Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

continue supporting him.”

Although Waldheim did not attend our wedding, the People’s Party sent two representatives to the reception who unveiled an attention-grabbing present: a life-size papier-mache caricature of Maria and me wearing Austrian folk outfits. In a toast I gave thanking people for all the letters and gifts, I wove that in. “I want to thank also the representatives from the Austrian People’s Party for coming here, for giving us this gift, and I know that this is also with the blessing of Kurt Waldheim. I want to thank him also for it, and it’s too bad he’s going through all these attacks right now, but that’s what political campaigns are all about.”

Someone gave this to USA Today, which mentioned it in a story about the wedding, drawing me into an international controversy that dragged on for years. When it was finally proven that Waldheim had lied about his military record, he came to symbolize Austria’s refusal to face its Nazi past. I was still struggling to understand the horrors of Naziism myself, and if I’d known the truth about Waldheim, I would not have mentioned his name.

That regret was still to come, however. Maria and I jumped in the limo and headed for the airport feeling like this was the best wedding we’d ever been to. It was a very special day. Everyone was happy. Everything was a straight ten.

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Maria had told her fans on the CBS Morning News that she was taking off only a few days. I didn’t have much time to honeymoon either. We went to Antigua for three days, and then she came with me to Mexico to spend a couple of days on the Predator set. When we arrived, I had everything prepared: the flowers were ready in the room, and I took Maria to a romantic dinner with mariachi music. When we came back to the room, I opened a bottle of great California wine, which I figured would lead to some good action. Everything was perfect the whole evening—until she went to take a shower. Then I heard loud screams coming from the bathroom, like in a horror movie.

I should have known. Joel Kramer and his stunt crew had decided play a joke on us newlyweds. Actually, it was payback, because some of the stunt guys and I had put spiders in Joel’s shirt and snakes in his bag. The set was like a summer camp in that way. So when Maria opened the shower curtain, there were frogs hanging off it. You’d think she’d understand the mentality, because her cousins in Hyannis were playing practical jokes all the time. But she has a quirk: although she’s physically daring—Maria wouldn’t think twice about jumping off a thirty- foot cliff into the ocean—if she sees an ant, or a spider, or there’s a bee in the bedroom, she freaks. You’d think that a bomb had gone off. Same thing with her brothers. So the frogs really triggered some drama. There was no way Joel could have known this, but even so his joke was highly successful. Fucking Joel screwed up my entire night.

Then Maria headed home, and it was time for me to get back to work as Major Dutch Schaefer, the hero of Predator. It’s a sci-fi action movie, of course, in which I’m leading my team in the jungles of Guatemala as guys are getting picked off and skinned alive by an enemy we don’t understand. (It turns out to be an alien, equipped with high-tech weapons and invisibility gear, that has come to earth to hunt humans for sport.) Producers Joel Silver, Larry Gordon, John Davis, and I took a big risk in picking John McTiernan to direct. He had done only one movie, a low-budget horror film called Nomads about some people who drive around in a van and create mayhem. What set it apart was the tension McTiernan maintained in a film that cost less than $1 million to make. We felt that if he could create that kind of atmosphere with so little money, he must be very talented. Predator would need suspense from the moment the characters arrive in the jungle—we wanted the viewer to feel scared even without the predator around, just from the mists, the camera movements, the way things came toward you. So we gambled that McTiernan could handle a production more than ten times as expensive.

Like any action movie, Predator was more of an ordeal than a pleasure to make. There were all the hardships you’d expect in a jungle: leeches, sucking mud, poisonous snakes, and stifling humidity and heat. The terrain McTiernan picked to shoot on was so rough that there was hardly an inch of level ground. The biggest headache, though, turned out to be the predator itself. Most of the time it keeps itself invisible, but when it appears onscreen it is supposed to look alien and fearsome enough to terrify and wipe out big, macho guys. The predator we had wasn’t up to the job. It had been designed by a special-effects company that the movie studio chose to save money: Stan Winston, who created the Terminator, would’ve cost them $1.5 million, and this other shop charged half that. But the creature came across as ridiculous, not menacing; it looked like a guy in a lizard suit with the head of a duck.

We started to worry as soon as we started test shooting, and after a few scenes, the worry crystallized. The creature didn’t work, it was hokey, it didn’t look believable. Also, Jean-Claude Van Damme, who was playing the predator, was a relentless complainer. We kept trying to work around the problem. Nobody realized that the creature footage couldn’t be fixed until we were all back from Mexico and the film was in the editing room. Finally the producers decided to hire Stan Winston to do a redesign and arranged to send us back down to Palenque to reshoot the climactic confrontation. That’s a night sequence where the predator is revealed fully and goes mano a mano with Dutch in the swamp.

By now it was November, and the jungle was freezing cold at night. Stan’s predator was much bigger and creepier than the one it replaced: a green extraterrestrial, eight and a half feet tall, with beady sunken eyes and insect-like mandibles for a mouth. In the dark it uses thermal vision technology to find its prey, and Dutch, who by this time in the movie has lost all his clothes, covers himself with mud to hide. To shoot that, I had to put cold, wet mud on my body. But instead of actual mud, the makeup artist used pottery clay—the same clay they use to make the bottle-holders that keep your wine chilled at the table in restaurants. He warned me, “This will make the body cool down a few degrees. You may be shivering.” I was shivering nonstop. They had to use heat lamps to warm me, but that made the clay dry out, so they didn’t use them much. I drank jagertee, or hunter’s tea, a schnapps mixture you drink while ice curling. It helped a little, but then you got so drunk it was hard to do the scene. You try to control your shivering while the camera is on, hold onto something really hard to stop the shaking, because as soon as you let go, it starts again. I remembered putting mud all over myself as a kid on the Thalersee and thought, “How did I ever enjoy that?”

Kevin Peter Hall, the seven-foot-two-inch actor who had taken over in the predator suit, was facing his own challenges. He had to look agile, but the costume was heavy and off balance, and with the mask on, he couldn’t see. He was supposed to rehearse without the mask and then remember where everything was. That worked most of the time. But in one fight, Kevin was supposed to slap me around but avoid my head; all of a sudden there was a “whap!” and there was this hand right in my face, claws and all.

The hassle paid off at the box office the following summer. Predator had the second-biggest opening weekend of any 1987 film (after Beverly Hills Cop II) and ended up grossing $100 million. McTiernan turned out to have been a great choice, and you could see from Die Hard the next year that his success with Predator was no fluke. In fact, if a director of his caliber had done the sequel to Predator, the movie could have become a major franchise on a par with Terminator or Die Hard.

I had a parting of the ways with the studio executives about that. What happened with Predator happens to a lot of successful movies with first-time directors. The director goes on making hits, and his fee goes up: after Die Hard, McTiernan’s was $2 million. And, of course, costs had risen in the years since Predator, but the studio executives wanted to do a sequel that would cost no more than the first movie. That ruled out McTiernan. Instead, they hired another relatively inexperienced and inexpensive director; in this case, the guy who’d made A Nightmare on Elm Street 5. Joel Silver wanted me to do Predator 2, but I told him that the movie would take a major dive. Not only was the director wrong, but the script was wrong too. The story was set in Los Angeles, and I told him, “Nobody wants to see predators running around downtown LA. We already have predators. Gang warfare is killing people all the time. You don’t need extraterrestrials to make the town dangerous.” I felt that unless they paid to bring in a good director and a good script, hiring me wasn’t going to do anything. He wouldn’t budge, so I walked away. Predator 2 and all the other Predators that followed flopped, and Joel and I never worked together again.

The studios have the hang of it better today. They do pay for the sequel of a successful picture. They pay the