Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  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.

  The rest of the week was devoted to an elaborate action sequence from much later in the plot. In our warehouse outside Madrid, the crews had constructed the Orgy Chamber of Thulsa Doom’s mountain temple. From the outside, the warehouse was a big, drab two-story building made of corrugated steel and surrounded by a dusty parking lot, tents, and a crude sign that said “Conan” in red paint. But inside, after you wended your way through the makeup, costume, and prop departments, you were transported into the debauched splendor of the sorcerer’s cannibalistic snake cult. The Orgy Chamber was a high-ceilinged hall with marble terraces and staircases lit by torchlight and draped in beautiful satin and silk, with a dozen naked women and their consorts sprawled on thick cushions in a central pit, dozing and reveling. In the center of the pit rose a pink and gray twelve-foot marble pillar with four giant snake heads carved on top. The feast was being served by attendants from a bubbling cauldron in which you could see severed hands and other body parts.

  The script called for Conan, Valeria, and Subotai to burst in on this orgy, slay the guards, and seize the wayward princess who had fallen under Thulsa Doom’s spell. The guards, of course, were supposed to be subhuman thugs, some of them wearing reptile masks, and I was stripped to the waist with my face and torso painted in fearsome black camouflage stripes that looked like lightning bolts. Sandahl and Jerry were painted in stripes too. It felt fantastic putting our weapons training into action, and Milius was pleased as we worked our way through dozens of shots.

  —

  Movie sets are noisy places between takes, with people talking, equipment clattering, and crews bustling around. On the fourth morning, we were getting ready for a shot in Thulsa Doom’s private alcove, carved high in the wall of the Orgy Chamber, when somebody said, “Dino is here,” and I heard the commotion suddenly stop. I looked down the broad sweep of stairs, and there, in the pit, amid all the naked girls, was our legendary producer making his first appearance on the set. De Laurentiis was immaculately groomed, wearing the most elegant suit with a beautiful cashmere overcoat, which, being Italian, he draped over his shoulders like a cape.

  He stood surveying the whole scene and then climbed up the steps to where we stood. Maybe there were twenty steps, but to me it seemed like a hundred, because it took a long time. I just watched him come closer and closer, with those naked women in the background. Finally he reached the top and walked right to me.

  “Schwarzenegger,” he said, “you are Conan.” And he made a snappy turn and walked back down and off the set.

  Milius had been near the camera, and the microphones were on. He came over to me. “I heard that,” he said. “You realize that’s the greatest compliment you’re ever gonna get from this guy? This morning he watched the three days of film we’ve shot, and now he’s a believer.”

  I felt this was Dino’s way of telling me I was off the hook for calling him short four years ago. From that point on, he would come to Spain once a month or so and invite me to his hotel for coffee. Slowly, we warmed to each other.

  Dino delegated the actual nuts and bolts of producing Conan to his daughter Raffaella and to Buzz Feitshans, who’d worked with Milius on earlier films. Raffaella was a pistol: she was his middle daughter with the Italian actress Silvana Mangano, and she’d known she wanted to be a producer from the time she was a kid. Even though Raffaella was only Maria’s age, Dino had been teaching her the ropes for ten years, and this was already her second major feature.

  I’d learned enough about movie production by now to be impressed with the job that she and Buzz did. They really had to scramble to find a country to shoot in after the Yugoslavia plan fell through. Every country has a film commission, and typically, when you produce a film, you start by calling and saying, “We want to make this movie in your country. What can you do for us?” In the case of Conan, Spain jumped at the chance. The commission told Raffaella and Buzz, “First, we have a great warehouse you can make into a studio. There’s running water, flush toilets, and showers. There’s room for the generators you’re going to need. We have an extra warehouse you can also rent, plus an empty hangar on an air force base. We have a luxury apartment complex in Madrid that’s perfect for the actors and senior crew. It’s attached to a five-star hotel, so you’ll have restaurants and room service always available. There’s room for your production offices too, right around the corner.”

  All that carried a certain price tag. Conan was a complicated project, so Buzz, Raffaella, the designer, the location scout, and others on the production team had to factor in a thousand other items. How many horses would we need, and how many stunt riders? Were they available in Spain, or would they have to be brought in from Italy or other places? Did Spain have the right kinds of desert, mountain, and seaside locations? Could we get permission to shoot there? What about historic ruins? And, of course, Raffaella and Buzz wanted to stay within the budget, so they were constantly looking for deals.

  They sized up other countries too, and within a remarkably short time, they were able to come back to the studio with a rundown. “In Spain, we can shoot the movie for eighteen million,” they said. “In Italy, it will cost us thirty-two million. Or we can do it in Las Vegas and build the sets in the Nevada desert, and it will cost even more. Or we can do it on soundstages in LA, and it will cost even more.”

