Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

wondering how to go through this. It was kind of a repeat of the night after I lost Mr. Universe against Frank Zane back in 1968.

Maria was a great support. “Look, the movie was good,” she said. “Maybe it was not what we expected, but it was good, and you should be proud. Now let’s move on. Let’s go to the next project.” We went to our vacation house in Sun Valley, Idaho, and played with the kids. “Don’t take this so seriously,” she said. “Look what we have here. You should think about that, not about the stupid movie. Those things come and go. Plus, on top of it, out of your twenty or so movies, at least two-thirds were successful, so you have nothing to complain about.”

But I think she too was disappointed and probably embarrassed when friends called. That’s what they do in Hollywood. They say, “I’m so sorry about the box-office grosses,” when they are really trying to see how you respond. So Maria was getting calls from friends saying things like, “Oh my God, I saw the LA Times story. God, I’m so sorry! Is there anything we can do?” That kind of dialogue.

We all do it. It’s human nature to empathize with someone else’s troubles. I would call Tom Arnold if one of his movies went down. I would call Stallone. I’d say, “Fuck the LA Times, fuck the trades, those stupid motherfuckers. You’re a great, talented actor.” That’s what you do. But at the same time, there is still a side of you that wonders, “What is he going to say?” So why wouldn’t people call me and do the same thing?

And when you feel embarrassed like I did, you tend to assume that the whole world is focused on your failure. I’d go into a restaurant, and somebody would say, “Oh, hey, how are you doing? I see the new movie’s out, that’s great!” And I’d feel like, “That’s great? You motherfucker. Didn’t you read the LA Times?” But, in fact, not everybody reads the LA Times or Variety or goes to see every movie. The poor guy probably knows nothing about it and just wants to say something nice.

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These woes were nothing another big hit wouldn’t fix. Before summer ended, I was back in front of Jim Cameron’s cameras, galloping a black horse across downtown Washington, DC, chasing a terrorist on a motorbike. True Lies was a large-scale action comedy that had over-the-top special effects, including a shoot-out between terrorists holed up in a Miami skyscraper and me in a Harrier jet, and a nuclear explosion that takes out one of the Florida Keys. And it had funny, complicated relationships, especially between me and my onscreen wife, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. My character, Harry Tasker, is a James Bond–style superspy whose wife, Helen, initially thinks that he’s a computer salesman. Jamie Lee played the part so well that she got nominated for a comedy Golden Globe.

I’d learned about True Lies the previous year, when Bobby Shriver called and said he’d seen a French movie that I might like to remake for the American screen. “It’s called La Totale! ,” he said, “and it’s about this 007-type ass-kicking guy whose wife doesn’t know what he does for a living. Sometimes he comes home all banged up and has to make excuses. He’ll be arresting these international criminals, and, meanwhile, he can’t figure out how to deal with his teenage daughter, who’s doing crazy things.”

“Sounds funny,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s comedy and action. You laugh, but there’s a lot of suspense.” I called the movie’s agent and asked him to send it over, and I fell in love with it. Bobby was right, though: it was too static for an American movie and needed action and energy. “Jim Cameron!” I thought. “He’s been planning to shoot Spider- Man, but that just fell through.” So I called Cameron and said, “Let’s do this together, the way you envision things: big.”

Soon we had a deal with Fox, and Jim was writing the script. All his movies feature strong female characters, and he transformed Helen Tasker from an ordinary hausfrau to the character Jamie Lee plays: smart and sexy, with her own secret life. He’d call me in to consult while the script was taking shape. At one point, we holed up for two days in Las Vegas, exploring how I would talk to my wife, how I’d confront her if I suspected her of having an affair, what I would say to a terrorist before I killed him, how I would handle it if I found out my daughter was stealing from my friend. In those conversations, we tailored the rhythm of the dialogue to me. The timing of the project worked out perfectly: just a few weeks after the disappointment of Last Action Hero, we went into preproduction and were shooting by September 1.

