Arnold Schwarzenegger says his mission to "outdo" rival Sylvester Stallone was so important to him that he argued with "Terminator 2" director James Cameron to include more violence in the film.
Reflecting on his most successful film, the sequel to "The Terminator," Schwarzenegger gave credit to Cameron for developing such a fantastic production.
"The reason why it became a big hit was, number one, Jim Cameron. I mean, Jim Cameron is a genius writer," he shared during an Academy Museum of Motion Pictures panel. "He came up with this brilliant idea, even though at the beginning I was suspicious. He says ‘I want to make you a good Terminator.'"
"I said ‘What do you mean a good Terminator?’ I say, ‘I was killing 68 people in the first one.’ I said, 'In the second one, I have to kill 150. We go up … Cut their throats and kill them and shoot them with a cannon …run them over with a car.’ … I got to outdo Stallone," he says of his mindset at the time.
"Remember my whole mission is that I got to be number 1 in killing the amount of people in the screen," Schwarzenegger joked.
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Cameron, however, already had a vision for the film, and it did not center around violence.
"‘Arnold, stop it. You’re a very sick guy," Schwarzenegger remembers Cameron telling him. "'I am gonna make sure that in ‘Terminator 2’, you’re not gonna kill one single person.'"
"I say ‘Well that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.’ I say, ‘How can we do ’Terminator 2' without me killing [anyone]?' I said, ‘C'mon, just a few token bodies we throw in there?’"
The 1991 film went on to gross over $500 million worldwide, making it Schwarzenegger's most lucrative project.
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Although their fences have been mended, both Schwarzenegger and Stallone have been transparent about their former feud.
"I always need an enemy," Schwarzenegger explained in his Netflix documentary, "Arnold."
"Every time [Stallone] came out with a movie, like ‘Rambo II,’ I had to figure out a way of now outdoing that."
"We were incredibly antagonistic," Stallone elaborated in the documentary. "We couldn’t even stand to be in the same room. People had to separate us."