  The choice was the same as always in modern movie production: between countries with an established moviemaking industry and labor unions, like Italy, and entrepreneurial, nonunionized countries like Spain. Unions or not, Dino had a reputation for getting things done. When he wanted to shoot sixteen hours a day, he shot sixteen hours a day. He was very powerful in that way, and people in Hollywood knew it and didn’t mess with him. If the studios wanted a movie done for a certain price, they worked with him. In this case, he backed Raffaella and Buzz when they picked Spain. “We’ll have to build the whole thing in a warehouse,” they told the studio, “but it’s still much cheaper than using real soundstages where labor can hold us up.” We definitely had no labor problems on Conan. Everyone worked together. If a shot needed to be changed quickly, everyone lifted lights and moved things around.

  In fact, Spain was a great place to shoot in every way, with one little exception: the stunt guys took too long to die. Milius would tell them over and over, “When he cuts you, just drop.” Instead, they would fall theatrically, get partway back up, fall down again, gasp—this was their moment, and they were going to play it to the hilt. I’d be busy slaying my next opponent when I’d hear Milius shout to the guy behind me, “You’re dead! Stay down! He cut you, don’t move!” But they were like zombies. Finally Milius offered to pay them extra if they died immediately and stayed dead.

  These were the kinds of things they don’t teach you no matter how many years you go to acting class. For all the talk about sense memory and getting into character, no one prepares you for what to do when the wind machine is blowing snow in your face and you’re freezing your ass off. Or when somebody’s holding a measuring tape up to your nose to mark the focus on a shot. Then how do you do all this sense-memory shit? All that stuff about being in the moment goes out the window.

  There’s a whole production going on while you’re trying to act. You have to deal with the dist
ractions of 150 people on the set working and talking. The lighting guy is putting up ladders in front of you and saying, “Can you move? I don’t want to drop a lamp on you.” The soundman is fooling around with your waistband to put on a battery pack. The boom guy is shouting at the camera guy to get out of the way. The set designer is saying, “I need more plants in the background, guys.” The director is trying to coordinate. The producer is screaming, “In five minutes we have to get lunch! If you want the shot, get it now!”

  Then the director says, “Arnold, look your opponent in the eye. Head straight up. Dominate this scene.” This sounds good: we’ve worked on that in acting class. Except what if he has put you on a horse that’s very lively? The horse is spinning and rearing up. How do you look dominant when you’re scared that the horse will go nuts and throw you off? So you have to stop and rehearse with the horse. Under those circumstances, how do you act real?

  I’d never done a love scene on camera and found it really strange. A closed set means that you can’t bring guests, but you still have endless people looking on: the script supervisor, the lighting techs, the camera assists. And you’re naked. No one in acting class ever talks about what to do in a nude scene when you really get excited. In sex, one thing leads naturally to another. It can be embarrassing. They say you should stay in character, but that’s not really what they want, trust me. All you can do is try to think about something else.

  Even though the set was supposedly closed, the sex scenes seemed to have a magnetic effect. After Conan escapes from the wolves, he is seduced by a witch who puts him on the trail of Thulsa Doom. Cassandra Gava, who was playing the witch, and I were rolling around naked in front of a roaring fire in the witch’s stone hut. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the walls of the hut move. A little gap opened in the corner, and I could see a pair of eyes glinting in the firelight.

  “Cut!” Milius called. “Arnold, where you looking at?”

  “Well, actually,” I said, “it’s the funniest thing. I saw that corner of the room move apart, and I think I saw eyes peeking through.” A guy ran behind the set, and we heard voices. Then Raffaella came out looking totally sheepish. She said, “I’m sorry, but I just had to peek!”

  Conan’s true love in the film is Valeria. Sandahl Bergman had never done love scenes either and felt just as awkward as I did. I was somehow supposed to be this weird combination of a barbarian and a gentleman, but not too much of either. It was hard to get in the mood because you don’t have a chance to practice with your costar; you just have to start mechanical and cold. On top of all that, Sandahl and Terry Leonard the stunt chief had fallen in love, and I was intensely aware that he was standing by probably ready to rip off my head. Meanwhile, Milius was working hard to avoid the censors, saying things like, “Arnold, can you move your behind so it’s in that shadow there? And make sure you hide her breasts with your arm, because we can’t have nipples in the shot.”

  The action scenes had perils of their own. Conan lives in a world of constant danger. You never know what’s going to attack you in the fantasy world. It could be a snake one day and a wolf-witch the next. When shooting such scenes, I had to be on my toes.

  Doing battle with a giant mechanical snake left me sore for a week. The sequence was in the middle of the movie, where Conan and his allies sneak into the Tower of the Serpent and steal some of the cult’s precious jewels. We were supposed to climb the tower (actually a forty-foot-high set built in the abandoned air force hangar) and then lower ourselves into a dungeon ankle deep in garbage and the bones of sacrificial virgins. The snake, thirty-six feet long and two and a half feet wide, was a replica of some kind of boa constrictor, operated remotely and animated with steel cables and hydraulic pumps capable of exerting nine tons of force. It turned out to be pretty hard to control, and the operator hadn’t practiced enough. One time it coiled around me and started slamming me against the dungeon wall. I was yelling to him to ease up. In the script, Conan kills the snake, of course: Subotai crawls out of a tunnel to find his buddy in danger and tosses him a broadsword, which Conan, in a single, swift motion, catches by the hilt and chops into the snake. I had to grab the heavy sword and strike a precise point behind the snake’s head to trigger the exploding blood pack. Conan, of course, has to be totally confident as he does all this. But part of me was thinking “I hope this goes well.” I’m proud to say that two and a half years of training paid off, and I nailed it in the first take.