Maria and I turned the making of True Lies into a family adventure. She was eight months’ pregnant when the filming started, and when she announced her maternity leave on her show First Person with Maria Shriver, she told the viewers, “Arnold will be here in Los Angeles when I give birth. Then I’ll pack up my family and go with him, and see how long I last as a set wife.” Cameron arranged it so that we would shoot in LA for three weeks until Patrick was born. Then the production moved to Washington, DC, and sure enough, a few days later, Maria, Katherine, Christina, the baby, and the nanny joined me.

We lived in Washington for a month, and it was an extremely happy time. Cameron, as usual, preferred shooting at night. So I’d work until daybreak, then come home and sleep, and in the afternoon, I’d get up and play with the kids. Katherine was now four and Christina, two and a half, and besides just tickling and horsing around, one of the things we liked to do was paint. My assistant, Ronda, the artist, had gotten me back into painting, something I’d loved as a kid. I’d always talked about going back to it, but I never had the patience to assemble all the materials and sit down to try. So one Saturday morning she came over to the house with a selection of acrylic paints and canvas and said, “For the next three hours, we’re going to paint.”

“Okay,” I said.

We sat, and I picked out a Matisse from an art book and set about copying it: a room with a rug, a piano, and a flower in a vase, with French doors opening to a balcony overlooking the sea. That got me back into art. So now I would draw castles in pen and ink and paint Christmas and birthday cards for Maria and the kids. The girls and I got into this delightful rhythm of making drawings and playing together, and I crayoned a beautiful Halloween pumpkin for Patrick and a birthday cake with candles for Maria.

We were like gypsies for the next several months. We moved with the True Lies production to Miami, where I took Maria and the girls jet skiing. Then we moved to Key West, and then Rhode Island, and, finally, back out west. I did much better than my secret agent character at integrating family and work. Cameron ran an incredibly organized set, and each day there was always time for work and for play. Even so, making True Lies was challenging, and I don’t just mean the many hours I spent doggedly practicing the tango for the ballroom scenes. Cameron was pushing the envelope with the stunts and special effects, and in addition to employing forty-eight stunt people, he had the actors do many stunts ourselves. Jamie Lee dangled from a helicopter that lowered her onto a speeding car on the bridge that joins the Florida Keys. I swam in the ocean to escape a wall of flames. I trusted Cameron not to lead us down the path of death, but those stunts were inherently risky, and if you screwed up, nobody could protect you 100 percent.

My closest call was riding that black horse. In the movie, Harry Tasker chases the terrorist on a motorcycle across a Washington, DC, park, into a luxury hotel, through a ballroom and a fountain, and into a bank of elevators with people wearing tuxedoes and ball gowns until he finally corners the bad guy on the roof. But incredibly, the terrorist revs his bike and does a spectacular jump off the building and into the rooftop pool of an adjacent building. In the heat of the chase, Harry spurs his horse and charges the edge of the roof to make the leap. But at the last instant, the horse puts on the brakes and comes to a skidding stop—so suddenly that Harry flips out of the saddle in a big arc over the horse’s neck and ends up dangling by the reins over the street many stories below. Now his life depends on the horse, which he’s trying to coax to step back from the edge. The rooftop was actually a studio set built ninety feet up in the air. The movie crew was nervous that the horse might not stop in time and we’d skid over the edge, so they’d extended a safety platform, like a heavy-duty gangplank, out from the edge of the roof. That way, if the horse took an extra step or two, we wouldn’t fall. The image of the platform would be edited out of the final print.

Doing a stunt like that, you need a really feisty horse, because you have to do a lot of takes. An ordinary horse will figure out that you are not really going to let it jump, so after the first few tries, it won’t charge all the way to the edge of the roof. Instead, it will slow down halfway across and come to an easy stop. But a feisty horse loves the idea of jumping so much that he’ll charge the edge of the roof all day, hoping that this time you’ll let him go. So I was on a feisty horse, well trained but very aggressive. I loved it because I knew how to handle the animal from my training as Conan.

Before we could start, they had to check the camera angles and measure the focus. So I had to walk the