Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

What drew me to the story was the idea of virtual travel. I play this construction worker named Doug Quaid who sees an advertisement from a company called Rekall and goes there to book a virtual vacation to Mars. “For the memory of a lifetime,” the ad says, “Rekall, Rekall, Rekall.”

“Have a seat, make yourself comfortable,” the salesman says. Quaid is trying to save money, but right away the salesman, who’s a little slippery, tries to get him to upgrade from the basic trip. He asks, “What is it that is exactly the same about every vacation you’ve ever taken?”

Quaid can’t think of anything.

“ You! You’re the same,” says the salesman. “No matter where you go, there you are. Always the same old you.” Then he offers alternate identities as an add-on for the trip. “Why go to Mars as a tourist when you can go as a playboy, or a famous jock, or a …”

Now Quaid is curious in spite of himself. He asks about going as a secret agent.

“Aaaah,” says the salesman, “let me tantalize you. You’re a top operative, back under deep cover on your most important mission. People are trying to kill you left and right. You meet a beautiful, exotic woman … I don’t wanna spoil it for you, Doug. Just rest assured, by the time the trip is over, you get the girl, you kill the bad guys, and you save the entire planet.”

I loved that scene of a guy selling me a trip that, in reality, I never would actually take—it was all virtual. And, of course, when the Rekall surgeons go to implant the chip containing the Mars memories into Quaid’s brain, they find another chip already there, and all hell breaks loose. Because he isn’t Doug Quaid: he’s a government agent who was once assigned to the rebellious mining colonies on Mars and whose identity has been wiped and replaced with Quaid’s.

The story twists and turns. You never know until the very end: did I take this trip? Was I really the hero? Or was it all inside my head, and I’m just a blue-collar jackhammer operator who may be schizophrenic? Even at the end, you aren’t necessarily sure. For me, it connected with the sense I had sometimes that my life was too good to be true. Verhoeven knew how to balance the mind games with action. There’s a scene in Total Recall where Quaid, now on Mars, stands in front of his enemies as they start shooting at him from close range. Thousands of bullets are flying, and you’re grabbed by the suspense. Suddenly he vanishes, and you hear him calling out from nearby, “Ha ha ha, I’m over here!” They were shooting at a hologram he’d projected of himself. In science fiction you can get away with such stuff, and no one even questions it. That’s great, great storytelling; the kind that has international appeal and staying power. It wouldn’t matter if you watched Total Recall twenty years from now, you could still enjoy it, just as you can still enjoy Westworld today. There’s just something very appealing about futuristic movies if they have great action and believable characters.

It was a tough movie to make, with lots of stunts and injuries and craziness and night shooting and day shooting and dust. But when the set is the tunnels of Mars, it’s interesting work. Verhoeven did a great job directing me and the other leads, Rachel Ticotin, Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside, and Sharon Stone. Sharon, who plays Quaid’s wife, Lori, is actually a government agent sent to keep an eye on him. She follows him to Mars, breaks into his room, and kicks him in the stomach.

“That’s for making me come to Mars,” she says. By the end of the next scene, she’s saying, “Doug … you wouldn’t hurt me, would you, honey? Sweetheart, be reasonable … We’re married,” while she’s pulling out a gun to kill him. He shoots her between the eyes. “Consider that a divorce,” he says. Where else in movies do you get away with that: a guy shoots his beautiful wife in the head and then makes a wisecrack? No such thing. Forget about it. That’s what makes science fiction wonderful. And what makes acting wonderful.

Working with Sharon will always be a challenge. She is a sweetheart of a person when not on the set, but there are some actors who just need more attention. One violent scene was hard to film because I was supposed to grab her by the neck, and she freaked. “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” At first I figured that she hadn’t been brought up like a tomboy and tried to sympathize, but it was more than that. We found out that she’d had a serious neck trauma early in her life. I think she even had a scar.

“Sharon,” I said, “we all rehearsed this in the hotel room on Sunset. Paul was there, we all were there, going through scene by scene. Why did you never say, ‘By the way, when we get into the fight scene, it says here that you’re strangling me, I have a little hang-up about my neck’? Then we could have worked around it step-by-step. I would gently put my hand on your neck, and then you let me know when I can squeeze tighter and when we can get a little rough. Because I’m the first one to understand.” Paul calmed her down, and Sharon was willing to work through the scene. She wanted it to be a success; we just had to go through the difficult step first. That’s the way it was.

When you’re an actor and when you’re a director, you deal with all of those problems. No one gets up in the morning and says, “I’m going to be difficult today,” or “I’m going to derail the movie,” or “I’m going to be a bitch.” People just have their hang-ups and insecurities, and acting definitely brings them out. Because it’s you who is being judged, it’s your facial expressions, your voice, your personality, your talent—it’s everything about you so it makes you vulnerable. It’s not some product you’ve made or job you’ve done. If someone tells the makeup guy, “Can you tone this down a little bit? I have too much powder there,” he says, “Oh, sorry,” and just wipes it off. But if someone says, “Can you get rid of that self-conscious smile while you’re doing the scene? You have something weird going on in your face,” you feel like “Jesus!” Now you don’t know what to do with your face. Now you’re self-conscious. In acting you take criticism so much more personally. You get upset. But every job has its downside.

In spite of Verhoeven’s amazing work, Total Recall almost got lost on the way to the screen. The trailer we had playing in movie theaters in anticipation of the movie’s release was really bad. It was too narrow; it didn’t convey the film’s scope and weirdness. As always, I was looking at the marketing data from the studio: the “tracking studies” as they’re called, which measure a movie’s buzz.

Marketing departments generate hundreds of statistics, and the trick is to find, right away, the numbers that are really important. The ones I lock in on are “awareness” and “want to see,” which measure how people answer the questions “On this list of movies that are coming out, which have you heard about and which do you want to see?” If people respond, “I know about Total Recall and Die Hard 2 , and I’m dying to see them,” then you know your movie will be up there. An awareness figure in the low to mid-90s means that your movie will probably open at number one and make at least $100 million at the box office. For every percentage point below that, you might gross $10 million less, which is why studios and directors often tweak their movies at the last minute.

Another useful measure, “unaided awareness,” shows whether people spontaneously name your movie among the films they know are coming up. A score of 40 percent or more means you have a winner. Two other numbers also matter a lot: “first choice,” which has to hit 25 percent to 30 percent to guarantee success; and “definite interest,” which has to be between 40 percent and 50 percent.