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Film 893: Total Recall

Trivia: As many as seven directors were considered for and even hired to direct the movie, including Richard Rush, Bruce Beresford and David Cronenberg. Cronenberg had even written a few drafts of the script before Paul Verhoeven took over the Total Recall project.

Over 40 drafts of the script had already been written when Paul Verhoeven agreed to read the screenplay. Some of them depicted Quaid as a mild-mannered accountant (instead of a construction worker). Most scripts had a similar first half (Quaid visits Rekall and starts having altered memories), but they all varied widely in the ending. One of them even had Quaid discover that he was really an alien in human disguise (a twist that may have been inspired by another Philip K. Dick short story, "Impostor"). Verhoeven finally brought in Gary Goldman for additional work on the script. According to Verhoeven, although there were many changes made to each of the scripts, the final draft was very similar to the first draft by Ronald Shusett.

Johnnycab whistles the Norwegian national anthem.

When Quaid is dressed up as the fat lady, the passport he hands the guard is the actual passport of Priscilla Allen (who played the fat lady).

The short story on which it was based was first optioned in 1974, 16 years before the film finally was released.

Patrick Swayze was signed to play Quaid when the movie began preproduction in Australia with Bruce Beresford as the director. However, early in preproduction, Dino De Laurentiis' company went bankrupt. After Arnold Schwarzenegger heard about this, he persuaded Carolco to buy the script for him.

All of the crew fell ill due to food poisoning during production, with the exception of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Shusett. Schwarzenegger escaped because he always had his food catered from the US. This was because three years earlier, he had fallen ill due to drinking tap water in Mexico during production of Predator. As for Shusett, he took extreme health precautions, such as only brushing his teeth with boiled or bottled water and insisting on getting a weekly vitamin B12 shot. Shusett was even mocked by the crew until they all got sick themselves.

As it is often done in futuristic movies, this one also uses contemporary design objects to depict future settings - among other things, the small cups with the black plastic ring, used by Quaid while preparing his breakfast smoothie, are Bodum Bistro coffee mugs from Denmark, and a desk lamp at Rekall is the Tolomeo from Italian manufacturer Artemide.

Although never mentioned in the film, the cover of the VHS-edition of the movie mentions that the movie takes place in the year 2084 AD.

The Spanish title for this movie is "Desafío Total", which translated to English means "Total challenge". This movie was also released under another Spanish title, "El Vengador del Futuro", which translates to "Future Avenger"

Jeff Bridges, Matthew Broderick and Richard Dreyfuss were each considered for the role of Quaid.

In the DVD commentary, Paul Verhoeven said that for the love scene after Quaid wakes from his nightmare, he wanted Sharon Stone to show off more skin for the scene, but Stone had refused to do so. He settled for shooting the scene as it is shown, but mentions that he "got her back" while shooting the movie Basic Instinct.

When filming the fight scene between Lori and Melina, director Paul Verhoeven asked 2nd unit director Vic Armstrong to choreograph the fight not as a "cat fight" but more like a martial arts fight, to give the feel of two "warriors" fighting each other and not simply two women. Verhoeven remarks in the DVD commentary that this is probably the first time in a feature film where we see two women fighting each other normally, as opposed to a cat fight.