23 Fun Facts About James Cameron's TRUE LIES with Behind the Scenes "Making Of" Videos
James Cameron’s True Lies is an action-comedy masterpiece. I love this movie! It’s filled with awesome action, and the comedy is gut-busting funny. I still laugh my ass off every time I watch it.
The movie stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a fearless, globe-trotting, terrorist-battling secret agent whose life is turned upside down when he discovers his wife (Jamie Lee Curtis) might be having an affair with a used-car salesman (Bill Paxton) while terrorists smuggle nuclear war heads into the United States. This film is also the best thing that Tom Arnold was ever a part of. He was amazingly funny in this movie.
This is a movie that I probably revisit once a year, and I thought it’d be fun to share some information from the film that you may or may not have known. Thanks to IMDB for the info!
Jamie Lee Curtis performed the helicopter rescue scene herself. At her insistence, director James Cameron agreed to let her perform this scary spectacle. According to Jamie Lee Curtis, on the TV special promoting the film, it was Cameron's idea for her to do the helicopter work; she said, "Oh, yeah. And just where are you going to be while I'm dangling way up there in the air, Jim?" And, according to her, he said, "Hanging out the door filming you with a hand-held camera." So she decided that if he was willing to do that to get the shot, she could stand to do it, too. Curtis did the helicopter stunt on her 35th birthday.
When Harry tells Gib that Helen is having an affair, Gib tells a story about his second wife taking everything when she left him, even the ice cube trays from the freezer. This is a direct reference to Tom Arnold's divorce from Roseanne Barr that was happening at the same time - she was reported to have taken his ice cube trays when she left him as well. Arnold told the story to Cameron on the set while saying: "What kind of sick bitch takes the ice cube trays out of the freezer?" Cameron thought the line was hilarious, and incorporated it into the film.
The set of bra and matching panties worn by Helen Tasker during the striptease scene were Curtis' own. Curtis rehearsed the scene extensively Cameron, and it was there that the fall she makes in the middle of the dance was conceived (it didn't happen spontaneously during the actual shooting, as is often claimed). Schwarzenegger was not told of this beforehand, and this is hinted at when Harry briefly sits up in alarm, realizes that he is breaking character, and then relaxes. They did another take with the same gag, but Harry's reaction didn't look as spontaneous.
Schwarzenegger's biggest challenge for the movie was not doing all the physical stunts, but dancing a tango. He had to take dancing lessons to realistically perform the dance. He rehearsed the scene for about six months, as he wanted to make sure he was as good at the tango as Al Pacino was in Scent of a Woman.
James Cameron can be heard as the helicopter pilot who says, "Yeah she's got her head in his lap, Yahoo!"
Tom Arnold didn't expect to get a role in the movie, and went to the audition mostly for the chance to meet Cameron. He did some scenes with Schwarzenegger, and Cameron immediately noticed the chemistry between the two actors. Afterwards, Arnold jokingly said about Schwarzenegger: "He's not that big, I think I can take him", which highly amused Cameron and sealed the deal. Initially, 20th Century Fox objected (Arnold's reputation at the time wasn't positive, mostly due to his public antics with then-wife Roseanne Barr), but when Cameron threatened to take the movie somewhere else if Arnold couldn't be cast, they relented. When Arnold later learned about this, he was grateful to Cameron for taking a chance on him.
Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Joe Pesci, and Steve Guttenberg were considered for the part of Albert Gibson.
The US Government supplied three Marine Harriers and their pilots for a fee of $100,736 ($2,410 per hour).
Eliza Dushku broke some ribs during the filming of her Harrier jet stunt scenes. It was later revealed by Dushku that this likely wasn't entirely an accident. She was being molested by the stunt coordinator during production and Dushku said that after an adult friend confronted him on the set about the abuse, she was injured during a stunt. Dushku said that this was "no small coincidence.... To be clear, over the course of those months rehearsing and filming True Lies, it was Joel Kramer who was responsible for my safety on a film that at the time broke new ground for action films. On a daily basis, he rigged wires and harnesses on my 12-year-old body. My life was literally in his hands: he hung me in the open air, from a tower crane, atop an office tower, 25+ stories high. Whereas he was supposed to be my protector, he was my abuser.”
Cameron originally hired a team of writers to help him come up with the film's jokes. However, after being mostly unsatisfied with their work, Cameron let them go and decided to try his own hand at comedy. He rewrote the script from scratch and kept only two jokes from the team of writers (one of which being Schwarzenegger's famous "You're fired!" line).
