Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  The studios have the hang of it better today. They do pay for the sequel of a successful picture. They pay the 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 sense no matter where you lived. The Terminator, Commando, Predator, Raw Deal, Total Recall—they all focused on universal themes such as good versus evil, or getting revenge, or a vision of the future that anyone would fear.

  Red Heat was the only movie that was even slightly political—it was the first American production ever allowed to film in Moscow’s Red Square. This was during the détente period of the mid-1980s, when the USSR and the US were trying to figure out how to work together and end the Cold War. But my intentions were mainly to make a buddy movie, with me as a Moscow cop and Jim Belushi as a Chicago cop teaming up to stop Russian cocaine dealers from sending the stuff to America. Walter Hill, our director, wrote and directed 48 Hrs., and the idea here was to combine action and comedy.

  All Walter had in the beginning was an opening scene, which is often how movies get made: you have one idea and then sit down and cook up the rest of the roughly one hundred pages for the script. I play a Soviet detective named Ivan Danko, and in this scene I’m chasing a guy down. I find him in a Moscow pub, and when he resists arrest, we fight. After I have him subdued and helpless on the floor, to the horror of the bystanders, I lift his right leg and brutally break it. Moviegoers would be grossed out by that. Why would you break a guy’s leg? Well, in the next instant, you see that the limb is arti
ficial, and it’s filled with white powder: cocaine. That was Walter’s idea, and as soon as I heard it, I said, “I love it, I’m in.”

  We talked back and forth as he wrote the script, and we decided that it would be good to have the buddy relationship reflect the working relationship between East and West. Which is to say that there is a lot of friction between Danko and Belushi’s character, Detective Sergeant Art Ridzik. We’re supposed to be working together, but we’re constantly on each other’s case. He makes fun of my green uniform and my accent. We argue about which is the most powerful handgun in the world. I say it’s the Soviet Patparine. “Oh, come on!” he says. “Everybody knows the .44 Magnum is the big boy on the block. Why do you think Dirty Harry uses it?” And I ask, “Who is Dirty Harry?” But our working together is the only way to stop the cocaine smugglers.

  Walter had me watch Greta Garbo in the 1939 film Ninotchka to get a handle on how Danko should react as a loyal Soviet in the West. I got to learn a little Russian, and it was a role for which my own accent was a plus. I loved filming in Moscow and also loved doing the fight scene in the sauna where a gangster challenges Danko by handing him a burning coal. He’s amazed when Danko doesn’t flinch; the cop simply takes the coal and squeezes it in his fist. Then he punches the guy through a window and leaps after him to continue the fight in the snow. We shot the first half of that scene in Budapest’s Rudas Thermal Bath and the second half in Austria because Budapest had no snow.

  Red Heat was a success, grossing $35 million in the States, but it wasn’t the smash I’d expected. Why is hard to guess. It could be that audiences were not ready for Russia, or that my and Jim Belushi’s performances were not funny enough, or that the director didn’t do a good enough job. For whatever reason, it just didn’t quite close the deal.

  Whenever I finished filming a movie, I felt my job was only half done. Every film had to be nurtured in the marketplace. You can have the greatest movie in the world, but if you don’t get it out there, if people don’t know about it, you have nothing. It’s the same with poetry, with painting, with writing, with inventions. It always blew my mind that some of the greatest artists, from Michelangelo to van Gogh, never sold much because they didn’t know how. They had to rely on some schmuck—some agent or manager or gallery owner—to do it for them. Picasso would go into a restaurant and do a drawing or paint a plate for a meal. Now you go to these restaurants in Madrid, and the Picassos are hanging on the walls, worth millions of dollars. That wasn’t going to happen to my movies. Same with bodybuilding, same with politics—no matter what I did in life, I was aware that you had to sell it.

  As Ted Turner said, “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.” So I made it my business to be there for test screenings. A theater full of people would fill out questionnaires rating the film, and afterward twenty or thirty would be asked to stay and discuss their reactions. The experts from the studio were concerned primarily with two things. One was to see if the movie needed to be changed. If the questionnaires indicated that people didn’t like the ending, the marketers would ask the focus group to elaborate so we could consider changing it. “I thought it was fake for the hero to survive after all that shooting,” they might say, or “I wish you’d shown his daughter one more time so we could see what happened to her.” Sometimes they would point out issues you hadn’t thought about while filming.

