On ‘6th Day,’ He Rested

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest action blockbuster, “The 6th Day,” due in theaters Nov. 17, is about a guy who comes home from work one night and finds a party going on, peeks through the curtains and is shocked to discover that he’s been cloned.

Sounds like yet another man-against-all-odds saga for the bodybuilder-turned-Terminator, except for one thing: It’s rated PG-13. This from a movie star best known for gun-toting, R-rated mega-hits like “True Lies” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”? What’s up, Arnold?

“You have to say, ‘OK, people are talking about the violence and this and that. What can I do? Let’s tone it down a little bit,’ ” the 53-year-old father of three said over lunch the other day, explaining his decision to make not only more lighthearted comedies (think “Kindergarten Cop”), but more PG-13 action fare.

“I’m going more in that direction anyway, because my age now is such that I feel naturally more responsible,” he said as he munched on a microwaved Cornish game hen in his trailer during a break on “The 6th Day” set. “At the age of 30, you run around, you say, ‘I want to do the biggest blow-ups, the biggest shooting. I want to have the biggest body count and all those things.’ But then when you get to be over 50 and you have a family, you see that you should broaden out and do other things.”

As debate about the impact of Hollywood violence continues in Washington, Schwarzenegger may seem an unlikely champion of self-restraint. This, after all, is the same Schwarzenegger who, playing a construction worker whose brain is controlled by malevolent forces in “Total Recall,” shot his wife and quipped, “Consider that a divorce!” This is the same Schwarzenegger who, as a killer robot from a robot-controlled future in “The Terminator,” promised a guard at a police station, “I’ll be back!” (and sure enough, drove his car into the building, spraying bullets all the way).

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But the affable Schwarzenegger--who is seriously considering a run for office himself some day--is proof that fatherhood forces even tough guys to think about the consequences of their actions. While he disagrees with assertions that entertainment is largely to blame for societal ills (“I think where it really falls apart is in parenting,” he asserts), Schwarzenegger believes Hollywood does have a role to play.

“Particularly when I see my children looking for films, and I see this is R-rated and that is R-rated, I think the trick is to do these action movies, but to bring it down, so you cut away when you shoot somebody,” he said, adding that recent proposals to limit the marketing of violent movies to kids are “not the answer to the whole thing, but it’s a place where we could tighten the belt.”

“We could say to all those marketing people, ‘Look, we know that if you sell an R-rated movie to 12-year-olds, they will want to go and see it. But is it really good in the end for our country to let them in?’ ” he said. “Or should we come up with a system where we really don’t let any kids in whether they’re with a parent or not? Because to me, that’s bogus: ‘with parents.’ Do I want my children watching incredible violence? No. You have to be much more careful with these things.”

Just moments before sharing these civic-minded observations, Schwarzenegger had been waving a humongous gun in the face of a gooey-looking malformed clone played by Tony Goldwyn. Inside Columbia Pictures’ Sound Stage 29 in Culver City, where director Roger Spottiswoode was shooting pickup scenes for “The 6th Day,” Schwarzenegger--with a brown leather bomber jacket and a fake abrasion above his left eye--delivered his special brand of tongue-in-cheek patter.

“We all have to die someday,” Schwarzenegger, as helicopter pilot Adam Gibson, told Goldwyn.

“You’re wrong, Adam,” said Goldwyn’s evil scientist, Drucker, whose melted features looked oddly shiny, as if he’d been dipped in petroleum jelly. “I’m offering you the chance to live forever. Never aging. Perfect in every way.”

“Perfect?” Schwarzenegger bellowed, his huge firearm gleaming. “Like you? You’re a monster! A half-baked monster!”

Schwarzenegger himself seems comfortable with getting older, although he knows that just a few years ago, his mortality made the movie industry consider leaving him for dead. It was 1997 when he underwent elective heart surgery to replace a faulty valve. He was fit. He was trim. And both he and his doctors insisted that he was as sturdy as ever. But the whiff of illness, he says, sent the major studios into retreat.

