Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

I could go on for hours about what draws me to Maria but still never fully explain the magic. Ronald Reagan famously would sit and write ten-page love letters to his wife, Nancy, while she was sitting just across the room. I used to think, “Why wouldn’t he just tell her?” But then I realized that writing something is different from saying it —and that love stories are built around people’s idiosyncrasies.

CHAPTER 14 What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Stronger

CONAN THE BARBARIAN IS set in primitive Europe during the fictional Hyborian Age, after the sinking of Atlantis but thousands of years before the dawn of recorded history. I arrived in Madrid in early December to witness it taking shape in modern-day Spain. John Milius had been telling people we were out to make “good pagan entertainment, first and foremost a romance, an adventure, a movie where something big happens”—and also full of action and gore. “It’ll be barbaric,” he promised. “I’m not holding myself back.”

To bring his vision to the screen, he’d recruited the A team: masters like Terry Leonard, the stunt director who’d just worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark; Ron Cobb, the production designer responsible for Alien; and Colin Arthur, formerly of Madame Tussauds, to supervise the making of human dummies and body parts. By the time I got there, Conan was already its own little industry. The movie’s headquarters was in a swanky hotel in central Madrid where most of the actors and senior crew would stay, but the real action took place in locations all across Spain. Two hundred workers were busy building sets in a large warehouse twenty-five miles outside of the city. Outdoor sequences were scheduled for the mountains near Segovia, as well as the spectacular dunes and salt marshes of Almeria, a province on the Mediterranean coast. A Moroccan bazaar in the provincial capital was to be dressed as a Hyborian city, and we were also due to film at an ancient fortress nearby and at other historical sites.

The $20 million production budget was lavish: the equivalent of $100 million today. Milius used the money to put together an amazing roster of people and special effects. He brought in artisans, trainers, and stunt experts from Italy, England, and the States, as well as the dozens of Spaniards the film employed. The script called for an animal population of horses, camels, goats, vultures, snakes, dogs, a hawk, and a leopard. More than 1,500 extras were hired. The score was to be performed by a ninety-piece orchestra and a twenty-four-member choir, singing in a mock Latin language.

Milius was fanatical that every bit of clothing and gear be true to the fantasy. Anything made of leather or cloth had to be aged by having cars drag it through the dirt until it looked dirty and worn. Saddles had to be hidden under blankets and furs because John said in those prehistoric times, there would have been no saddle makers stitching leather. The weapons came in for an endless amount of attention. The two broadswords for Conan himself were custom forged to Ron Cobb’s drawings and inscribed with a pretend language. Four copies were made of each sword at $10,000 each. Naturally John insisted that these swords and all the other weapons had to be weathered looking, not gleaming. They were meant to kill, not shine, he said. Killing was the bottom line.

I busied myself during December studying lines, helping block out action scenes, and getting to know the other people on the Conan team.

Milius had unorthodox ideas about choosing a cast: he picked athletes instead of actors for other big parts. As my sidekick, the archer Subotai, he hired Gerry Lopez, a champion surfer from Hawaii who had starred as himself in Milius’s previous movie, Big Wednesday. And as Conan’s love, the thief and warrior Valeria, he chose Sandahl Bergman, a professional dancer recommended by director-choreographer Bob Fosse. John believed that the rigors of weight training, dancing, or being out seven hours a day surfing waves that could kill you built strength of character, and he was sure that this would show through on the screen. “Look at the faces of people who went through horrible times; people from Yugoslavia or Russia,” he would say. “Look at the lines, the character in their faces. You can’t fake that. These people have principles that they will stand and die for. They are tough because of the resistance they’ve fought through.”

Even a fanatic like John realized that our lack of experience in front of the camera might be a problem. To inspire us and help offset the risk, he cast some veterans too. James Earl Jones was just finishing a run on Broadway as the star of Athol Fugard’s A Lesson from Aloes, and he signed on to play Thulsa Doom, the evil sorcerer and king who slaughters Conan’s parents and sells the young hero into slavery. Max von Sydow, the star of many Ingmar Bergman films, joined as a king who wants to reclaim his daughter who has run off to join Thulsa Doom’s snake cult.

