Where to watch Total Recall (1990)

Trivia & production notes

• David Cronenberg wrote twelve separate drafts of the script during his time as director, struggling particularly with the third act before ultimately leaving the project.
• Producer Dino De Laurentiis initially considered Arnold Schwarzenegger unsuitable for the lead role, and the project cycled through casting Richard Dreyfuss and William Hurt before Schwarzenegger eventually took control of the production.
• Cronenberg departed the project after disagreements with producer Ronald Shusett and De Laurentiis over tone, with Shusett wanting an adventure film similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark on Mars rather than the serious science fiction approach Cronenberg favored.
• Patrick Swayze was cast as Quaid under director Bruce Beresford, but set construction in Australia had to be destroyed when De Laurentiis Entertainment Group filed for bankruptcy in 1988, resulting in approximately 80 crew members being fired.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger convinced Carolco Pictures to acquire the Total Recall rights for $3 million in 1989 and gained substantial creative control over the project, negotiating a salary of $10-11 million plus 15% of profits.
• Paul Verhoeven initially declined an offer to direct Total Recall because he disliked science fiction, but accepted after reading the Mars hotel scene and being impressed by Schwarzenegger's confidence in the project.
• Gary Goldman rewrote the script to allow the entire second half of the film to be interpreted as either reality or a mental breakdown, making it ambiguous whether Quaid's Mars experience actually happened.
• The character Benny was deliberately written as a villain because Goldman believed African American characters were typically typecast as good-hearted and wanted the reveal to be surprising.
• The main character was renamed from Quail to Quaid to avoid any reference to then-vice president Dan Quayle, and was reimagined as a muscle-bound construction worker rather than a meek clerk to match Schwarzenegger's action-hero image.
• Total Recall spent nearly sixteen years in development, cycling through seven directors, four screenwriters, and forty script drafts before finally going into production in April-May 1989.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Total Recall (1990 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.