Everyone's career in film starts somewhere, right? Looks like Nick and I are off to a potentially good start - with background acting work on the set of
Total Recall starring Colin Farrell at Pinewood Studios in Toronto!
Nick and I had answered a Craigslist ad looking for "clubby/seedy/funky people" to fill a street scene in New Asia, where it's "always raining in this part of the world". We were asked to bring our own clothes in rust and earth green tones - about two thirds of my own wardrobe - for the costume folks to take a look at and see if there's anything to use. They liked just about everything I brought, which I'm told makes the process a whole lot easier on shoot day. Here's what we got:
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| :: khaki green three-quarter length sleeve jacket, H&M (gift) :: Mandarin-collar olive green button-up shirt, Alfred Sung :: rust brown dress pants, Ricki's :: paisley pashmina scarf with gold thread detail, gift :: knee-high brown 'leather' wedge-heel boots, gift (not pictured) :: |
Funny enough, this is stuff I wear on the regular, so I'm just gonna look like myself!
I've been reading up on the movie itself, being it a remake of one of my favourite Arnie movies. The original concept of
Total Recall came from the short story
We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, written by Phillip K. Dick. The story is a mesh of reality, false memory and real memory, all in the mind of Douglas Quail, a simple and ordinary man who would one day like to visit Mars, a plausible vacation destination of the future. Since he is, however, a simple and ordinary man, he can't afford it, so he gets the next best thing - a mental vacation courtesy of Rekal Incorporated, offering "extra-factual memory" to fulfill his dream. As the "Mars memory" implantation proceeds, the staff at Rekal reveal that Quail is an actual government agent with a brain full of dangerous secrets. Frightened by what they may have stumbled across, the staff at Rekal hurry him out of the office, where Quail finds more physical evidence to support that his Mars 'memories' are actually real. The government puts a bounty on his head, but he manages to make a deal: he returns to Rekal to have his memories of Mars suppressed and replaced with "heroic wish-fulfillment" false memories as compensation. As the Rekal staff prepare to implant the memories, they uncover an older and different set of suppressed memories that reveal the unbelievable events they're about to implant to be actually true.
In Mr. Dick's story, Quail doesn't go to Mars. Arnie's "Quaid" does in the 1990 film. I don't think Colin will be going, though. From what I understand, this remake will be closer to the short story than a frame-for-frame remake of Arnie's sci-fi action adventure. I've always been into this stuff, and I'm crazy excited to be a part of this. Hopefully, I won't be on the cutting room floor when this is all said and done.
But if we're going to remake this film again, maybe we can see something along the lines of this:
Source material from Wikipedia.org. Those guys are the best, yeah?
