(MENAFN- Arab Times) Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke Friday about being "back" as the Terminator in a new sequel to the sci-fi film series that made him famous - and about how he's still an action star at age 67. In a promotional media conference in Paris on Friday for "Terminator Genisys", Schwarzenegger, revealed some secrets from the movie, which will hit the screens next week in Scandinavia, Greece, Turkey and Singapore, and the rest of the world early July. First up, he told reporters that "I got the phone call a month after I'd finished my governorship" - his sevenyear stint running California, which ended in Jan 2011 - to return as the killer robot.
He then explained that a key scene in the movie sees him fighting a younger version of himself. In it, he is an older Terminator battling the one he played back in 1984, when the original "Terminator" came out, a struggle made possible by the time travel conceit of the series - and modern special effects. His appearance as a Terminator visibly three decades older was explained in a "very well-written" way, he said.
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The production hired a bodybuilder with "a Mr Universe physique" to play the younger version of Schwarzenegger in the fight and then spent a year using computer graphic overlays to make him look like the first Terminator. "When I saw the movie for the first time three weeks ago I was literally blown away, to see myself fighting me and to see exactly the way I looked in 1984," Schwarzenegger said. He said his young face had to be recreated. Not "one single frame" was taken from the first Terminator movie, because it is owned by a different production company, he explained. "It was really extraordinary to watch that. I didn't actually know when I saw the fight who I should root for," he said.
Schwarzenegger also spoke about how movie magic was making it possible for him to keep going in other action roles at an age that many men are enjoying retirement golf. He said, for instance, that he is reprising his title role from "Conan", the first feature movie he made 35 years ago, for an upcoming sequel. "All of this is very unusual, because normally when you watch movies such as 'James Bond' or 'Batman', they switch out the actors every five, six or 10 years." But, the former bodybuilder grinned, "when you have a studly body, you shouldn't be surprised".
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US film fans probably know actress Marthe Keller from such 70s hits as "Marathon Man" and "Black Sunday," or perhaps Claude Lelouch's "And Now My Love." True aficionados are likely to recall her Garbo-esque role in Billy Wilder's "Fedora" or in Nikita Mikhalkov's Oscar-nommed "Dark Eyes." But European audiences have seen her work without a pause since, most recently in Barbet Schroeder's "Amnesia," which bowed in Cannes, and earned the Swiss-born actress some of the best notices of her career. Variety first spotted Keller in the Michael Caine spy thriller "Funeral in Berlin" in 1966.
Question: "Funeral in Berlin" was a big Hollywood film. How was the experience?
Answer: I was so young, I literally didn't know what I was doing there. I came in one day and saw a beautiful woman getting made up and dressed for my character, so I thought, "This is it. I've been fired." I started taking off my makeup. I got yelled at by the assistant director, who explained that this was my stand-in. I didn't even know they existed. My whole life is a misunderstanding, and I still don't believe that I have the right to sit in the chair.
Q: It doesn't sound like you craved stardom.
A: I was a real country girl, and it was a little job I did to make some money.
Q: But you'd been studying acting.
A: I was a member of the Berliner Ensemble acting company in East Germany. It was founded by Bertolt Brecht, and when I was there, it was run by Brecht's widow, Helene Weigel. I was also a member of the Schiller Theatre in West Germany. You don't find a lot of people who worked in East Germany and Hollywood.
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