“I had several projects set up, including ‘I Am Legend’ [at Warner Bros.]. All of a sudden, it became impossible. The script was too expensive. The director was too slow. Everything was wrong--when nothing was,” he said. “I really could feel people kind of one inch at a time pulling back. You know, they don’t return your phone calls the same way that they used to. Or all of a sudden the guy’s on the phone all the time or he’s on a trip. It was like, ‘Maybe now we can’t sell him as an action star. Now he’s not the kind of superhuman that kids think he is.’ I heard it, from other sources, what those studio executives said.”

At the independent production companies, like Beacon Entertainment, which made his next film, 1999’s R-rated “End of Days,” “people were really people, not like those suits in the studios. They continued with their projects,” Schwarzenegger said. But until “End of Days” was released, with Schwarzenegger as an ex-cop battling Satan to save the world, the man whose most successful movies have made billions was virtually dead meat.

“They were so worried about what would the fans now think. To them, it’s all about, ‘How can we market and sell a person?’ If there’s one little interruption, they will hesitate,” he said.

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To be fair, he’s had a few flops--”Last Action Hero” and “Junior,” to name two. And, in 1997 the studios began to balk at the $100-million-plus budgets of many action projects.

Schwarzenegger doesn’t sound bitter. But he clearly has enjoyed proving them wrong. “When ‘End of Days’ opened, immediately I got phone calls from people I hadn’t heard from saying, ‘Congratulations and by the way, when do you want to do that “Sgt. Rock” thing or that other project we’ve been talking about?’ All of a sudden it was that kind of dialogue. And since then, everything is again in the running.”

Of course, when you’ve used bodybuilding as a springboard to become a household name, when you’ve emigrated from a tiny town in Austria and married into the Kennedy family (his wife is Maria Shriver), when you’ve hung out with a U.S. president (George Bush made him chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness) and made a fortune in real estate, it takes a lot more than Hollywood churlishness to get you down.

Besides, the big man--who still works out twice a day, as he has all his life--has more than movies on his mind. Schwarzenegger is thinking, he says, about schools, about the welfare system, about trade policy and campaign reform. Though he quotes wrestler-turned-Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura on politicians (“They’re dug in like Alabama ticks!”), he admits he’s considering becoming one. The Republican party’s favorite dark horse has already decided at least two things. First, whatever office he’d seek to occupy, he’d never accept a salary. Second, while he could finance a campaign all by himself (he makes in the neighborhood of $25 million per picture), he’d seek small donations just so people could feel invested in his bid.

“I don’t need another job. But of course I think about it. I’ve been asked so many times to run,” he says, launching into a glowing description of the joys of public service. He says his work with the Special Olympics, with the President’s Council on Fitness and his own Inner City Games Foundation (which funds sports and educational activities for kids in 14 cities) has made him ponder whether he is man enough to govern.

“I am really critical about the government because they have failed in the last 20 years to inspire people or make the adjustments necessary to help people be better parents. We need after-school programs. [Two-income] families need the flexibility to have split shifts. The ultimate child abuse is not paying attention to your kids,” he said.

“You wonder: Wouldn’t it be great to just sit in an office where your full-time job is just to serve people? Wouldn’t it be great to have a day where you let people come by, have them stand in line to come in and tell me their problems? You have a child in public school who can’t read, can’t write, doesn’t get any education? Now, you have a choice. Let me figure it out,” he said, sounding a bit like one of his movie heroes.

When would he do it? And what would he run for? He won’t say, though when reminded that Sen. Barbara Boxer’s seat is up in four years, he chuckled, “Perfect timing.”

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For now, he’s happy to be working nonstop. He’s currently shooting an action-thriller in Mexico, “Collateral Damage,” in which he plays a federal officer seeking revenge upon terrorists who murdered his family. In March, he’ll start work on “Terminator 3,” in which he will battle a female android to the death. And after that, he’s hoping to bring the comic-book hero “Doc Savage” to life on the big screen. He compares the script by Frank Darabont (one of several writers on the project) to Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark”--one of the most profitable PG-13 films of all time.

“All of a sudden, all these huge projects are coming, so I’m having--in the meantime--a lot of fun with that,” he said. “I went through a me-oriented period for many years. ‘I want to be a champion. I want to be a millionaire. I want to be a successful businessman.’ But when you have a family, your mind shifts. You becoming the supporting guy.”