Total Recall (1990): 15 Weird Facts You Didn't Know!

[00:00:00]Remember when a sci-fi movie could hand you fake memories, Martian mutants, and still leave everyone arguing 35 years later about whether any of it actually happened? Well, that is Total Recall. In 1990, Arnold Schwarzenegger and director Paul Verhoeven made one of the strangest, bloodiest, and most quotable sci-fi movies of the decade. Arnold plays Douglas Quaid, a construction worker who buys himself a memory vacation to Mars and accidentally uncovers a life full of spies, rebels, mutants, corporate villains, and one very angry fake wife. Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside, Ronnie Cox, and Rachel Ticotin came along for the ride, plus enough ham-handed practical effects to make every viscera kid pause the tape and wonder what they just saw. And behind the scenes, the road to getting this thing made was so long, so cursed, and so genuinely dangerous that it is kind of a miracle it exists at all. Here are 15 weird facts about Total Recall.

[00:00:57]Number 15, 16 years, 40 drafts, and a $1,000 bet that paid off. In 1974, producer Ronald Shusett bought the film rights to Philip K.

[00:01:08]Dick's short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale for $1,000. Just a thousand bucks for what became one of the most expensive sci-fi productions Hollywood ever attempted. Shusett brought in Dan O'Bannon, his co-writer on Alien, to adapt it. They got 30 pages in and then hit a wall because Dick's story basically ends there. There's no second act, no third act, no Mars, just a guy, a memory booth, and abrupt stop.

[00:01:34]So, they invented the rest, and every studio in town said the same thing.

[00:01:38]Too expensive, too weird, unfilmable.

[00:01:41]Then came 16 years of directors cycling through and a script that piled up around 40 drafts. David Cronenberg alone wrote 12 of them over the course of a year. His own version was darker and stranger and much closer to Dick until Shusett told him out that what they actually wanted was Raiders of the Lost Ark goes to Mars. So, Cronenberg walked.

[00:02:04]Patrick Swayze stepped up to star under director Bruce Beresford. Sets went up in Australia, and then the company bankrolling the whole thing, the Dino De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, went broke and took the whole production down with it. Sets and all. That is when Schwarzenegger pounced. He had been chasing the role for years, and the second the project came loose, he convinced Carolco Pictures to buy the rights for a relatively cheap $3 million.

[00:02:30]He then negotiated himself an $11 million salary, 15% of the profits, and veto power over producer, director, screenplay, co-stars, and the marketing.

[00:02:41]He basically bought the movie and let himself shoot it. Philip K. Dick never saw a single frame. He died in 1982, 8 years before the film came out. Number 14, the director who invented Quato and then quit. The creepiest thing in Total Recall came from the one director who walked away from the movie. The mutants on Mars, that is all Cronenberg. Quato, the psychic little brother sprouting out of a grown man's torso, also Cronenberg.

[00:03:10]He dreamed up the single most unforgettable image in the whole film, and then quit before anyone shot a frame of it. Verhoeven inherited the monster and had the good sense to keep it. His version was a little weirder, though.

[00:03:23]Quaid's hidden identity was not a secret agent at all. He was Chairman Mandrell, the dictator of Earth buried inside a fake life. None of that survived except the mutants. The one part everyone remembers is the one part that was not even Verhoeven's idea. Cronenberg got the last word eventually. Nine years later, he made Existenz all simulated reality and memory implants, and that queasy dread he did better than anyone.

[00:03:49]It barely registered at the box office, but it is genuinely great. He just had to wait. Number 13, the three-breasted woman was almost a cow. Of all the things people remember about Total Recall, the three-breasted woman in the Martian bar beats the mutants, beats the Mars chase scene, even beats Arnold himself. She is on screen for maybe 2 seconds, but she had been the movie's mascot for 35 years, and she was almost a cow. The original design did not have three breasts. It had four. That was Verhoeven's call, and he had a reason, kind of. He said he'd seen medical photos back in college of a woman born before nipples, filed it away, and then decided Mars was the place to use it.

[00:04:33]The man who saved everybody was Rob Bottin, the effects artist. He looked at the four-breasted version and pointed out that it had tipped over from sci-fi into something closer to livestock.

