Total Recall's Director Wanted To Make The Three-Breasted Woman Even Weirder

There are few directors as willing to get as fully weird as Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, whose satirical, wildly over-the-top films are sometimes so ridiculous that they come around to being taken seriously again. After all, it's been nearly 30 years and people still don't understand that "Starship Troopers" is a satire about the dangers of fascism! Out of all of Verhoeven's films, however, nothing is as intensely weird as the 1990 science fiction classic "Total Recall," which follows a construction worker named Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who has the memory of an adventure on Mars implanted into his brain as a kind of virtual vacation, only to have the details of his supposedly fake adventure cross over into his reality. He ends up going to Mars to try and take out a tyrannical dictator, meeting up with all kinds of mutant Martians along the way, including one that's pretty impossible to forget: a sex worker with three full-sized breasts!

Verhoeven's films are full of nudity (he even once stripped down himself to get the cast comfortable for the shower scene in "Starship Troopers"), but the three-breasted sex worker is truly one for the history books. Here's the thing, though: initially, Verhoeven wanted to make her design even more extreme, though he was talked out of it by some folks on set who (probably wisely) felt that wasn't the way to go.

In an interview with The Ringer, Verhoeven mused on the three-breasted sex worker and his original plans for her, explaining that he had once intended for her to have four breasts based on something he had once seen in a medical textbook:

"I know that some women had, let's say, not two nipples, but they have four nipples. Like a dog, whatever. That's what they have. They exist, basically, and I've seen the medical photos when I was at university. And I knew that. I wanted four nipples and breasts, with big breasts and smaller breasts underneath. And (special effects artist) Rob Bottin, I think, felt that it was too realistic for the film. And basically that three breasts would be more, let's say, in the style of the whole movie."

The three-breasted design is definitely more in-line with the rest of the film, which has a fairly cartoonish tone, than the more realistic four breasts would have been. It might have been interesting to go even bigger with it, with whole rows of nipples like a cat or dog has, but that would have been a lot of prosthetic work. Since the team already had to create a bunch of other mutants, including the animatronic Kuato character who grows out of another person's abdomen, maybe the triple-threat chest set was the best decision. Even Verhoeven conceded in the interview that Bottin was right, cementing the three-tittied lady in sci-fi movie history. 

"Total Recall" may not have the cultural cache of something like "Star Wars" or "Star Trek," but it was still hugely influential and had a pretty impressive pop culture impact. Getting the movie made was a real ordeal, with a long struggle for Schwarzenegger to even get the green light to star in the film, and things didn't get any easier from there. "Total Recall" was an expensive, big-budget blockbuster with an absolutely grueling shoot, but in the end the movie was a success, making back its $65 million budget more than four times over. It's also just incredibly quotable, with lines like "Get your a** to Mars!" and "Consider that a divorce" made all the more fun to say with Schwarzenegger's trademark Austrian accent. Out of all of Verhoeven's films, it's easily the zaniest and also the most fun, allowing him to get as gross and weird as he wanted in a sprawling science fiction playground. 

Well, almost as weird as he wanted, anyway, and maybe that's for the best.