Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly lost famous Terminator line after fight with James Cameron

Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly lost his famous The Terminator line after a fight with director James Cameron.

The actor revealed this in Arnold, his new Netflix docuseries.

He says if it wasn’t for the director, he never would have uttered those classic words in the 1984 film.

Schwarzenegger actually fought back against his director, not wanting to say the memorable line: “I’ll be back.”

Cameron says in the documentary: “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.”

The director also co-wrote The Terminator with Gale Anne Hurd.

He added: “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.’”

Paramount Pictures

But Schwarzenegger kept pushing back.

Instead, the Austrian actor wanted to say ‘I will be back’ because he believed it would sound more ‘machine like’.

In the sci-fi action film, Schwarzenegger plays the Terminator, a cyborg assassin from the future.

The Terminator of course ended up being followed by five sequels with the most recent, Terminator: Dark Fate, released in 2019.

And thanks to the blunt response from Cameron, the Terminator’s classic line remained.

Schwarzenegger recalls in the documentary: “He says, ‘Are you the writer?’” Schwarzenegger remembers. “And I said, ‘No', and he said, ‘Well, don’t tell me how to f***ing write.’”

Netflix

Now, he admits his director was ‘absolutely right’ and says: “It became the most quoted movie line, I think, in the history of motion pictures. So this just shows to you who was right and who was wrong.”

The new documentary about the actor also sees him opening up about the moment he told his wife about his love child.

Schwarzenegger married journalist Maria Shriver in 1986 and went on to have four children with her; Katherine, Patrick, Christopher and Christina.

However, in 1996 he had an affair with housekeeper Mildred Baena which led to the birth of his son Joseph.

In the documentary, he recalls telling Shriver during a counselling session in 2011: “One day, the counsellor said, 'Today Maria wants to be very specific about something. She wants to know if you’re the father of Joseph’.

"I thought my heart stopped. And then I told the truth."

Schwarzenegger remembers his now ex-wife being ‘crushed’ by this.

You can catch Arnold on Netflix from 7 June.