Israeli army commando turned Hollywood military adviser Uzi Gal has a new mission: Terminate Arnold Schwarzenegger
As a member of the Israel army's elite commando unit, Uzi Gal trained to do battle with terrorists. These days he is a terrorist. Not in real life, but on the big screen: In the summer action hit "True Lies," Gal leads a squad of Arab bad guys, roughs up Jamie Lee Curtis, and ends up impaled through the eye by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It's an auspicious debut for Gal, who carved out a place for himself in Hollywood as the in-house military trainer and adviser of Hollywood's top action-filmmaker Jim Cameron, director of the "Terminator" movies. When it was time to audition a team of swarthy Middle-Eastern types to play the nuke-bearing bad guys in "True Lies," Cameron hired Gal to assess their physical abilities. Then Gal was asked to train those cast in conventional weapons, and to make them appear part of a cohesive unit. Finally he insisted that Gal also climb out from behind the spotlight and, for the first time, read for a part himself.
"You remember that accent you used to have?" Cameron told him shortly before his reading. "I want you to get it back."
Gal, 32, is a stocky man with a cleft chin who exudes physical and mental solidity. The Beersheba native's Iraqi-born father was, in the 1950s, one of Israel's first paratroopers. During his youth Gal studied judo, becoming an Israeli national youth champion in his teens. His ability to focus on goals served him well in his army service, which began in 1980. He regarded his draft as an opportunity to seek the best in himself and he ended up in the top commando unit, Sayeret Matkal, the general staff's reconnaissance and special duties force.
Immersing himself in the crack unit and its culture, Gal gave serious consideration to an offer to make the army his career. But the priorities of a young man can change over time, and by the end of his three-year stint Gal, eager for new scenery, boarded a plane for Los Angeles.
He found a job installing solar heating units, eventually drifting into the personal security business. Within a short time, Gal was sought by an assortment of celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor and Bruce Willis.
"I was probably among the highest-paid bodyguards," Gal recounts, "but I wouldn't want to recommend it as a career - not in the United States, anyway. The field isn't as well developed as in Israel. But what got to me most was that though you see yourself as a professional, the person paying your salary sees you as one of the hired help. I didn't want to see myself that way."
Throughout this period Gal kept up with his judo, training at a well-known Los Angeles dojo affiliated with the Japanese Buddhist Tenri Church, teaching at the Beverly Hills YMCA and at an inner city youth center. In 1987, after working out for a week with a visiting contingent of judoists from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he was asked to teach a week-long course at the campus on the Hudson River.
In 1990, still working in security, Gal met another Sayeret Matkal vet, Israeli director and long-time Hollywood resident Avi Nesher. Nesher was then gearing up to direct a small-budget science fiction thriller he had written called "Timebomb," with Michael Biehn, who had starred in two Cameron films, "Terminator" and "Aliens."
In "Timebomb," Biehn was cast as a mild-mannered watch repairman who discovers that, unbeknown to himself, he is a CIA-trained killer. Nesher needed someone to help Biehn learn how to carry himself as an assassin, and hired Gal to put him through an approximation of Israeli basic training.
"Avi promised he would back me completely and that Michael wouldn't be allowed to flake, so I agreed." Biehn hit the beaches for three months of running through the surf and doing pazatztot, the army's inevitably painful technique for "hitting the dirt" under fire. Biehn didn't Gal (above and at right) manhandles Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies': This is art, not war' "flake" and his performance in this straight-to-video film benefited greatly from the experience. It was Biehn who recommended Gal's services to Cameron.
Having had his fill of Hollywood lunches and shmoozing with more people than he would have liked, Gal is not overly enamored of the film industry. "This business is about creating an illusion," he says. "And sometimes the way of doing business here is not very direct or concrete. I prefer to do a good job and let the work speak for itself."
No wonder Gal likes working with Cameron. The director has a reputation as a demanding perfectionist and taskmaster: The cast and crew of "True Lies" had T-shirts printed up after the shoot which read: "You don't scare me - I worked with Jim Cameron."
"There's never any nonsense with him," Gal says admiringly. "Jim would have made an ideal member of my army unit. He doesn't look the type, but he would have been the kind of soldier every commander dreams of. This is a man who doesn't stop until he gets what he wants."
Cameron first utilized Gal to train Linda Hamilton for her role as Sarah Conner, the battle-ready heroine of "Terminator 2." Gal muscled her up, put her through three months of military training, and then did a similar job with actor Robert Patrick, who plays the lethal T-1000 robot who almost terminates Schwarzenegger's Terminator. Cameron, who later married Hamilton, was so taken with Gal's results that he hired the Israeli as his personal trainer.
Playing a terrorist in "True Lies" earned Gal both membership in the Screen Actor's Guild and the services of an agent. He doesn't know what kind of a market exists for actors with his looks and accent, but he isn't going to worry about it. His next assignment is to train Biehn for a new action role. That suits him fine.
Says Gal: "Apart from standard weapons training, safety and authenticity - like counting bullets and making sure people aren't shooting 500 rounds with a handgun that could shoot only 13 rounds - it is my job to come up with new things that help the director feel he is doing something realistic, but new.
"When I first started, I used to say, This is how you do things.' But if you do the moves as fast as you would in real life, the cameras don't get it. I have since learned to adapt, and to blend my ability and my experiences into something that works for movies. This is art, not war. You can cut, you can do things in stages. And more than anything else, there are no casualties."