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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
In a press junket interview, Schwarzenegger has the orange skin of extreme stardom -- and has reporters eating out of his hand.
Feb 8, 2002 | Arnold Schwarzenegger comes bounding into a pokey little suite in New York's Essex House hotel, wearing that peculiar orange complexion -- a fake tan? TV makeup? A beta-carotene overdose? -- that connotes extreme stardom. He's here for a junket interview, that oft-derided infotainment moment when small groups of journalists get to spend a few minutes chatting with the stars and directors of Hollywood movies. "You guys obviously had Andy Davis already!" he beams, taking a quarter of a second to look at each of the reporters in the room individually. "That's why you're all in such a serious mood!"
He's referring to Andrew Davis, the bearded, balding, professorial director of "Collateral Damage," in which Schwarzenegger plays a firefighter whose wife and child are killed by Colombian terrorists in a Los Angeles bombing. He pursues the perpetrator through some murky adventures in the Colombian jungle and ends up almost single-handedly combating a terrorist plot to plow up government buildings in Washington. To some extent, "Collateral Damage" is an ordinary escapist action-adventure film fighting a battle against history that it can't possibly win. Its scheduled release last fall was postponed for obvious reasons, and its eerie, if clumsy, resemblance to actual events may make it seem weightier than it actually is.
Oddly enough, the film's terrorists were originally supposed to be Libyan, but Davis, who has a background in journalism, made the decision to focus on the virtual state of civil war between the U.S.-supported regime and the left-wing rebel groups in Colombia. "I felt there had been a series of movies with Arabs as the bad guys," he says, "and that it was a cliché. Instead we could address this place where there was all this hatred and maybe try to defuse it."
Whatever you think about Schwarzenegger, who at 54 is trying to reestablish himself as the movie world's biggest action hero, he understands the requirements of show business. He's working hard on this February afternoon to dispel the air of sobriety surrounding "Collateral Damage" and to counteract the gravity of Davis, who has indeed just left the room for another interview session. Davis is perhaps the leading contemporary auteur of the action genre -- he's best known for "The Fugitive" -- but he's also seen as a sort of Hollywood intellectual whose spectacular flicks contain parables of political darkness.
"Well, with me it's different," Schwarzenegger says, settling into a chair. Although he has lived principally in the United States since the early 1970s, his syntax remains, at least occasionally, that of a German speaker. "I don't do that stuff," he says, still talking about Davis. "I don't go to Colombia and study for three years terrorism. For me this is a movie about entertaining people!"
Come to think of it, there's something middle-European about Schwarzenegger's style of dress, too. He isn't attired in the sharp designer suit of a Hollywood executive or the pseudo-outdoor wear of a leisure-class American, but in a pair of dress slacks and a starched white oxford shirt, under an official "Collateral Damage" bomber jacket. Yet despite the surprisingly strong accent with its swallowed consonants and uniformly flat vowels, the almost nebbishy, enthusiastic manner and the bizarre skin tone, Schwarzenegger is in his own way an extraordinarily gifted performer.
Certainly by the end of the interview he has us eating out of his hand; we have pretty much forgotten about Davis and his dour tales of Venezuelan petrodollars and CIA subterfuge in Guatemala. We laugh uproariously at Schwarzenegger's jokes. We nod and smile when he gazes directly into the eyes of his interlocutor (pretty much the oldest trick in the actor's book). We all want to be helpful when he pretends to solicit our opinions about casting the female villain of his much-anticipated next film, "Terminator 3," which is scheduled to go before the cameras in April.
Tell us what you were doing on the morning of Sept. 11. How did you learn about the attacks?
My wife [NBC reporter Maria Shriver] got a phone call about 10 minutes to 7:00 [West Coast time]. The NBC bureau said, "Turn on the TV, there's been an accident, a plane has crashed into one of the twin towers in New York." So we turned on the news and watched basically the whole thing. The second plane went in and everyone started realizing it was not an accident, blah blah blah, all those things.
She had to go out to the airport to talk to people waiting for the passengers who were supposed to come from Boston to Los Angeles that [were in the plane that] hit the twin towers. We dropped off our kids at school at 8 o'clock, and she turned to me and said, "This means you can forget about your 'Collateral Damage' movie." I hadn't thought about it up to that point. I was just thinking about what I had just seen. I was, you know, in shock. Then I said, "You're right." I called Warner Bros. and they said they had been trying to call me to talk about pulling the movie. So we were all in sync on that one.
How did you explain to your kids what had happened?
One of the things I learned was to turn off the television right away. What is amazing about kids is that they don't see the difference between a replay and reality. My kids said to me, on the way to school that morning, "Daddy, there are 20 or 30 buildings that planes have run into." They had seen it again and again and just thought it was more planes and more buildings like that. They were confused and my wife and I just decided to turn off the TV.