[00:04:45]Lisha Naff, the actress under prosthetic, put it more bluntly, the feedback was that she looked too bovine, like a cow ready to be milked, and that was not the vibe. So, they cut one, and the rest is history. Number 12, he brought his entire Robocop crew. The moment Schwarzenegger had the project locked, his first call was not to a casting agent.

[00:05:08]It was to Paul Verhoeven. Arnold had been floored by Robocop and wanted exactly that flavor. Violent, satirical, beamed in from somewhere slightly off planet. One problem, though, Verhoeven had other offers and was not sure Total Recall was the one, but Arnold lobbied him personally until he was. Once Verhoeven said yes, he brought the whole gang with him.

[00:05:30]Ronnie Cox, the corporate snake from Robocop, came back to play the corporate snake in space. Rob Bottin, who had butted heads with Verhoeven over Robocop effects, signed up for round two as the cinematographer, the editor, and production designer. The villain seat took a detour. Kurtwood Smith, who played a psycho Clarence Boddicker in RoboCop, was offered Richter and passed, figuring he'd already done this exact guy once. So, Verhoeven handed it to Michael Ironside, who'd been considered for RoboCop and missed out the first time around. One way or another, the part was going to a RoboCop alumnus.

[00:06:09]Number 11, the entire crew got sick and two people did not. Total Recall shot at Estudios Churubusco in Mexico City across as many as 45 sets.

[00:06:20]Six months production, and somewhere in the thick of it the food and water turned on everyone. Food poisoning tore through nearly the entire crew.

[00:06:28]Verhoeven got the worst and refused to leave. They parked an ambulance on set and ran an IV into him between takes so he could keep directing while his body staged a full revolt. Stopping was not an option, either, since insurance would not cover his first hospital days. And every day he could not work meant about $150,000 carved out of the budget. So, he directed sick on a drip for weeks. Then there was the air. The Mexico City smog was so brutal that associate producer Elliott Schick ended up hospitalized, struggling to breathe. The production designer later said it was like smoking two packs a day. Arnold never got sick, not even once. He had learned his lesson getting wrecked by the water on Predator a couple years earlier. So, this time every meal was catered and flown in from states. He ate alone, stayed healthy, and watched the production fall apart around him. Ronald Shusett dodged it, too, brushing his teeth only with bottled water and taking a vitamin B12 shot every week. Number 10, everyone got hurt, but no one stopped. For a film this physical, injuries were kind of given. For the shot where Quaid smashes a train window, a tiny charge was rigged to blow the glass a beat before his fist arrived, but it misfired. Arnold's arm went through real glass and opened up his wrist. Stitches, then back to work.

[00:07:51]He later broke a finger on his right hand during another fight and finished the movie in a cast. Watch the back half and that right hand is suspiciously absent, tucked out of frame shot after shot. Ironside got the worst of it.

[00:08:04]During a chase, he collided with co-star Michael Champion, cracking his sternum and popping two ribs. He had to spend 3 weeks on the sidelines, and when he was finally cleared, he still could not lift his left arm. First thing on the schedule was the elevator brawl with Schwarzenegger. So, they tracked down a rib brace that belonged to Raiders quarterback Jim Plunkett, the kind of rig built to lock cracked ribs and a sternum in place. Ironside strapped it on under the costume, and they shot the whole fight. Number nine, Kuato took 15 people to run and 9 hours to put on. Kuato, the mutant resistance leader sprouting out another man's belly, is one of the most genuinely unsettling things in all of '90s sci-fi, and there is not a single pixel of him anywhere. Rob Bottin built the whole thing by hand and bolted it onto actor Marshall Bell, who played George, the poor guy who had to carry him around.

[00:08:59]Day one, the makeup took 9 hours to attach. The puppet weighed 80 lb, and running it took something like 15 puppeteers at once, each working a different piece of face, the eyes, the hands, just to get through one take.

