Schwarzenegger says he could feel the wire that made his red eye glow burning him during filming. When I talked about the movie, I found myself focused more on the Terminator character than on Reese, the hero. I had a very clear vision of the Terminator. I told Cameron: ''One thing that concerns me is that whoever is playing the terminator, if it's O.J. Simpson or whoever, it's very important that he gets trained the right way. Because if this guy is really a machine, he won't blink when he shoots. ''When he loads a new magazine into his gun, he won't have to look because a machine will be doing it, a computer. When he kills, there will be absolutely no expression on the face, not joy, not victory, not anything.'' No thinking, no blinking, no thought, just action. I told him how the actor would have to prepare for that. In the army, we'd learned to field strip and reassemble our weapons by feel. They'd blindfold you and make you take apart a muddy machinegun, clean it and put it back together. ''That's the kind of training he should do,'' I said. ''Not too different from what I was doing in Conan.''

I described how I'd practised for hours and hours learning to wield a broadsword and cut off people's heads like it was second nature. When coffee came, Cameron said suddenly, ''Why don't you play the Terminator?'' ''No, no, I don't want to go backward,'' I said. The Terminator had even fewer lines than Conan - it ended up with 18 - and I was afraid people would think I was trying to avoid speaking roles, or, worse, that a lot of my dialogue had been edited out of the final film because it wasn't working. ''I believe that you'd be great playing the Terminator,'' Cameron insisted. ''Listening to you, I mean, you could just start on the part tomorrow! I wouldn't even have to talk to you again. There's no one who understands that character better. ''And Arnold, it's the title role! You are the Terminator. Imagine the poster: Terminator: Schwarzenegger.''

I told him that being cast as an evil villain wasn't going to help my career. It was something I could do later on, but right now I should keep playing heroes so that people would get used to me being a heroic character. Cameron disagreed. He took out a pencil and began to sketch. ''It's up to you what you do with it,'' he argued. ''The Terminator is a machine. It's not good, it's not evil. ''If you play it in an interesting way, you can turn it into a heroic figure that people admire because of what it's capable of.'' He showed me his drawing of me as the Terminator. It captured the coldness exactly. I could have acted from it. ''I am absolutely convinced,'' Cameron said, ''that if you play it, it will be one of the most memorable characters ever. I can see that you are the character, and that you are a machine, and you totally understand this. You're passionate about this character.'' I promised to read the script one more time and think about it. By now the bill for lunch had arrived. In Hollywood the actor never pays. But John Daly couldn't find his wallet, Gale Anne Hurd didn't have a purse, and Cameron discovered he didn't have any money either.

Finally I said, ''I have money.'' After having to borrow my plane fare from my girlfriend Maria, I never left the house without $1000 in cash and a no-limit credit card. So I paid, and they were very embarrassed. When I came back from Mexico in February 1984 after filming Conan The Destroyer, I was ready to start preparing for The Terminator. I had just a month before we started shooting. The challenge was to lock into the cyborg's cold, no-emotion behaviour. I worked with guns every day before we filmed, and for the first two weeks of filming I practised stripping and reassembling them blindfolded until the motions were automatic. I spent endless hours at the shooting range, learning techniques for a whole arsenal of different weapons, getting used to their noise so that I wouldn't blink. Why I understood the Terminator is a mystery to me. While I was learning the part, my mantra was the speech Reese makes to Sarah Connor: ''Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.'' I worked on selling the idea that I had no humanity, no expressiveness, no wasted motion, only will. Cameron had promised to make the Terminator a heroic figure. We talked a lot about how to do that. How do you make people admire a cyborg that massacres 30 cops? It was a combination of how I played the part, how he shot the character, and subtle things Jim did to make the cops look like schmucks.

I didn't try to build chemistry with Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn, who play Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. Just the opposite. They get a lot of screen time, but they were irrelevant as far as my character was concerned. The Terminator was a machine. He was just there to kill them and move on. The less chemistry, the better. The Terminator was not what I'd call a happy set. How can you be happy in the middle of the night blowing things up, when everybody is exhausted and the pressure is intense to get complicated action sequences and visual effects just right? Much of the time, I had glue all over my face to attach the special effects appliances. I have strong skin, luckily, so the chemicals never ruined it much, but they were horrible all the same. Wearing the Terminator's red eye over my own, I'd feel the wire that made it glow getting hot until it burned. I had to practise operating with a special effects arm that was not mine, while for hours my real arm was tied behind my back. Cameron was full of surprises. One morning, as soon as I was made up, he said, ''Get in the van. We're going to go shoot a scene.'' We drove to a nearby residential street, and he said, ''See that station wagon over there? It's all rigged. When I give the signal, walk up to the driver's side door, look around, punch in the window, open the door and get in, start the engine, and drive off.'' We didn't have the money to get permission from the city and to properly set up the scene of the Terminator jacking a car, so that's how we did it instead. It made me feel like I was part of Jim's creativity, sneaking around the permit process to bring in the movie on budget. Lame ideas really irritated him, especially if they involved the script. I decided one day that The Terminator didn't have enough funny moments.

There's a scene where the cyborg goes into a house and walks past a refrigerator. So I thought maybe the fridge door could be open, or maybe he could open it. He sees beer inside, wonders what that is, drinks it, gets a little buzz, and acts silly for a second. Jim cut me off before I could even finish. ''It's a machine, Arnold,'' he said. ''It's not a human being. It's not E.T. It can't get drunk.'' Our biggest disagreement was about ''I'll be back''. That of course is the line you hear the Terminator say before it destroys the police station. The scene took a long time to shoot because I was arguing for ''I will be back''. I felt the line would sound more machine-like and menacing without the contraction. ''It's feminine when I say the I'll,'' I complained, repeating it for Jim so he could hear the problem. ''I'll. I'll. I'll. It doesn't feel rugged to me.'' He looked at me like I'd lost my mind. ''Let's stick with I'll,'' he said. But I wasn't ready to let it go, and we went back and forth. Finally Jim yelled, ''Look, just trust me, OK? I don't tell you how to act, and you don't tell me how to write.'' And we shot it as written in the script.

This is an edited extract from Total Recall, by Arnold Schwarzenegger (Simon & Schuster, $32.99).