rnold Schwarzenegger is beside himself in his upcoming SF cloning thriller The
6th Day, playing both helicopter pilot Adam Gibson--and his clone. After
last year’s
disappointing End of Days, Schwarzenegger returns to SF form in The 6th
Day, a film that director Roger Spottiswoode described as a "cousin" to
Schwarzenegger’s previous hit SF film Total Recall. But instead of
the larger-than-life roles of previous Arnold actioners like True Lies,
this time around the 53-year-old actor plays an ordinary man in extraordinary
circumstances, a family man who comes home to discover that a doppelganger has
taken his place, and that mysterious forces are out to destroy him.
The 6th Day offers the director of Tomorrow Never
Dies the chance to work with Schwarzenegger for the first time, both as
actor and producer. Schwarzenegger and Spottiswoode took time to speak with
Science Fiction Weekly during a break in filming in Vancouver last
April and again this week while promoting The 6th Day. The following
interviews combine comments from both sessions. The 6th Day opens Nov. 17.
Mr. Schwarzenegger, how is this movie different from what you've done
before?
Schwarzenegger: Everything is different. The story is quite
different. It is a futuristic movie ... which is the ... kind of movie
that I always enjoy doing ... dealing with all the stuff that could
come in the future--or that we make the people believe that this will
happen in the future. ... Here, the idea is that human cloning will exist
15 years from now, but in an illegal way, and what could happen. Who
will be in charge then in the decision of who will live and who will die?
And is it all for corporate profits, is it for good use and on and on and on?
The character you're playing is more of a regular kind of guy than
some of your roles in the past.
Schwarzenegger: I think that what was appealing to me about this film was
[that] I had a chance to play a totally regular guy, the way I am at home with
my family. ... Where if there's a problem, they don't just come in like a
steamroller and say, "I'm the action hero and I can take care of the job." ...
You have to struggle. You have emotional struggle, you have physical struggles,
you have confrontations that are very difficult to overcome. And I'm going
through all those traumas in this film. And it works really well that I am an
ordinary guy, a pilot, a family man. So when ... someone is trying to ... duplicate my life and is cloning me and taking my family from me ... it's
a real struggle to fight back. And it becomes kind of like The Fugitive ... in some ways, even though it's a futuristic setting.
Does the audience know which is the clone and which is the real Adam
Gibson?
Schwarzenegger: No. You will not know. The audience will not know. ... The
characters don't really know. It gets confusing. ... In the end, they
find out some totally different information, and some twists in the end,
which I'm not going to give away. But it's a very well-written script
that leads the audience in one direction, and you find out later on there's
something else that's going on.
Overall, we're dealing with ... the human trauma of what happens to one
individual when he gets caught up in the middle of a situation like that,
when a mistake is made. He comes home and sees himself in his house, and
from that point on, everyone is trying to kill him. And he's trying to
regain his life, his family and kind of clear his record. He didn't do
anything wrong. And he's being accused of something here. So that's what
the movie is about. It really focuses on ... the human drama of ... the shock
of losing your family, seeing it slipping away in front of your eyes, and
not having any way of having contact with them, because of the threat of
their getting kidnapped or killed. ... Because of that, it makes it a movie that
has great action and a big size, and exposes ... this whole subject of cloning.
But at the same time, it's also great because it's a very dramatic role for me
to play. And very challenging, because I'm playing two [roles].
There's a scene in the film where you hide underwater and must
swim while holding your breath. During the shooting of that sequence,
didn't you get into trouble?
Schwarzenegger: Actually, I just missed my exit spot. And ... when
I came up from under the water of this diving sequence, there was a
solid top, and there was no exit at all. And so ... I had to be kind of
rescued by a scuba diver. But that's nothing new. In every movie there's
one or two of those kinds of situations where you have a close call.
You get a producer credit on this film as well. Was it difficult to
balance the responsibilities of producer and star?
Schwarzenegger: Well, If I [hadn't] been the producer,
I think I would have made the [other] producers pay twice the amount
of money for my salary, because I was two times in the movie, but I only
got paid once [as an actor]. But since I was the producer, I had to let that one go.
Do you feel any pressure for The 6th Day to succeed
after End of Days?
Schwarzenegger: I think that every movie that I come out with I feel
pressure, simply because the budgets are very high. ... I ... always want to make
sure that my movies come out successfully. I always feel the pressure, because
I don't want to disappoint my fans. I always have done films that should entertain
people around the world. So I have to say that I feel the same pressures on The
6th Day as I did on any other movie. But at the same time, I was very happy
that most of my films have been extremely successful, and that I had the
longevity over the last 25 years in this business, which is very unique.
