Columbia Pictures assembles
a powerhouse cast led by Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan
Cranston, John Cho and Bill Nighy for the big screen re-imagining of “Total
Recall.”
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| Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures |
Directed
by Len Wiseman (“Underworld,” “Live Free and Die Hard”), “Total Recall” is an
action thriller about reality and memory, inspired anew by the famous short
story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick.
In
the film, Rekall is a futuristic company that can turn your dreams into real
memories. For a factory worker named Douglas Quaid (Farrell), even though he's
got a beautiful wife (Beckinsale) who he loves, the mind-trip sounds like the
perfect vacation from his frustrating life - real memories of life as a
super-spy might be just what he needs.
But
when the procedure goes horribly wrong, Quaid becomes a hunted man. Finding
himself on the run from the police – controlled by Chancellor Cohaagen
(Cranston), the leader of the free world – Quaid teams up with a rebel fighter
(Biel) to find the head of the underground resistance (Nighy) and stop
Cohaagen.
The
line between fantasy and reality gets blurred and the fate of his world hangs
in the balance as Quaid discovers his true identity, his true love, and his
true fate.
“Total
Recall’s” re-imagined journey to the silver screen began in 2008 when producer
Toby Jaffe was perusing a bookstore, looking through the sci-fi shelf. “I was
looking at all the books I read as a young guy, and I picked up a Philip K.
Dick anthology and read the short story ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,’”
he recalls. “I remembered it was a great sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy.”
Of
course, Dick’s story had been adapted for the screen once before, in 1990,
under the title “Total Recall.” Jaffe began thinking that the time might be
right to revisit Dick’s story for the screen and brought his idea to producer
Neal H. Moritz, who read the short story and re-watched the 1990 film.
“We
just felt like we could make a fresh version of the original story,” Moritz
says. “By reimagining the story, we thought that there was so much more to the
characters and story that we could investigate. That felt fresh to us.”
The
reason is that Dick’s story feels as cutting edge as when it was first
published in the 1960s. “The genius of the story is this idea that you can implant
a memory into somebody’s head and when they wake up, they will feel they’ve
lived it,” says Jaffe. The set-up opens up a treasure trove of questions: what
is memory? How do we know what really happened in the past?
“That
concept of Rekall, as Philip K. Dick created it in his story, is what made me
want to direct this movie,” says Len Wiseman, who also has an art department
background, having worked on such big budget sci-fi hits as “Independence Day”
and “Stargate.” Wiseman’s take on the film was to delve deeper into the main
character by creating a hybrid of a psychological thriller and an action film
that just happens to be set in the future.
Instead
of events occurring on Mars, Wiseman keeps the action on a far-in-the-future
earth dominated by two nation-states – United Federation of Britain and The
Colony. Like Dick’s story, Wiseman’s says, “There’s a whole other kind of
experience on Earth with which to take this character.”
“When
we reminded ourselves that Philip K. Dick didn’t send his characters to Mars,
that really opened up the possibilities,” says Jaffe. “Once we were freed to
keep the character here on Earth, like Dick does, we weren’t constrained by the
setting, the era, or the hows and whys of getting him off the planet.”
Opening
across the Philippines in August, “Total Recall” is distributed by Columbia
Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visit http://www.columbiapictures.
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