Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

James Earl Jones was late joining the production because he had to wrap up his commitment on Broadway, but after he arrived, we quickly became friends. By mid-March, when the production moved from Madrid to Almería to film the battle scenes and the climactic confrontation at Doom’s mountain citadel, I spent days hanging out in his trailer. He wanted to keep in shape, so I helped him with his training, and in return, he coached me on my acting. With his powerful bass voice, James was a wonderful Shakespearean actor, and he’d won both a Tony Award and an Oscar nomination for his performances in The Great White Hope, a drama about racism and boxing. (His character was based on Jack Johnson, the World Heavyweight Champion from 1908 to 1915.) Lately he’d become internationally known as the Star Wars villain Darth Vader. He told me the amazing story of how he’d gotten into acting. As a kid in Mississippi, James had such a serious stutter that from the time he started school at age five until he was fourteen, he refused to talk. The schools classified him as functionally mute. Then in high school he fell in love with literature and felt a desire to read great works aloud. His English teacher encouraged him, “If you like the words, you’ve got to be able to learn to say them.”

Milius wanted me to add a half page of dialogue that he’d written during the shooting. It was in the quiet before the climactic battle at the Mounds, a Stonehenge-like ancient burial ground of warriors and kings by the sea. Conan and his allies have fortified the monument and are waiting to be attacked by Thulsa Doom and a large troop of savage henchmen on horseback. Thulsa Doom has already killed Valeria, and Conan and his friends are greatly outnumbered and expect to die. So before the battle, Conan is sitting on a hillside with his chin on his fist, looking at the sea and the beautiful blue sky and thinking melancholy thoughts. “I remember days like this when my father took me to the forest and we ate wild blueberries,” he says to Subotai. “More than twenty years ago. I was just a boy of four or five. The leaves were so dark and green then. The grass smelled sweet with the spring wind.

“Almost twenty years of pitiless cumber! No rest, no sleep like other men. And yet the spring wind blows, Subotai. Have you ever felt such a wind?” ( Cumber means “burdens.”)

“They blow where I live too,” says Subotai. “In the north of every man’s heart.”

Conan offers his friend the chance to leave and go home. “It’s never too late, Subotai.”

“No. It would only lead me back here another day. In even worse company.”

“For us, there is no spring,” Conan says grimly. “Just the wind that smells fresh before the storm.”

I’d practiced these lines dozens of times, as I always did before a shoot. But I told Milius, “It doesn’t feel natural to me. It doesn’t feel like I’m really, you know, searching and seeing it.” You can’t just recite a monologue like that. It truly has to seem like you are thinking about an earlier time, the memories are coming to you, ideas are popping into your head. In some moments you say things in a rush, and in other moments you just stare. The question was how to create that naturalness.

Milius said, “Why don’t you ask Earl? He does this onstage where the pressure’s even higher because you can’t edit out the mistakes.”

So I went to James Earl’s trailer and asked if he would mind taking a look at the dialogue.

“No, no, absolutely. Sit down,” he said. “Let’s look at that.” He read it and asked me to deliver the lines.

When I finished, he nodded and said, “Well, what I would do is have this retyped two ways. Do it once so the lines are really narrow and go down the entire length of the page. And the second time do it with the paper turned sideways, so that you have the widest lines possible.” He explained that I’d practiced so much that I’d unconsciously memorized the line breaks. So each time I hit one, it came across as a break in thought. “You need to throw off that rhythm,” he explained.

Seeing the lines retyped made me hear them in a different way, which helped tremendously. I came back later in the day, and we dissected and rehearsed the dialogue line by line. “Well, normally after a sentence like this you would pause, because that’s a pretty heavy thought,” he’d say. And, “Here maybe you want to shift position a little bit. Whatever comes to mind, whether it’s a stretch or a shake of the head or just a pause. But you shouldn’t program yourself,” he stressed, “because it could be different from one take to the next, unless John tells you that’ll cause a problem with editing. But usually they only keep a shot until the thought changes, and then they’ll go to another angle.”

Max Von Sydow was generous and helpful too. It was great being able to watch two great stage actors rehearse and fine-tune until they got it right. Working with professionals, you learn a lot of nuances. I realized, for example, that actors often shift gears when the director moves from a master shot, to a medium shot, to a close-up shot, to a micro-shot (which captures, say, the eyes wincing). Some actors pay very little attention to the master shot because they know this is just to establish where they are physically in the scene. Therefore, they don’t overexert themselves. But the closer the shot, the more they perform. You realize how important it is to pace yourself: don’t go all out on the first takes; give just 80 percent. Eventually your close-up will come, and that’s when you really need to act. I figured out that this was also a way to get more close-ups of yourself into the film, because the editing will often pick the shot with the best performance.

Making Conan brought back memories of the wild summers with my Austrian buddies pretending that we were gladiators on the shores of the Thalersee. Here it was Milius’s fantasy that set the pace. Before we shot a scene, he’d tell endless stories from history, about how barbarians ate, how they fought, how they rode, their religions, and their cruelties. For the orgy sequence, he talked about the decadence of ancient Rome, the women, the nudity, the sex, the violence, the intrigues, the feasts. Around us he had the best weapons experts, the best horse people, the best designers, wardrobe, and makeup people, all to draw us into the Conan world.

I loved the immersion of being on location: sharing the Apartamentos Villa Magna with the other actors, driving from there to the warehouse, learning a whole new way of functioning for six months. I’d never filmed in a foreign country before. I picked up a lot of Spanish because very few people on the set spoke English. At first the work was too intense for me to allow myself to do anything but train, rehearse, and shoot. But after a month or two, I started to relax. I realized, “Wait a minute. I’m in Madrid! Let’s go see some museums, let’s go see interesting architecture, buildings, and streets. Let’s try some of the restaurants everyone talks about and have dinner at eleven at night like the Spaniards.” We discovered boot makers, leather makers, and tailors, and started buying uniquely Spanish things like ornate silver ashtrays and beautifully tooled leather belts.

Working for Milius was a constant adventure. I had to tear apart a vulture with my teeth, for example. This was in the scene where Conan’s enemies crucify him in the desert upon the Tree of Woe. The tree was a huge outdoor prop built on a rotating base so that the angles of the sun and shadows would stay constant. As Conan nears death in the boiling heat, vultures circle and gather on the branches, and when one lands to try to feed on his face, I bite its neck and rip it apart with my teeth. Naturally, with Milius the birds on the branches were real—they were trained, yes, but still vultures, with lice all over them. During the three days we needed to shoot the scene, the vultures were taken into a tent every hour to rest while I stayed out on the hot tree with five new vultures. The bird I tore apart was an animated prop made of dead vulture parts. I had to rinse out my mouth and wash my skin with an antibiotic afterward.