I was also very happy ... with [End of Days], because we grossed over
$210 million worldwide, and I think that's why I got all those offers for
6th Day and other projects.
What is your actual feeling about cloning? What do you think if
someone could save your DNA and maybe recreate you in 100 years?
Schwarzenegger: I'd love it. ... I may be one of the few, but ... how many
times have I said to myself, "I wish there were two of me?" I say
it all the time, because there's so much to do in life. ... You have your family
that needs a lot of attention. You have your office and your business that needs
a lot of attention. There's a lot of work with the Inner City Games [one of
Schwarzenegger's charities] that has to do with the Special Olympics, traveling
around the world, that needs a lot of attention. The filmmaking needs a lot of
attention. ... I wish, at least, if I cannot be two, at least wish that I don't need to
sleep. That really annoys me. The whole idea that you have to go to sleep, or that
I am not one of those unique people that doesn't need any sleep. Not even an hour.
I mean, imagine how much you could accomplish in life if you just go to do your
night work in a movie, then tomorrow you can run your business, and don't have
to go to sleep. And do your family stuff, and do all the other stuff. It would
be fantastic.
Are you interested in more humanistic roles and fewer action roles?
Schwarzenegger: I always enjoyed movies where you see a little more about
the person. ... I think maybe more so now than maybe 15 years ago, because we change. ...
Fifteen years ago, I was looking forward to "How big is the explosion?"
And the action, and how many people do you wipe out? Then I was 35. And now,
I'm over 50, so you think differently, and there's other kinds of elements of the
story and the character and all this becomes very much more important. And I think
it has to do with just growing up, I guess.
Roger Spottiswoode, tell us about the themes of The 6th
Day.
Spottiswoode: The theme of the film, I guess, is [the question]
"What is one's real identity?" Do clones have souls? What will happen when
we can clone ourselves? Who are we really? Do we have souls? Are we complete
people? Or are we some sort of biochemical machines that's been created by
man? Is there such a thing as a being with a soul that can be made in a lab,
or will they be different?
How do you see it?
Spottiswoode: I suspect you can make us in a lab [laughs].
When you read the script [by first-time screenwriters
Marianne and Cormac Wibberley], did you know immediately that you wanted to do it?
Spottiswoode: Yes. I was really intrigued. I thought it was a really
good story, a really good subject. And it was a story that reflected the theme.
You didn't have to talk about the ideas in it. They naturally came out of the
story. And it was exciting and fun, and it had a lot of interesting things to do
in it. And I thought Arnold would be terrific in it.
The script is very good because the things that happen in it are very
believable to me. It doesn't presuppose that the world has changed very much.
You don't have to think that you're in a different world. The basic premise
of this is that, yes, people have learned to clone each other, but that cloning
is illegal. Not that it's bad, just that the law as it is now, is that if you die,
you're dead.
What surprised you about Arnold that you didn't expect?
Spottiswoode: He knows filmmaking backwards. A lot of actors know
a fair amount about it, but he completely thinks as if he's on the other side
of the camera. He knows exactly what he does, how to make the shot better. He
instinctively knows where things are. He's very very smart, camera-wise. I've
always thought he was smart. But he's extremely good at figuring out how to make
a better movie.
And he is genuinely interested in getting the film really good. One of
the first script notes, from an early meeting before I came aboard, we were
both discussing what we both thought about the script, and I discovered that
his passion was that a character needed to be much better. Well, nine out of
10 movie stars, it turns out the character who needs to be much better is
themselves, but in Arnold's case, he was saying, "Well, the villain needs to be much
more interesting." The Bill Gates of our story, so to speak. ... The head of this very
large ... corporation that's bigger than Microsoft. He said, "That character needs to
be much more interesting and complicated and better written and intelligent and
everything else." Usually, one hears that about actors talking about their own
parts. And he was saying, "No, no, no, the film really works if the other
character has the most interesting stuff." And I just thought that was a very
interesting and correct and absolutely perceptive way of approaching it. And was
more from the point of view of a filmmaker than an actor who wants his lines to
be better.
What were the hardest shots to set up or capture?
Spottiswoode: We have a ... plane, a "whisper craft," that doesn't exist.
That's proving, for me, very difficult. I haven't done the Star Wars
kind of films. So having a large prop that doesn't exist is a very hard thing
to handle. ... It's just hard to have things in shots that aren't there, large
moving objects that create an enormous amount of wind, and none of it's there.
So for me, that's been the hardest thing, to have a virtual plane in it all the
way through.
People will compare this with Total Recall. Did you see that,
and do you think there are similarities?
Spottiswoode: It's not similar. It's in the same ... group,
I would think. I have seen it. I thought it was very good. I thought
he was good in it. But it's sort of cousins, I guess.
