When Arnold Schwarzenegger got his first copies of his new book Be Useful: Seven Tools For Life, he opened the box with a Conan sword. While that may have been done simply because it made for an entertaining Instagram video, the book itself, as it turns out, contains some pretty wild stories about the actor’s experience making Conan the Barbarian. That including his injuries, and taking a bite out of dead birds.
Conan the Barbarian was Arnold’s biggest movie role to date, really his first movie as an action hero. And according to the book (via Insider) director John Milius required a lot of Arnold personally. He did all of the sword training with Kiyoshi Yamazaki who recently passed away. And There were no stunt doubles doing the difficult stuff. While nothing on set sounds particularly dangerous, it was all very physical and Schwarzenegger ended up bloody and bruised from it all. He explained…
I learned to ride horses and camels and elephants. I learned how to jump from large rocks, how to climb and swing from long ropes, how to fall from a height … I basically went to another vocational school, this one for aspiring action heroes. Then on top of that, [John] Milius had me doing all kinds of terrible shit. I crawled through rocks, take after take, until my forearms bled. I ran from wild dogs that managed to catch me and pull me into a thorn bush.
But the cuts and scraps were not the worst of it. Arnold also reveals that in one scene, he had to take a bite out of a vulture. This apparently wasn’t a prop, it was an actual dead vulture. He continues…
I bit a real, dead vulture that required I wash my mouth out with alcohol after each take. (PETA would have a field day with that one.) … On one of the first days of filming, I tore a gash on my back that required forty stitches.
Yeah, PETA almost certainly would take issue with this, and probably with good reason. A movie using an actual vulture body on set raises a number of questions, not the least of which is just how in the world did the Conan movie come into possession of a dead vulture? Of course, the even bigger question is just how safe is it for a human to bite into a dead vulture multiple times?
The scene in question sees Conan tied to a tree and left for dead. A vulture then comes along, thinking Conan is dead and looking to make a meal of him, but before the bird can start eating Arnold, he takes out the bird with the only weapon available to him, his teeth. Check out the scene below.
This all sounds pretty brutal, though I suppose the fact that Conan the Barbarian would be one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best movies and help make him a movie star probably helped make it all worthwhile. I can only imagine if the often rumored King Conan movie ever happens, Arnold will have a “no vultures” clause in the contract.