One of the many things that has made Arnold Schwarzenegger and some of the best action movies so iconic is his incredible one-liners. From “Get to the chopper!” in Predator or “Hasta la vista, baby!” in Terminator 2, these quotes have become legendary. Believe it or not, though, the action star actually had a problem with his most popular line from Terminator, “I’ll be back,” and he got into a dispute with its director James Cameron over it while they were filming the movie.
We hear “I’ll be back” for the first time in the Terminator scene when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin character is denied entry into the police station where his targets Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese are. He stays true to his word that he’ll return by violently driving a car through the police station and killing any police crew in his way. But, there was a time that Schwarzenegger tried to rewrite this quotable line only to get shot down. He went into more detail about what happened on Jimmy Kimmel Livesaying:
With ‘I’ll Be Back,’ I remember at the beginning we had a dispute, the director and I, because I couldn’t really — I didn’t really feel comfortable with this ‘I’ll Be Back,’ this ll type of thing. So I said, ’Why don’t I just, since I already talk like a machine, I might as well just say, ‘I will be back.’ And he says, ‘No, no, it doesn’t sound as good.’ I said, ’Well, it sounds better to me. Let’s just forget about the ‘I’ll be back’ let’s just do ‘I will be back.’ He says, ‘Arnold, are you the fucking writer here? What is going on here?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not the writer.’ He says, ’Well I’m the writer! So I decide what we’re gonna do.
I do see where Arnold Schwarzenegger was coming from where cyborgs are expected to talk like computers with perfect grammar. I feel like the Predator actor would have been able to make the line work if it was said in a more threatening tone like, “I will be back.” But, Cameron’s “I’ll be back” is a quicker line to get through, and it does have some zing. Even if the sentence didn’t work for Schwarzenegger, it certainly worked for millions of fans who watched. Plus, the dialogue couldn’t have been too cringe for the former Governor of California to say as he still drops that famous one-liner to the chagrin of his own children.
When “I’ll be back” was first written in The Terminator script, no one including Cameron, anticipated this line would be so quotable. Schwarzenegger continued to tell Jimmy Kimmel how he knew his disputed one-liner was trending, saying:
That’s exactly what we did. We shot 10 different takes of ‘I’ll be back,’ and one of them they used and we did not know this was going to be such a famous line until the movie came out. I remember I walked through Central Park and someone came up to me and says, ‘Can I repeat this line?’ I said in German, ‘Which line?’ ‘Well, I’ll be back.’ I said, ‘I’ll be back.’ They said, ‘No, no, no–the way you said it in the movie! The way you said it in the movie was just perfect.’ [Arnold tries again] ‘I’ll be back.’
And you better believe that dialogue found its way back in all of the Terminator movies. It might as well be the movie’s motto at this point. That line has been said repeatedly by the killer Cyborg himself, John Connor in Terminator Salvation, and Sarah Connor utters the prominent line in Terminator: Dark Fate. Linda Hamilton actually had a hard time saying it without sounding like Schwarzenegger which led to them having to redo it.
Director Tim Miller didn’t really want to use it in his Terminator movie, but he included it more for fan service. To do something different with the line, he gave it to Hamilton to say instead of Schwarzenegger. It might as well be a golden rule at this point to include this quote in every Terminator movie.
The line “I’ll be back” may not have been ideal for Arnold Schwarzenegger when it first appeared in the Terminator script, but it absolutely worked well with his fans. You can hear the celebrated quote from The Terminator, one of the best sci-fi movies ever, by watching the film with a Max subscription.