Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger

Author:Arnold Schwarzenegger [Schwarzenegger, Arnold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-09-30T21:00:00+00:00

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.

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