Well, not “news” but a interview at Comic Con with both director, Jonathon Mostow and star, Arnold Schwarzenegger about T3:Rise of the Machines.
"INTERVIEW: SCHWARZENEGGER/MOSTOW
”Were you at Comic Con when New Line was pimping The Cell and The Fellowship of the Ring and Sir Ian McKellan walked out on stage, surprising the hell out of the audience and causing applause to rain down like hellfire? Yeah, it was pretty memorable, cool, and made a lot of folks really fucking happy. It also set a precedent.
Now, the idea behind the convention is to bring "surprise guests" and get people talking about it the rest of the day. Ben Affleck sure as hell was talked about as was the most excellent X2 footage. James Cameron showing up was a big deal and his footage from Solaris looked great, but for sheer applause-level-and-fans-jumping-to-their-feet-and-going-mad-ability, you can't beat what happened when Jonathan Mostow brought Arnold Schwarzenegger on stage for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
People went ape-shit. Absolutely, positively ape-shit. Nevermind that End of Days, The 6th Day, and Collateral Damage weren't big fan favorites, Arnold Schwarzenegger can have the same hypnotic effect on a Comic Con audience that William Shatner does at a Star Trek Convention. Schwarzenegger could've come out to promote his role as the little-seen, but oft-quoted Professor Diogenes Teufelsdrockh in a new, seven-hour, no sets/empty-stage Peter Greenaway-directed version of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and the fans would've gone crazy.
That's just kind of the way Schwarzenegger is. Two years ago while promoting The 6th Day at the L.A. Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention, the reaction was the same – people leaping to their feet and going nutso. THAT is the definition of a star, I suppose.
Anyway, after talking it up with the crowd and showing some new T3 footage, Schwarzenegger and Mostow came back to the press room and did a quick roundtable of interviews with us'in's from the genre press.
Question: That was a hell of a surprise, huh?
Arnold: This is fun because these are the fans, these are the first ones to go see the movie so it's always great to come down and show our appreciation to the fans because without the fans, what do we have?
Question: Were you surprised by how big a reaction you got?
Arnold: I'm always very pleased when I get this kind of reaction, you know. I can't say 'surprised' because I never even think about it – will I get a standing ovation or not – or anything like this. So, it was great to get this kind of reception.
Question: Can you tell us how your character is different in this film?
Arnold: It's pretty much the same kind of a character, but the scenes are quite different and the kind of circumstances that he gets into are very different and the time is different, also. It's ten years later. So, he has his hands full.
Question: Are you the hero or are you the villain?
Arnold: That I cannot tell you because that would give the story away because there are a lot of surprises throughout the story even with that particular subject and I'd like to keep it that way.
Question: How far are you through the production and how much do you have to go?
Arnold: We are now, what is it? Three months in it?
Jonathan: We did Day 77 of 100 last night.
Question: At the end of the footage you showed, we got to see the endoskeleton, finally, being built. Does that mean in the movie we will finally get to see the model for the person the T-800 was based on? Do you play more than one character in this movie?
Arnold: Uh...I cannot tell you that.
Jonathan: We just need to plead the fifth amendment all the time.
Question: When dealing with a highly-anticipated project like this, how do you live up to the hype and does that enter into any of your creative thoughts?
Jonathan: Yeah, the funny thing is what drives me always is, first I've got to like the story. When I realized what story this could be, I got excited by that and then I got all focused and I just tuned out the whole daunting aspect, filling Jim Cameron's shoes, all that kind of stuff. Then, at some point before we started, suddenly I thought, oh, my God! I'm making this huge, huge movie that's known all over the world, it's got all this pressure on it, but then the first day we started shooting, this wonderful feeling came over me. I realized, you know what's different about this movie? Every other thing I've ever done, you make it and you sit there going, God, I'm putting all this effort into it, but is anybody going to go see this? And there's just something wonderfully calming about the fact that we're making this movie and, for better or worse – hopefully for better – everybody's going to go see this movie. Even the guy out there who is saying, "you're going to ruin the picture," he'll still go see it! As a filmmaker, that's a great feeling just to know that the audience is there, so that aspect of it is very calming and it takes away a lot of the anxiety and neuroticism that usually surrounds the process of making a movie.
Arnold: But there is a tremendous demand out there. There's no two days about it. No matter where you go – and just recently I went over to Japan for instance and I was sitting with a bunch of journalists, maybe two hundred of them and I was promoting COLLATERAL DAMAGE. The first question was, "are you going to do another TERMINATOR?" And, no matter where I go, whatever country it is – the United States or other countries – that's what people want to see most. It's one of those franchises. I don't think there's anyone here concerned about "ten years out." People have been waiting. Of course, they've seen the second one now in so many different ways, in the movie house, on video, on television, whatever, so it's really a highly-anticipated project.
Question: For you as an actor, you've done so many things since the last TERMINATOR, what's it like for you to step back into it? Is it like putting on a comfortable shirt or difficult getting back into it?
Arnold: It was like putting on a comfortable shirt. It always feels great to get back into it again and I, somehow, click into this character very quickly and the only thing I had to do was get going with my training again because one of the things you can't hide is when you arrive from the future to the present and you arrive naked. So, you have to have the same body as you did in the first movie or the second movie because otherwise you're not from the same mold or are the same kind of robot. So, the pressure's on and Jonathan said, "I think you'd better gain some weight." All this pressure put on me, so I started going with a heavy workout for the last six months.
Question: Was it hard to get into that kind of shape again?
Arnold: No, no, I love it. Whenever you have a reason for it, it's like – this day, we're going to this scene or this week, we're going to shoot this scene. This is like, in the middle of June or whatever it is, the Mr. Olympia competition is that day and I'm going to train for that day so that's what you do. You go on a diet again and eat more and you train more and instead of training at home, I ended up training at a gym much more. It was fun.
Question: Like old times.
Arnold: Exactly. I'm very fortunate that on set also I get enough time to train during lunch time because it's very important for me to train twice a day when I train heavier and harder, so we have a hour during lunch which I then take for working out in the exercise trailer. "
That’s it folks, just a tidbit. Hope you enjoyed it. Patricia :-)
