Iron Jim Pt. 2

The film Schwarzenegger had in mind was a French film called La Totale!, a comedy about a man who pretends to be a boring joe when really he's a secret agent. The problem is, he's done such a good job of pretending that his wife is nearly ready to leave him. Cameron liked it and wrote a script, only to find his shiny new self-financing deal freezing up when he couldn't get any completion-bond company to insure him. After some wrangling, Fox and Cameron agreed to an acceptable budget and Fox put up more cash.

Then the studio threw out the numbers. “Once we got into the logistical problems, we knew we weren't going to make that schedule,” says Jon Landau, Fox's senior vice-president of feature production. The actors were prepared. “When you make a deal with Jim's company, they don't hire you with an out date,” says Jamie Lee Curtis, who signed on as Schwarzenegger's wife. "It was made very clear to me in an unspoken way that I shouldn't be making plans for the last day of the movie."

Filming began during a heat wave last year. Working at the Santa Clarita studios, the crew started with interior scenes between Curtis and Schwarzenegger. “[The first scene] was just two people getting ready for work, that wonderful dance that married people do, where they're oblivious to each other,” says Curtis. For three weeks they established the relationship, shooting in a simple and linear way. Then the action started.

“It's not the ordinary scenes you see with car crashes,” says Schwarzenegger. “Imagine riding a horse through a hotel lobby and into an elevator, going up the elevator with the horse and people in tuxedos and dresses, then going on to the roof.”

And that was the easy stuff – in Miami, Cameron shot the Harrier jet. “The first time I saw that, my jaw dropped,” says Curtis. “They took a real Harrier jet and mounted it on top of a hydraulic – it looked like an upside-down spider, with all these legs moving up and down. They were up there for three weeks, with every piece of equipment – a Technocrane, a Lenny arm, a Powerpad. It's outrageous what he did. And it went flawlessly.”

Then on to the massive limo-and-helicopter chase on Florida's Seven-Mile Bridge, which took weeks to film. Cameron asked Curtis to perform the final stunt herself. It involved hanging from a wire under a moving helicopter a hundred feet off the water. “Will you be there?” she asked. “Ill be shooting you,” he said. So up they went, the director acting as his own cameraman, -hanging out of the helicopter door with nothing but the Seven-Mile Bridge and lots of water and manta rays underneath him.”

As the scope of the film expanded, so did the stress. To keep things moving, Cameron ordered the troops around like Patton – via those speakers. The crew dubbed him Mr. Microphone. “People who would screw up constantly would hear about it in a very direct manner,” says Tom Arnold, who plays Schwarzenegger's sidekick.

Occasionally, Cameron went too far even for Schwarzenegger. One day, he said that anyone who went to the bathroom could just keep walking – and he wasn't kidding. “That's over the top,” Schwarzenegger admits. “He would rather pee in his pants than leave the scene when things are clicking. But an electrician doesn't feel as dedicated as he does.”

But again, Cameron's fanaticism inspired his troops. Says Schwarzenegger: “There was one thing that blew me away about the guy – there was a particular action scene that required a weapon to be fired in a very tight area. I asked Jim about it, and he said, `Well, well find out if it's safe.' And he gets in this area and has the weapons guy fire it past his face a couple of times – the fact is, he has balls, man. Hell do anything.”

Filming was endless – True Lies shot so long that Paxton worked on it for a while, went off and played the lead in another movie, and came back to shoot some more. Tia Carrere, who plays an art dealer, signed on for seven or eight weeks' work and ended up cashing checks for seven months. “It kept going and going, like the Energizer bunny,” she says. Cameron admits to 130 shooting days, give or take a few, but add second unit and the occasional unofficial first unit and it's anyone's guess; the rumor is 180 days. (Cameron insists that True Lies isn't the most expensive picture in history – Spartacus was, he says, -adjusted for today's dollars.”) “Fox was sweating bullets, just like Mario did,” says one insider. “But what could they do? They want more pictures from him, plus the dailies were great.”

Finally in March, Fox announces that principal photography is finished. A week later, in a small editing room in Santa Monica, Cameron watches a shot of fingers fumbling for an electronic bug. He turns to his editor. “Cut to it with the fingers already on the bug, so she's not fumbling. If it doesn't cut smoothly, then play with it some more.

Cameron jumps to another editing room, then another. Despite a deadline so tight that within a few days hell end up pushing his release date two weeks, Cameron seems relaxed, even happy. He jokes that “all my available RAM is taken up by True Lies dailies,” but he seems confident about the movie, and he has even managed to keep things going with Linda Hamilton since she moved out with their baby daughter during preproduction. “Maybe that's what it takes,” he says. “We're both pretty happy with the arrangement for right now. And the baby is outstanding, beautiful – total engineer.” He shows a one-sheet he came up with for True Lies – a hand grenade with a wedding ring for a firing pin. The tag line reads, EVEN PERFECT MARRIAGES HAVE THEIR BLOW-UPS. Suddenly it all comes clear: Cameron is probably the only person in the world who can make gearhead action-romances that aren't just sincere, they're autobiographical.

Cameron and his editor watch Schwarzenegger in a tender moment, trying to break through his teenage daughter's shell. “She's very subtle,” Cameron says. “She's listening to what he's saying, but she's not going to blurt out, `Oh, Daddy.' That's excellent, let's go to Six. I like her in Four too.”

Then it's off to dailies – yes, despite the wrap announcement, Cameron is still shooting. In a few days Schwarzenegger – already at work full-time on another movie – will quietly slip out to shoot one last scene.

Maybe the last. “I called [Cameron] a perfectionist once,” says Tom Arnold. “And he said, `No, I'm a greatist. I only want to do it until it's great.' ”