arnold schwarzenegger conan on conquering

#Arnold schwarzenegger conan on conquering movie#

“Within two hours, there must have been 50 or 60 fellow bathers, all proud to join the orbit around the people’s hero.”Ĭonan The Barbarian, finally released in May 1982, was a milestone for Stone and Schwarzenegger. “We started as two sunbathers, and within an hour, I was surprised to see 20 people that already circled his towel with their own, like smaller planets around the sun,” Stone wrote in his 2020 autobiography Chasing the Light. He was struck, too, by how readily the public was drawn to Schwarzenegger. Walking to the beach, he picked up on Schwarzenegger’s charisma and laid-back humour. Stone was the first person in Hollywood who looked beyond the one-time Mr Universe’s muscles. Even a scene-stealing appearance in the 1977 body-building documentary Pumping Iron had failed to take his career to the next level. Alas, casting directors struggled to see the young Austrian as anything other than a lunk with biceps where his brains should be. Schwarzenegger’s hunger for fame was even more insatiable than Stone’s.

But he retained the gonzo energy that had crackled through Stone’s screenplay. He toned down Stone’s excesses – ditching the post-apocalyptic setting and mutant hoards. “Fever dream” was just what Milius wanted. Fuelled by cocaine and anti-depressants, the script was described by the movie’s director, the larger than life, Hemingway-worshipping John Milius, as a “fever dream” – and feverish is the only way to describe Stone’s decision to set the story in a post-apocalyptic America stocked with “mutant monsters”. Having gone through the grinder writing the Conan screenplay, Stone appreciated a walk in the sunshine. Conan brimmed with beheadings, sex-crazed witches and James Earl Jones putting in the performance of his career as a philosopher-villain heading an evil snake cult. Scripted by Stone, starring Arnold as the eponymous shirtless warrior, it was a brutal brawn-fest.

#Arnold schwarzenegger conan on conquering movie#

But at the time of their stroll, they were pinning their ambitions on the fantasy movie they were making together: Conan The Barbarian.

Stone and Schwarzenegger would reshape Hollywood in their macho images within a few years. It was a walk to the seaside but also, in a way, into the future. One summer afternoon in the early Eighties, Oliver Stone and Arnold Schwarzenegger went, in Stone’s words, “to Santa Monica Beach to hang out”.