Arnold Schwarzenegger is back--just a little later than he expected. His latest movie, Collateral Damage, was due in October but was postponed after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Schwarzenegger plays a fireman who witnesses his family killed in an office-building bomb blast initiated by Colombian militants and is out to exact revenge for his wife and son.

Is the 54-year-old back to his butt-kicking ways? Sure looks like it. He recently sat down with us to speak about the timing of his movie's release, preparations for the next Terminator and why he'll be quitting acting in the near future.

Collateral Damage had the highest profile of all the movies rescheduled after the terrorist attacks. Do you feel any differently about the film now than you did a few months ago?
Not at all. It was never a movie about terrorism. That's already been done.

We wanted to let people look seriously at the idea of collateral damage, the innocent victims that are killed, whether it's the bombing in Yugoslavia or Afghanistan or the terrorists attacking the World Trade Center--how many lives have been taken that have nothing to do with warfare and what hostility that creates in a national sense.

Pretty relevant questions with what's going on right now.
You can't fight terror with terror. America has tried that in the past, and it has created a cycle of violence that has nations hating you and looking to pay you back.

In the aftermath of 9-11, some people were saying that action movies, as Hollywood has defined them, were dead. Do you believe that?
Journalists have to fill space and write their stories. I know that firsthand from my wife [NBC journalist Maria Shriver]. But video rentals of action movies were up, and television and movie audiences have responded differently than the media imagined. People still want to see heroic stories.

One typical comment after the attacks was that it was like seeing something out of a movie.
Except if it were a movie, I don't think people would have believed it. It was so big, so organized. Critics would have said, "Typical Hollywood nonsense. They always have to go over the top." You watch our movie now after seeing those towers come down, and it feels so little. It was staggering to see that.

Does it change your outlook on making movies?
One thing I know for sure is I'll be out of acting within the next few years. I only have one life, and I want to do as many things as possible. There is nothing more refreshing to the mind than to start from the bottom and work your way back up.

Do you have anything in mind?
It could very well be directing, or it could be politics. I'll decide between both in the next few years.