[00:09:12]Bell has not sugarcoated that week. He barely slept. The rig was crushing, and Verhoeven, never the most nurturing director, barked "Be a man." at him in front of the whole crew while he was buckling under the weight. At one point, Bell faked passing out just so he would be allowed to drop to his knees and rest for a second. Verhoeven swore the thing read as real. He claimed people stopped him during production, Dead serious wanting to know if Marshall Bell was an actual conjoined twin.

[00:09:42]Number eight. The X rating that almost ended everything. Verhoeven and the ratings board have a history and it is not a warm one. Robocop is first American movie came back from the MPAA with an X and he had to keep slicing until they gave him an R.

[00:09:58]Total Recall walked the same plank. The first cut earned an X entirely for the violence.

[00:10:04]Making one of the last films branded with that old scarlet letter before the board rolled out the NC-17 just a few months later. To claw back to an R, Verhoeven trimmed and re-angled the goriest moments. The body count stayed put. On the commentary track, he and Arnold pegged it at 77 kills, a number they figured was the highest of the era.

[00:10:24]What changed was not how many people died but how much you got to see.

[00:10:28]Benny's death is a giveaway. In the original, the drill burst clean out of his stomach. The version you see is cropped a little to hide the exit. And even after all that trimming, Total Recall still plays like one of the most gleefully violent studio movies ever released and that is the toned-down cut.

[00:10:46]Number seven. The last old-school blockbuster and the first new one. Total Recall sits at a weird intersection in movie history. It is one of the last of its kind and one of the first of what came next. Both at once. The Mars landscapes, the colony, all those sweeping establishing shots are physical miniatures. Hand-built and modeled on real photographs of the Martian surface.

[00:11:09]Massive, painstaking, done the old way because in 1989, there genuinely was not a better tool for the job. Nearly every effect of movie is something you could have reached out and touched. The standout exception is the X-ray security scene where Quaid and the guide dog stroll through a scanner as glowing skeletons. That was CGI, one of the first photorealistic computer sequences in a mainstream Hollywood film. The team tried to animate it with early motion capture.

[00:11:39]The mocap flat out failed, and they ended up hand animating the whole thing to make it read like a real x-ray. To build the dog skeleton, they had nothing to scan. So, they digitized a wolf skeleton borrowed from the museum next to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

[00:11:54]Number six, the futuristic subway was really just a subway. The movie is set in 2084, and most of that world got built from scratch on the sound stages at Estudios Churubusco. The futuristic subway, though, nobody built that. They just borrowed it. That is the Mexico City Metro. The crew rolled in, painted the train cars and walls a grim cement gray, covered up the signage, bolted TV monitors all over the interiors, and called it the future. The station interiors are Metro Chabacano. The entrance you see is Metro Insurgentes.

[00:12:32]Real stations, real trains, just slightly disguised. Number five, Sharon Stone was a nobody than she absolutely was not. By 1989, Sharon Stone had been grinding in Hollywood for the better part of a decade, little parts, forgettable movies, a career stuck in neutral. When Total Recall handed her Lori, Quaid's loving wife who turns out to be a planet agent assigned to babysit him, and then when that fails, kill him.

[00:13:01]Arnold was so impressed by her commitment that he started calling her the female Terminator, and the Stunt Women's Association made her an honorary member. The film's stunt team will tell you a double handled most of the heavy kicks, and Stone got shot mostly in close-up. But, it does not matter. She walked away with the better story.

[00:13:19]Verhoeven also wanted both of his leads to bare more in the early bedroom scene.

[00:13:25]Arnold was game. Stone said no. So, he shot it as you see it and years later on the commentary admitted he got his own back on the next project together, which was Basic Instinct. Verhoeven had been watching her play Lori. He clocked the way she could swing from warm to lethal and back in a single breath, no transition, no tell. That flip is the entire engine of Catherine Tramell, one supporting role in an Arnold movie and he had already spotted the star hiding inside it. Number four, the sequel that accidentally became a Spielberg movie.

[00:13:59]Total Recall made $261 million.

[00:14:03]So naturally there would be a sequel and for a while there really was one. The seed was already buried in the first movie when the Martian mutants were hinted to be psychic. Co-writer Gary Goldman grabbed the rights to another Philip K. Dick story, The Minority Report, and the plan reshaped into a follow-up.

