breezy stunt. Hauled by a helicopter, the actress gamely hung on from a cable 250 feet above open water as Cameron himself aimed the camera down on her. "It was fun," says Curtis, who left other dire maneuvers to her stunt double. "Jim is the most safety- conscious person on the set."
You Might Also Like
- Movie Review True Lies (1994) | Owen Gleiberman
- Video Review True Lies | Ty Burr
- Pop Culture News IT'S A BIRD. IT'S A PLANE. NO, IT'S ARNOLD!
- Style The Dress in ''True Lies'' (1994) | Rebecca Ascher-Walsh
- Movie News Tom Arnold, Movie Star (1994) | Lisa Schwarzbaum
- Movie News Racism and sexism in ''True Lies''? (1994) | Pat H. Broeske , Nisid Hajari, Anne Thompson
