Before he was a governor, international film star and champion bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a teenager in the Austrian Army.ESPN Films goes back to those early days in a new film that will open a new documentary shorts series, 30 For 30 Shorts, in September. The films, part of a collaboration with Bill Simmons' Grantland.com, will premiere online.
The Schwarzenegger film looks at his mandatory military service, the time when became immersed in bodybuilding. He faced early resistance to his pursuit, but said the lesson served him well on his path to success in film and politics.
"You realize you've got to continue to pay no attention to the naysayers. That helped me the rest of my life," he told television critics on Friday.
As a youth pursuing bodybuilding, he remembered how his father thought he should be putting his physical skills to more practical use, such as chopping wood, and how his mother worried about him having pictures of muscular men on his bedroom wall.
His mother "called the house doctor and said, 'Is something wrong? Is my son turning south here?', because all of his friends have girls on the walls of their bedrooms and he has only men oiled up with little briefs on," Schwarzenegger said.
That resistance continued in the military, although his superiors eventually came around as he started enjoying success in competition. Schwarzenegger said he maintained a positive outlook despite any negative reaction, an attitude that he said has served him well in life.
"I never saw a no as a no. I always heard, 'Yes,' " Schwarzenegger said. "What was important to me was I had a very clear vision of where I wanted to go. I wanted to come to America, I wanted to be a bodybuilding champion, I wanted to be the strongest man in the world. … I was absolutely convinced, no matter what anybody said, that it was possible to reach."
When asked about drug use in sports, Schwarzenegger said he took steroids in an earlier, more experimental era before much was known about their effects.
Today, "every sport is trying everything they can, including bodybuilding, weightlifting and power-lifting, to get rid of the drugs. It is a very big challenge to do, because for every test you have the drug companies make something you cannot detect," he said.
Michael Zimbalist, the film's co-director, finds Schwarzenegger's determination admirable.
"When Arnold was 18 years old, he didn't have success, he didn't have a fortune and fame. He didn't have anything to fall back on. He had everybody telling him that his aspirations were silly and he should give them up," he said. "He turned lemons into lemonade in that situation."
Schwarzenegger, who turned 65 this week, has been in the news lately, talking about his upcoming lead role in the film, The Last Stand, and opening a public-policy think tank at the University of Southern California.
At the ESPN panel, he also talked about his partnership with Sylvester Stallone, with whom he has worked on The Expendables and in two upcoming films, the Expendables sequel and The Tomb.
"I don't know if there will be another movie together or if there will be 10 more. We have no plan," he says. "I'm sure the way it looks right now, the test scores the way that they show on The Expendables (2), it's going to be a big hit, it's going to be most likely a bigger hit than the last one, and then he will be probably coming back and asking me again to be in the next movie."
In addition to the shorts, ESPN also will present new films in its returning 30 for 30 documentary series, including films on Bo Jackson, Ben Johnson and athletes going broke.
