Give Schwarzenegger a Choice; He’ll Take Film

Give Arnold Schwarzenegger his choice between politics and movie making and he’ll take movie making.

“In Hollywood,” he says, “everything gets done quickly. They don’t care. They just want to make a movie. In politics, they’re always worried about making the wrong move.”

He knows about both. At the moment, his star is very high in the Hollywood heavens. If he were to decide to do “Tom Sawyer,” with himself as Tom, he’d probably have no trouble raising the money.

His political star isn’t as high as his Hollywood star, but it’s rising. He was recently named chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. It was President Bush’s decision to name him. And the fact that Schwarzenegger is married to Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy clan, didn’t hurt. It shouldn’t. Schwarzenegger’s politics are about as well known as his muscles--he’s about as conservative as Ronald Reagan.

“But,” Schwarzenegger says, “I don’t want to go into politics. I love my job as head of the fitness program, but that’s about it. It was this country that gave me the opportunity to do all I have done. I couldn’t have done it anywhere but here, and being head of the fitness program gives me a chance to give something back.”

As head of the fitness program--a job he doesn’t get paid for--he roams around the country talking to youth groups. “I have earned a position through my films, and now I have some influence over youth,” he said. “When I speak to them, I speak against drugs and encourage them to exercise.”

His new film, “Total Recall,” has a lot of violence. “Violence was here a hundred years ago,” Schwarzenegger says. “And ours is based on fantasy. It’s like ‘Conan.’ In other films, a space ship is destroyed and hundreds of people die. I don’t believe ‘Total Recall’ will create more violence.”

Schwarzenegger found out about the “Total Recall” script when he did a film for Dino De Laurentiis. “He let me read several scripts,” Schwarzenegger said. “One was ‘Total Recall.’

“He said fine, but we couldn’t agree on a director. We needed one who knew futuristic films, and we couldn’t find one. Then Dino went out of business, we bought the script, and then I saw ‘RoboCop.’ We decided to ask the director, Paul Verhoeven, to do our film. He agreed, and it was on. We needed someone who would devote three years to it, and Paul was that man.

“I was fascinated with the original script, but I didn’t like the ending. We worked on that for a year, came up with the solution and, once we had that down, put more humor into the script. It went from an eight to a 10, and it cost a lot to make . . . $50 million.”