Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

actors more money, and the writers more money, and they bring back the director. It doesn’t matter if the sequel costs $160 million to make. Franchises such as Batman and Ironman are going to gross $350 million per movie at the box office. The Predator movies could have been like that. But with a cheaper director, and cheaper writers and actors, Predator 2 became one of the biggest bombs of 1990. They didn’t learn and made the same mistake with the third Predator movie twenty years after that. Of course it’s always easy to be smart in hindsight.

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I was riding the great wave of action movies, a whole new genre that was exploding during this time. Stallone started it with the Rocky movies. In the original Rocky, in 1976, he’d looked like just a regular fighter. But in Rocky II, he had a much better body. His Rambo movies, the first two especially, also had a giant impact. My 1985 movie Commando continued that trend, coming out in the same year as the second Rambo and Rocky IV. Then The Terminator and Predator expanded the genre by adding sci-fi dimensions. Some of these movies were critically acclaimed, and all of them made so much money that the studios could no longer write them off as just B movies. They became as important to the 1980s as Westerns were in the 1950s.

The studios couldn’t wait to cook up new scripts, dust off old scripts, and have writers tailor scripts to me. Stallone and I were the leading forces in the genre—although Sly was really ahead of me and got paid more. There was more work for action stars than either of us could do, and others emerged in response to the demand: Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis. Even guys like Clint Eastwood, who were doing action movies all along, started bulking up and ripping off their shirts and showing off muscles.

In all this, the body was key. The era had arrived where muscular men were viewed as attractive. Looking physically heroic became the aesthetic. They looked powerful. It was inspiring: just looking at them made you feel that they could take care of the job. No matter how outlandish the stunt, you would think, “Yeah, he could do that.” Predator was a hit partly because the guys who go into the jungle with me were impressively muscular and big. The movie was Jesse Ventura’s acting debut. I was at Fox Studios when he came to interview for the job, and after he walked out, I said, “Guys, I don’t think there’s even a question that we should get this guy. I mean, he is a navy frogman, he’s a professional wrestler, and he looks the part. He’s big and has a great deep voice; very manly.” I’d always felt we lacked real men in movies, and to me Jesse was the real deal.

My plan was always to double my salary with each new film. Not that it always worked, but most of the time it did. Starting from $250,000 for Conan the Barbarian, by the end of the 1980s, I’d hit the $10 million mark in pay. The progression went like this:

The Terminator

(1984)

$750,000

Conan the Destroyer

(1984)

$1 million

Commando

(1985)

$1.5 million

Red Sonja

“cameo” (1985)

$1 million

Predator

(1987)

$3 million

The Running Man

(1987)

$5 million

Red Heat

(1988)

$5 million

Total Recall

(1990)

$10 million

From there I went on to $14 million for Terminator 2 and $15 million for True Lies. Bang, bang, bang, bang; the rise was very fast.

In Hollywood, you get paid for how much you can bring in. What is the return on investment? The reason I could double my ask was the worldwide grosses. I nurtured the foreign markets. I was always asking, “Is this movie appealing to an international audience? For example, the Asian market is negative on facial hair, so why would I wear a beard in this role? Do I really want to forgo all that money?”

Humor was what made me stand out from other action leads like Stallone, Eastwood, and Norris. My characters were always a little tongue in cheek, and I always threw in funny one-liners. In Commando, after breaking the neck of one of my daughter’s kidnappers, I prop him up next to me in an airline seat and tell the flight attendant, “Don’t disturb my friend, he’s dead tired.” In The Running Man, after strangling one of the evil stalkers with barbed wire, I deadpan, “What a pain in the neck!” and run off.

Using one-liners to relax the viewer after an intense moment started accidentally with The Terminator. There’s a scene where the Terminator has holed up in a flophouse to repair itself. A paunchy janitor pushing a garbage cart down the hall thumps on the door of the Terminator’s room and says, “Hey, buddy, you got a dead cat in there or what?” You see from the Terminator’s viewpoint as it selects from a diagram listing “possible appropriate responses”:

YES/NO

OR WHAT

GO AWAY

PLEASE COME BACK LATER

FUCK YOU

FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE

Then you hear the one it chooses: “Fuck you, asshole.” People in the theaters were howling at that. Was the guy going to be the next victim? Would I blow him away? Would I crush him? Would I send him to hell? Instead, the Terminator just tells him to fuck off, and the guy goes away. It’s the opposite of what you expect, and it’s funny because it breaks the tension.

I recognized that such moments could be extremely important and added wisecracks in the next action film, Commando. Near the end of the movie, the archvillain Bennett nearly kills me, but I finally win and impale him on a broken steam pipe. “Let off some steam,” I joke. The screening audience loved it. People said things like “What I like about this movie is there was something to laugh about. Sometimes action movies are so intense you get numb. But when you break it up and put in some humor, it’s so refreshing.”

From then on, in all my action movies, we would ask the writers to add humor, even if it was just two or three lines. Sometimes a writer would be hired specifically for that purpose. Those one-liners became my trademark, and the corny humor deflected some of the criticism that action films were too violent and one- dimensional. It opened up the movie and made it appealing to more people.

I’d visualize an inventory of all the different countries in my mind’s eye—a little like the Terminator’s list of “possible appropriate responses” in that flophouse scene. “How will this play in Germany?” I’d ask myself. “Will they get it in Japan? How will this play in Canada? How will this play in Spain? How about the Middle East?” In most cases, my movies sold even better abroad than in the United States. That was partly because I traveled all over promoting them like mad. But it was also because the movies themselves were so straightforward. They made