Tales From Development Hell by David Hughes Page A

Martian colonists used camels as pack animals, and the camels wore oxygen masks... Cronenberg elaborated on the camels idea by having the monsters in the sewers be mutant camels.” Miller also remembers working with art director Pier Luigi Basile (Conan the Destroyer) at DEG’s studios in Rome, where “nothing much happened. We just drew all day for weeks on end. Cronenberg finally was hired, and he gave us more direction, more purpose. Bob Ringwood was going to do the costume design for the Cronenberg version, so he was there, on and off, for a couple of weeks and did a few sketches.”
    Cronenberg recalls that, several years down the line, De Laurentiis offered him the project again, his way. He declined. “It’s dead for me now,” he told the producer. “I can’t get back into that now. I just can’t go back to working with Ron and fighting the same old battles and doing all thatstuff.” Cronenberg was mostly unimpressed by the finished film. “I thought it was a bad movie,” he told Serge Grünberg, “although there were one or two moments that were true Philip Dick moments in it — they were good. But they weren’t good because it was Schwarzenegger still: first of all as an actor for that kind of role, and secondly as that character. The whole point of that character was that he was a unique, shy, mild character. They tried to compensate by making him a construction worker, but they gave him this beautiful Sharon Stone wife.” This, of course, was a deliberate move on the part of director Paul Verhoeven (who would soon make Stone a star in Basic Instinct), who understood that Quaid’s low-grade employment was as far as possible from secret agent, while his beautiful wife was designed to keep him satisfied with his otherwise average lifestyle. As Verhoeven explains, “With Arnold Schwarzenegger in the main part, [an audience] would not want him to dream. So to a large degree by choosing Arnold, there was a preference in reality.” Nevertheless, Cronenberg had other reservations: “I thought it was very visually tacky and messy,” he said. “Verhoeven didn’t do a good job with all the effects and the mutants and all of that stuff. They went for the action stuff purely and that was it: it was an action gimmick. So I didn’t really like the movie and I didn’t think much of it. But by the time I saw it, I didn’t care. I was over it.”
    Although Cronenberg was the first director involved with Total Recall, his would certainly not be the last name to be stencilled on the director’s chair before Paul Verhoeven’s was allowed to dry. “As I recall it was seven directors,” says Shusett, “most prominently Richard Rush, who’d directed The Stunt Man. He and Dino couldn’t agree, because Richard liked our third act of Total Recall — Mars gets air — and Dino didn’t. Richard Rush said, ‘It’s wonderful, Dino. It’ll work perfectly.’ And Dino said, ‘Rick, I can’t go with you as director. I don’t even want to go to Mars.’ And I said, ‘Well, you can’t take that out, it’s in my contract.’ Dino said, ‘It’ll never get made,’ and I said, ‘Fine, I’d rather never make it.’ I said, ‘Mars is in it, and Mars gets air, it’s the first ending that’s worked, Dino. Show it to another director.’ So one day I get a call from Dino, he says, ‘Ron, I love you so much I could kiss you on the mouth! You saved me! You’re so goddamned stubborn, you saved me! I showed this script to Bruce Beresford... [and] I say, ‘Take out Mars, take out air.’ He says, ‘Dino, you full of shit!’”
    Beresford, a two-time Academy Award nominee best known for the acclaimed dramas Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies, soon found himself in his native Australia, with Dirty Dancing star Patrick Swayze in the lead of whatShusett has described as a less gritty, more fun, ‘Spielbergian’ version of Total Recall. The next thing Shusett knew, however, “Beresford called us and said, ‘The