To be or not to be back: How The Terminator’s most iconic line was discovered on set
“I’ll come back”? “I will be back”? Something is not working here.
Everyone knows that James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s breakthrough hit, The Terminator, loves to be back. After five sequels, it’s safe to say that’s been back four too many times. But—and you can probably see where this is going—that iconic line almost didn’t happen. In Netflix’s new docu-series about the life and times of actor, governor, and real estate magnate Arnold Schwarzenegger, director James Cameron explains that “I’ll be back” was discovered on set in stereotypically James Cameron style—i.e. after the director screamed at his star.
“Sometime in the middle of the shoot, we’re doing this police station scene. The line is, ‘I’ll come back.’ It wasn’t meant to be like a big moment at all,” Cameron said, describing the “not big moment” in which Schwarzenegger says the line in a tight close-up before the cyborg drives a car into a police station. “It was literally meant to be, on its face, ‘No problem, I’ll come back.’ For some reason, Arnold didn’t say, ‘I’ll come back.’ I said, ‘Well, just say “I’ll be back.” Keep it simple.’”
As much as we wish there was a cut of the movie in which the Terminator says, “No worries if not,” that wasn’t in the cards. Schwarzenegger and Cameron still didn’t see eye to red robot eye on the line, and the actor attempted to change it to “I will be back,” which he felt sounded more “machine-like.”
Thankfully, that wasn’t James Cameron’s tempo, and like J.K. Simmons in Whiplash, he uses the old “demeaning people” approach to directing. “He says, ‘Are you the writer?’” Schwarzenegger remembers. “And I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘Well, don’t tell me how to fucking write.’”
In the end, Schwarzenegger didn’t tell Cameron how to write and spent the rest of his acting career paying for that mistake. “It became the most quoted movie line, I think, in the history of motion pictures,” Schwarzenegger said. “So this just shows to you who was right and who was wrong.”
There you have it, folks. Yelling at people works.