The movie Total Recall is a cult classic by Paul Verhoeven, but it was almost directed by David Cronenberg.
Director David Cronenberg became famous for When the night Comes (1985) and The fly (1986), that’s why they offered him Total Recall. But he had to reject the project because they wanted it to be more like Indiana Jones than the original story of Philip K Dick.
In a recent interview, David Cronenberg The 79-year-old admitted why he turned down Total Challenge:
«I had worked a little with Dino De Laurentis. He was going to do Total Recall at the time with Ronald Shusett which he was producing and writing. It was based on a story by Philip K. Dick. I was very excited to do that and wrote several versions, twelve drafts in all.”
“But at a certain point, Ronald Shusett said to me: Well, you know what you’ve done, you wrote the Philip K. Dick version. And I said: I thought that’s what we’re supposed to do… he said: No! We want this movie to be like Raiders of the Lost Ark Goes to Mars. I said, Okay, well, I’m not going to do that movie, so I said bye.”
What is the original movie about?
Although David Cronenberg did not make the film, the work of Paul Verhoeven is spectacular and has become a classic of science fiction and action. The story follows Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a construction worker. His big dream is to travel to Mars, but his wife doesn’t want to because she says there are many terrorists. So he decides to go to a company to implant the memories that he really did travel to the red planet. But when they begin to manipulate his brain, they realize that there are certain repressed memories and he wakes up believing that he is a government spy. That’s why when he discovers that his wife and his friends are fake, he decides to travel to Mars and discover the truth.
In 2012 they did a remake with Colin Farrell of protagonist, but it was a small failure, since they only raised 198 million dollars. Would you have liked the original film to have been directed by David Cronenberg? Leave us your comments below in the opinion section.