When I met Arnold Schwarzenegger last month to interview him for his upcoming drama MAGGIE, I was only given a scant four minutes to chat, leaving very little room for talk of other projects. However, after cameras stopped rolling, I couldn’t resist asking him (very quickly) about the status of LEGEND OF CONAN, which we’ve been hearing about for years. He told me the script was still being worked on, and the hope was to shoot it at some point soon, but he couldn’t get much more detailed. Hey, I tried.
The folks at Entertainment Weekly were lucky enough to get a little more out of Arnold in a recent interview. When asked about LEGEND OF CONAN, which has had drafts written by Andrea Berloff (Straight Outta Compton) and Will Beall (Gangster Squad), Arnold responded that it’s looking good and the script is “unbelievably well written.”
“They want to film it in the fall… I don’t know if I will then have the time to film it, but we will sort that out within the next month or two. I can tell you is that it’s unbelievably well written. They’re still tweaking the end but it’s going to be very very powerful. What’s important on this project is they don’t look at it like, ‘Oh this is kind of a sword movie, where they just kill each other, and let’s write it off as a b-action movie.’ They treat it as like, ‘This is a very important movie for us, and we want to make a lot of money with this, it has to be the best quality.’ So the way they treat it is different than in the old days. Now, they see that it is one of those event movies that can come out in the summer and they treat it totally differently.”
When asked if this is the first of a rumored trilogy, Schwarzenegger had an amusing answer:
I never heard that, no. Even though that is a popular thing to do: ‘Why doin’t we just shoot all 12 movies together! Let’s just go on the set now and stay there for the next 18 years!’”
Hey, he’s not getting any younger, one movie at a time!