Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

goes way beyond comedy or drama or sports. The number one show is The Running Man, a live contest in which convicted criminals are given a chance to run for freedom but are hunted down and slaughtered onscreen like animals. The story follows the hero, Ben Richards, a cop who has been wrongly convicted and winds up as a “runner” fighting to survive.

In fairness, Glaser just didn’t have time to research or think through what the movie had to say about where entertainment and government were heading and what it meant to get to the point where we actually kill people onscreen. In TV they hire you and the next week you shoot, and that’s all he was able to do. As a result, The Running Man didn’t turn out as well as it should have. With such a terrific concept, it should have been a $150 million movie. Instead, the film was totally screwed up by hiring a first-time director and not giving him time to prepare.

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Scripts for Total Recall had been kicking around Hollywood for so long that people were saying the project was jinxed. Dino De Laurentiis owned the rights for much of the 1980s and tried to produce the movie twice—once in Rome and again in Australia. It was a different kind of movie from what it ultimately became: less violent and more about the fantasy of taking a virtual trip to Mars.

I was pissed that Dino didn’t offer it to me, because I told him that I would like the part. But he had a different vision. He hired Richard Dreyfuss for the Rome attempt and Patrick Swayze from Dirty Dancing for the Australian attempt. Meanwhile, he gave me Raw Deal. They finally got as far as building sound stages in Australia and were about to start shooting Total Recall when Dino ran into money trouble. This had happened several times during his career. It meant he had to get rid of some of the projects.

I called Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna at Carolco, which was then the fastest-growing independent film production company, riding high from doing the Rambo movies. They’d bankrolled Red Heat, and I thought they’d be perfect for Total Recall. I said, “Dino is wiping out. He has a lot of great projects, and there’s one specifically that I want to do.” They moved fast, launched an all-out assault, and bought it from him within days. I was the driving force through all these years.

So now the question was who should direct. It was still unresolved a few months later when I ran into Paul Verhoeven in a restaurant. We’d never met, but I recognized him: a skinny, intense-looking Dutch guy about ten years older than me. He had a good reputation in Europe, and I’d been impressed by his first two English-language movies, 1985’s Flesh+Blood and, two years later, RoboCop. I went over and said, “I would love to work with you someday. I saw your RoboCop. It’s fantastic. I remember Flesh+Blood, and it was also fantastic.”

“I’d love to work with you too,” he said. “Maybe we can find a project.”

I called him the next day. “I have the project,” I said and described Total Recall. Next I called Carolco and said, “Send Paul Verhoeven the script immediately.”

A day later Verhoeven told me that he loved the script, even though there were a few changes he wanted to make. That was normal: every director wants to pee on the script and make his mark. His suggestions were smart and made the story much better. He immediately dug into the research on Mars: How would you free the oxygen that’s bottled up in the rocks there? There had to be a scientific basis for it. Paul added a dimension of realism and scientific fact. Control of Mars in the story now hinged on controlling the oxygen. So many things he said were brilliant. He had a vision. He had enthusiasm. We got together with Carolco and discussed what he wanted to change, and Paul signed on to direct the movie.

That was in the fall of 1988. We went into full swing in rewriting, and then into full swing on where to shoot it, and then into full swing on preproduction, and we started filming in late March at the Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. We shot all the way through the summer.

We chose Mexico City in part for the architecture: some of its buildings had just the futuristic look the movie needed. Computer-graphics imagery was not yet very capable, so you had to do a lot of work in the real world, either by finding the perfect location or by building full-scale sets or miniatures. The Total Recall production was so complex that it made Conan the Barbarian seem small-scale. The crew, which numbered more than five hundred people, built forty-five sets that tied up eight sound stages for six months. Even with the savings that came from working in Mexico, the movie cost more than $50 million, making it the second most expensive production in history at that point, after Rambo III. I was glad that Rambo III had been a Carolco production, so Mario and Andy weren’t allergic to the risk.

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