The appearance and traits of Spencer Trilby (Charlton Heston) is based on Nick Fury. Like Fury, Trilby has an eyepatch, and the same manneris”
Cameron originally hired a team of writers to help him come up with the film's jokes. However, after being mostly unsatisfied with their work, Cameron let them go and decided to try his own hand at comedy. He rewrote the script from scratch and kept only two jokes from the team of writers (one of which being Schwarzenegger's famous "You're fired!" line).
The appearance and traits of Spencer Trilby (Charlton Heston) is based on Nick Fury. Like Fury, Trilby has an eyepatch, and the same mannerisms; as well as heading a peacekeeping organization.
A sequel to True Lies was once in the works, which would've reunited the principal cast as well as been directed by Cameron. A script was even ready for this sequel, and had the movie been made, it would've been released sometime in 2002. The sequel idea was eventually scrapped due to script problems as well the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Cameron even said in an interview that he dropped his sequel plans because "in this day and age, terrorism just isn't funny anymore".
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, this is the first movie to have a production budget of $100,000,000, and this made it the most expensive movie at the time.
At one point in the film, Tasker uses a Mk II hand grenade to kill several terrorists. For those wondering where this grenade came from, it was originally in the script that Juno put a grenade between Helen's legs, saying all she has to do is keep her legs closed, which Helen remarks is a problem Juno seems to have. When the two escape, Harry re-pinned the grenade using Helens diamond earring for use again later. They cut this scene out of the film, causing this grenade's presence to be a continuity error, however the scene remains in the novelization by Dewey Gram and Duane Dell'Amico. This grenade, complete with the earring in place of the pin, is prominently visible on many of the posters for the movie and on the region 2 DVD cover.
Originally, the writers wanted Schwarzenegger's character during the horse chase sequence to chase after the suspect through the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument. The National Parks Service refused to allow that to happen.
Jodie Foster was originally cast as Helen Tasker, but was forced to turn the role down because she was signed on to star in Nell. Rosanna Arquette, Kim Basinger, Annette Bening, Joan Cusack, Geena Davis, Melanie Griffith, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Madonna, Demi Moore, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sharon Stone, Emma Thompson, Lea Thompson, Debra Winger, Sigourney Weaver, Julianne Moore, Julia Roberts, Claudia Wells, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Sandra Bullock and Madeleine Stowe were also all considered for the role of Helen.
Curtis said that in his contract Schwarzenegger gets top billing then the title then it would have said starring Jamie Lee Curtis but when Cameron finished editing the film and he saw that the film was really "a domestic epic, it's a film about a marriage." So Cameron called Schwarzenegger and asked him if it would be ok to put Jamie Lee Curtis' name before the title, to which Schwarzenegger immediately agreed. In the world of show business, as Curtis said, "The credit is such a coveted, negotiable, commodity" that for Schwarzenegger to give her billing before the title "was a real mensch move on his part."
This was one of the last first-run films to have a 70mm release. James Cameron personally paid for 16 70mm prints of the film to be struck.
Schwarzenegger had a near-fatal accident on set during the horse riding scene, when his horse got startled and ran out of control. Schwarzenegger managed to slide off the horse, but did this near a 30-foot drop-off. His personal stunt man saw what happened and was able to grab him before he went over the ledge.
Schwarzenegger recalled, "The hardest thing was sitting in a cockpit for hours and days and weeks. It was 100 degrees inside... That was torturous."
James Cameron described his creative process as "what I'm good at is working with actors to create scenes and then editing their performances to get the absolute best vibrating version of that scene and then share that with the audience. It's an amazing process to go through. Sometimes you think it's not going to work when you get started and then the characters come to life."
The bathroom fight scene was only half a page in the script, and only mentioned a struggle, but no specifics. When Cameron came to inspect the set two days before the scene was supposed to be filmed, he said that it needed to be three times bigger for all the shooting, fighting and other destruction that he had in mind (he wanted lights to come down from the ceiling and water spraying from broken toilet bowls and faucets). This was the first time that the art direction crew had ever heard of this, giving production designer Peter Lamont and his team only two days to redesign and rebuild the set to Cameron's wishes. Shooting the scene was scheduled to take one day of filming, but ultimately took five days.
Arnold and Schwarzenegger had to do 20 takes of the scene where Schwarzenegger abruptly stops the car and demands to see the missing transcript page. Arnold forgot to say the scripted line during the first two takes, so Cameron insisted that he use it. He did it on the third take, but Cameron then forced him to improvise 17 more takes. The one that ended up in the movie is where he replies "My turn to drive?" Arnold later confirmed on his Twitter account that he also improvised 15 takes of the scene where he comments on Dushku's helmet; the line that ended up in the film was "Boy, I remember the first time I got shot out of a cannon".
Below you’ll find the original trailer for the film along with some behind-the-scenes making of videos to enjoy!