  The marketers were also looking for cues on how to position the film. If they saw that a majority loved the action, they’d promote it as an action movie. If people loved the little boy who appeared at the beginning, they’d use him in the trailer. If the people responded to a particular theme—say, the star’s relationship with her mother—then they’d play that up.

  I was there for personal feedback. I wanted to hear what the test audience thought about the character I played, about the quality of the performance, and about what they’d like to see me do more or less of. That way I knew what I needed to work on and what kinds of parts I should play next. Many actors get their cues from the marketing department, but I wanted it directly from the viewers, without the interpretation. Listening also made me a more effective promoter. If someone said, “This movie isn’t just about payback. It’s about overcoming tough obstacles,” I would write down those lines and use them in the media interviews.

  You have to cultivate your audience and expand it with each film. With each movie, it was crucial to have a certain percentage of viewers say, “I would go see another movie of his anytime.” Those are the people who’ll tell their friends, “You’ve got to see this guy.” Nurturing a movie means paying attention to the distributors also: the middlemen who talk theater owners into putting your movie on their screens rather than somebody else’s. The distributors need to know you’re not going to let them hang out there by themselves. Instead, you’ll appear at ShoWest, the National Association of Theatre Owners convention in Las Vegas, and take pictures with the theater owners, and accept an award, and give a talk about your movie, and go to the press conference. You do the things that the distributors feel are important because then they go all out in pushing the theaters. Later that week, one of them might call you and say, “You gave that speech the other day, and I just want you to know how helpful it was. The guys who own these multiplex theaters agreed to give us two screens at each multiplex rather than one screen, because they felt like you are really pushing the movie, that you believe in it, and because you promised to come through their town promoting the movie.”

  Early in my movie career, the hardest thing was giving up control. In bodybuilding everything had been up to me. Even though I relied on Joe Weider and my training partners for help, I was in total control of my body, whereas in movies, you depend on others right from the start. When the producer approaches you with the project, you’re relying on him to pick the right director. And when you go on a movie set, you’re relying on the director totally, and a lot of other people besides. I learned that when I had a good director, like a John Milius or a James Cameron, my movies went through the roof because I was directed well. But if I had a director who was confused or did not have a compelling vision for the movie, it would fizzle. I was the same Arnold either way, so the director was the one. After realizing this, I couldn’t take myself too seriously even when I got heaped with praise. I didn’t make The Terminator the success that it was; it was Jim Cameron’s vision, he wrote the script, he directed it, he made the movie great.

  I did become part of the decision-making in a lot of films, with power to approve the script, approve the cast, and even to choose the director. But I still made it my rule that once you pick a director, you have to have total faith in him. If you question everything he does, then you will have nothing but struggles and fights. Many actors work that way, but not me. I will do everything I can to make sure that we check out the director beforehand. I’ll call other actors to ask, “Does he handle stress well? Is the guy a screamer?” But after you pick him, you’ve got to go with his judgment. You may have picked the wrong guy, but still you cannot fight throughout the movie.

  In 1987, just one week into filming The Running Man, director Andy Davis was fired. The producers and studio executives staged a coup on the set while I was away for a few days promoting the springtime bodybuilding championships in Columbus. By the time I came back, they’d replaced Andy with Paul Michael Glaser, who had gotten into directing TV shows after being an actor on TV. (He played Detective David Starsky on the 1970s series Starsky and Hutch.) He’d never directed a movie, but he was available, and so he was hired.

  It was a terrible decision. Glaser was from the TV world, and he shot the movie like it was a television show, losing all the deeper themes. The Running Man is a sci-fi action story based on a novel by Stephen King, built around a nightmare vision of America in 2017—thirty years from when we were shooting. The economy is in a depression, and the United States has become a fascist state where the government uses TV and giant screens in the neighborho
ods to distract people from the fact that nobody has a job. This public entertainment 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.