  James Earl Jones was late joining the production because he had to wrap up his commitment on Broadway, but after he arrived, we quickly became friends. By mid-March, when the production moved from Madrid to Almería to film the battle scenes and the climactic confrontation at Doom’s mountain citadel, I spent days hanging out in his trailer. He wanted to keep in shape, so I helped him with his training, and in return, he coached me on my acting. With his powerful bass voice, James was a wonderful Shakespearean actor, and he’d won both a Tony Award and an Oscar nomination for his performances in The Great White Hope, a drama about racism and boxing. (His character was based on Jack Johnson, the World Heavyweight Champion from 1908 to 1915.) Lately he’d become internationally known as the Star Wars villain Darth Vader. He told me the amazing story of how he’d gotten into acting. As a kid in Mississippi, James had such a serious stutter that from the time he started school at age five until he was fourteen, he refused to talk. The schools classified him as functionally mute. Then in high school he fell in love with literature and felt a desire to read great works aloud. His English teacher encouraged him, “If you like the words, you’ve got to be able to learn to say them.”

  Milius wanted me to add a half page of dialogue that he’d written during the shooting. It was in the quiet before the climactic battle at the Mounds, a Stonehenge-like ancient burial ground of warriors and kings by the sea. Conan and his allies have fortified the monument and are waiting to be attacked by Thulsa Doom and a large troop of savage henchmen on horseback. Thulsa Doom has already killed Valeria, and Conan and his friends are greatly outnumbered and expect to die. So before the battle, Conan is sitting on a hillside with his chin on his fist, looking at the sea and the beautiful blue sky and thinking melancholy thoughts. “I remember days like this when my father took me to the forest and we ate wild blueberries,” he says to Subotai. “More than twenty years ago. I was just a boy of four or five. The leaves were so dark and green then. The grass smelled sweet with the spring wind.

  “Almost twenty years of pitiless cumber! No rest, no sleep like other men. And yet the spring wind blows, Subotai. Have you ever felt such a wind?” (Cumber means “burdens.”)

  “They blow where I live too,” says Subotai. “In the north of every man’s heart.”

  Conan offers his friend the chance to leave and go home. “It’s never too late, Subotai.”

  “No. It would only lead me back here another day. In even worse company.”

  “For us, there is no spring,” Conan says grimly. “Just the wind that smells fresh before the storm.”

  I’d practiced these lines dozens of times, as I always did before a shoot. But I told Milius, “It doesn’t feel natural to me. It doesn’t feel like I’m really, you know, searching and seeing it.” You can’t just recite a monologue like that. It truly has to seem like you are thinking about an earlier time, the memories are coming to you, ideas are popping into your head. In some moments you say things in a rush, and in other moments you just stare. The question was how to create that naturalness.

  Milius said, “Why don’t you ask Earl? He does this onstage where the pressure’s even higher because you can’t edit out the mistakes.”

  So I went to James Earl’s trailer and asked if he would mind taking a look at the dialogue.

  “No, no, absolutely. Sit down,” he said. “Let’s look at that.” He read it and asked me to deliver the lines.

  When I finished, he nodded and said, “Well, what I would do is have this retyped two ways. Do it once so the li
nes are really narrow and go down the entire length of the page. And the second time do it with the paper turned sideways, so that you have the widest lines possible.” He explained that I’d practiced so much that I’d unconsciously memorized the line breaks. So each time I hit one, it came across as a break in thought. “You need to throw off that rhythm,” he explained.

  Seeing the lines retyped made me hear them in a different way, which helped tremendously. I came back later in the day, and we dissected and rehearsed the dialogue line by line. “Well, normally after a sentence like this you would pause, because that’s a pretty heavy thought,” he’d say. And, “Here maybe you want to shift position a little bit. Whatever comes to mind, whether it’s a stretch or a shake of the head or just a pause. But you shouldn’t program yourself,” he stressed, “because it could be different from one take to the next, unless John tells you that’ll cause a problem with editing. But usually they only keep a shot until the thought changes, and then they’ll go to another angle.”

  Max Von Sydow was generous and helpful too. It was great being able to watch two great stage actors rehearse and fine-tune until they got it right. Working with professionals, you learn a lot of nuances. I realized, for example, that actors often shift gears when the director moves from a master shot, to a medium shot, to a close-up shot, to a micro-shot (which captures, say, the eyes wincing). Some actors pay very little attention to the master shot because they know this is just to establish where they are physically in the scene. Therefore, they don’t overexert themselves. But the closer the shot, the more they perform. You realize how important it is to pace yourself: don’t go all out on the first takes; give just 80 percent. Eventually your close-up will come, and that’s when you really need to act. I figured out that this was also a way to get more close-ups of yourself into the film, because the editing will often pick the shot with the best performance.