[00:14:22]Quaid running an outfit of psychic mutants who could see crimes coming and stopped them before they happened. By the mid-90s, this was real. Arnold was attached to star, Verhoeven was attached to direct and there was a script everyone liked. But then Carolco fell apart. The studio was bleeding money on a Dune Geena Davis pirate epic called Cutthroat Island. It flopped so catastrophically that it helped sink the entire company into bankruptcy in 1995.

[00:14:50]So Total Recall 2 went down with everything else. But the underlying Dick story survived. The rights got scrubbed clean of any Total Recall connection and sold off. They bounced around and eventually landed in Steven Spielberg's hands. It got Tom Cruise out front and in 2002 it came out as Minority Report, one of the finest sci-fi films of its decade. Number three, they almost cut Mars out of the Mars movie. Picture Total Recall with no Mars, no colony, no mutants, no Quatto, no rebels, no just a guy on Earth who thinks he had a weird dream. That movie almost got made back when Dino De Laurentiis still had the project. He looked at the most expensive part of the script, the Mars finale where Quaid triggers an alien reactor and gives a whole planet an atmosphere, and decided it was too hard and too costly to put on screen. His fix was to gut it, change the ending, lose the part that made the story work because Mars getting there was too difficult to visualize. Ronald Shusett, the guy who carried the thing for over a decade, was not having it. He fought De Laurentiis on it for weeks and eventually threatened to pull the plug entirely. He would rather have the movie never get made than watch it get made wrong, and he won. De Laurentiis eventually backed down and even came around to apologize for the whole fight.

[00:16:12]Number two, Arnold spent an hour on the phone for a stranger. Michael Ironside played Richter like a man perpetually wanting a bad phone call from a heart attack. Off camera, the bad phone calls were real. All through the Mexico City shoot, Ironside kept slipping away at lunch to call home. His sister was when he was gravely ill back in Canada, and he phoned her every single day. Arnold noticed the pattern, the worried face, the constant calls, and finally asked who was on the other end. He walked Ironside into his trailer, set up a conference call, and Wendy got on the line. The three of them talked for an hour. The most famous bodybuilder live coaching a critically ill woman through food and exercise and reasons to keep fighting, and it did not end when the call did. Ironside found out later that Arnold rang Wendy four or five more times that week on his own just to check in and pump her up. She pulled through.

[00:17:08]Ironside told the story for decades and it still never shrinks. Number one, the ending is a little bottomy and And hid it in plain sight. Watch the very last shot. The screen does not cut to black.

[00:17:21]It bleaches to white. That was not a stylistic shrug. That was Verhoeven telling you exactly what happened in a language he figured nobody would bother to read. Black is a safe good night. A fade to white in old film grammar means one of two very different things.

[00:17:37]Someone is waking up or someone is dying. And that is the whole movie in a single color because those are the only two ways out of the story. Either Quaid is waking up from the vacation he bought or his mind is being switched off for good. Verhoeven picked white precisely so both could be true at once. For his money, it is the second one. Quaid is getting lobotomized in the chair and that glow swallowing the screen is his brain going dark while his face settles into something almost peaceful. The music was not it too. Jerry Goldsmith named the six-minute cue that scores a whole triumphant finale end of a dream.

[00:18:14]Not the escape. Not victory on Mars. End of a dream. The composer scoring the hero's big win quietly called it the moment the fantasy ends. Two men on this production left the same clue in two different languages and most people walked right past both. There was nearly a version that spelled it out. One more scene back at Recall with a heartbroken Sharon Stone watching procedure finish.

[00:18:38]They blew so far past the budget that they could not afford to shoot it. And someone pointed out that a flat-out downer sells fewer tickets.

[00:18:45]So the gut punch got cut and the whiteout was left to carry the whole grim idea alone. Verhoeven made peace with it. He knew most people would file out certain that the muscle-bound hero won, killed the villain, got the girl, saved Mars. He cast a man famous for walking away from explosions and the crowd assumes he walked away from this one, too. The director, though, shot a tragedy. The audience watched a triumph. But both of them are right and that is as close to a real answer as Total Recall is ever going to give you.