That Time James Cameron Took Arnold Schwarzenegger to a Remote Amazon Village Where Everyone Chanted His Name

At this point, most people know who Arnold Schwarzenegger is. But James Cameron wasn’t convinced that a tribe in the Amazon would be among his fans.

During an onstage conversation Wednesday at the Academy Museum David Geffen Theater in Los Angeles, the star recalled a conversation he had with his Terminator director years back during a trip to the Amazon.

In his chat to promote his limited edition TASCHEN photo book, Schwarzenegger revealed how Cameron — a “great friend of mine” — joined him in Brazil for an international conference alongside Indigenous leaders and environmental experts, focused on the environment back in 2011. After speaking, the pair arrived at the Amazon via sea plane, Schwarzenegger shared.

“As we were approaching this tribe in Amazon that he knew, [Cameron] says, ‘I just want you to know not to get your ego bruised because they, no one is gonna know who you are, that I can promise you.’ I said, ‘Well, thank you for warning me, but trust me, it’s not gonna bruise my ego, don’t worry about it.'”

But after landing, Schwarzenegger revealed that Cameron’s expectations were far off.

“Within a minute people were chanting: ‘Arnold, Arnold, Arnold, Arnold!’ And then they took me to a hut where they had actually a poster of mine inside that hut,” he added. “As I was looking at this poster, this huge snake dropped down from the tree that almost killed us. I mean, a monster snake just dropped down and a wild board was running around and it was all these animals there.”

“It was just crazy. But I mean, Jim Cameron was like freaking out. He says, ‘Well, I guess I was wrong for the first time in my life.’ You know, Jim has a big ego, but in any case, that was really funny.”

Still, Schwarzenegger gave Cameron credit for the tribe recognizing him when he got off the plane.

“It was some of his movies that they saw and I was in his movies, but no one expected them because there was no television set there,” he said. “So we don’t know really how they get their information and how they got to see those movies or anything like that. So, I was very happy to be that recognized all over the world.”

Of course, Schwarzenegger and Cameron’s creative relationship dates back to 1984’s The Terminator, and even extends to True Lies a decade later.

Speaking at An Evening with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor also praised their initial film together, as well as the franchise’s writer and director, as he said the future of artificial intelligence Cameron predicted in the movies has “become a reality.”

“Today, everyone is frightened of it, of where this is gonna go,” Schwarzenegger said of current concerns around AI. “And in this movie, in Terminator, we talk about the machines becoming self-aware and they take over,”

Celebrating the “brilliance of writing” in the 1984 sci-fi flick, the former California governor said that ‘”at that time we (had) scratched the surface of AI, artificial intelligence.”

“Now over the course of decades, it has become a reality. So it’s not any more fantasy or kind of futuristic. It is here today. And so this is the extraordinary writing of Jim Cameron,” Schwarzenegger continued.