One of Milius’s concerns was finding guys bigger than me to play Conan’s enemies, so it didn’t look like Conan was just going to run over everybody. He was very particular about that: they had to be taller and more muscular than me. On the bodybuilding circuit, I’d met a Dane named Sven-Ole Thorsen, who was six foot five and weighed over three hundred pounds. Sven also had a black belt in karate. I contacted him on Milius’s behalf and put him in charge of looking for other big guys. At the beginning of December they all came to Madrid, a half dozen big, really threatening-looking Danes: power lifters, hammer throwers, shot-putters, martial-arts experts. Among them I felt like the little guy, and I’d never felt that before. We worked together, training with the battle-axes and swords and the horseback riding. I had a big head start, of course, but by the time we started shooting in January, the Danes were getting pretty good, and they made a major contribution to the battle scenes.

I was thrilled to see all of this unfold around me. Just as my stunt teacher predicted back in LA, the movie machinery was working on my behalf. I was Conan, and millions of dollars were being spent to make me shine. The movie had other important characters, of course, but in the end it was all geared to making me look like a real warrior. The sets were built for that purpose too. For the first time, I felt like the star.

It was different from being a bodybuilding champion. Millions of people were going to watch this movie, whereas in bodybuilding the biggest live audience was five thousand and the biggest TV audience was one million to two million. This was big. Movie magazines were going to write about Conan, the Calendar section in the LA Times was going to write about it, and magazines and newspapers around the world were going to review it and analyze it—and debate about it, no doubt, because what Milius envisioned was so violent.

Maria came to visit for a few days at the end of December after spending Christmas with her parents. This gave me a chance to introduce her to the crew and the cast, so she wouldn’t think I’d dropped off the face of the earth. She got a laugh out of how I’d already assembled a whole posse of friends from the muscle world: not just the Danes but also Franco, because I’d arranged a small part for him.

I was glad that Maria wasn’t still there when we started filming a week later. In the first scene we were scheduled to shoot, an unarmed Conan, newly released from slavery, is being chased by wolves across a rocky plain. He escapes by scrambling up an outcropping, where he will stumble upon the mouth of a tomb containing a sword. In preparation for this sequence, I’d been working every morning with the wolves, just to conquer my fear. The wolves were actually four German shepherds, but without telling me, Milius had ordered the stunt coordinator to rent animals that had some wolf in them. He thought that would heighten the realism. “We’ll time it all out,” he promised me. “You’ll already be running when we release the dogs, and they won’t have enough time to cross the field and get you before you’re up the rocks.”

On the morning we shot the scene, they sewed raw meat into the bearskin on my back to attract the dogs. The cameras rolled, and I sprinted across the field. But the trainer let the dogs loose too soon, and I didn’t have enough of a head start. The wolf pack caught me before I could get all the way up the rocks. They bit at my pants and dragged me down off the rock, and I fell ten feet onto my back. I tried to stand and rip off the bearskin but fell over into a thornbush. The trainer called out a command, and the dogs froze and stood near me, drooling.

I’m lying there full of thorns and bleeding from a gash where I’d landed on a rock. Milius was not sympathetic. “Now you know what the film is going to be like,” he said. “This is what Conan went through!” I went off to get stitches, and when I saw him later at lunch, the director was in a great mood. “We got the shot. We’re off to a great start,” he said. The next day I ended up needing more stitches after I cut my forehead leaping into a rocky pool. When Milius saw the blood running, he said, “Who did that makeup? It’s terrific. Looks like real blood.” He refused to think about what would have happened to the production if I’d been crippled or killed. But of course there was no stunt double because it would have been very difficult to find anyone who had a body like mine.