Anyway, I’d had a kettle boiling in the bathroom for about half an hour to try and get some steam up, because the water just wasn’t hot enough. It took us about twenty takes before the guys stopped fluffing their lines or falling about laughing – Mark kept dropping the keys because he had soap in his eyes. By the time they finally got their act together the hot water had run out; Mark left the shower shivering and as wrinkly as a Shar-Pei dog. When we compiled the outtakes from this scene, they were longer than the actual film.
The next scene was downstairs where they shared a whisky from my father’s drinks cabinet. After having a drink, David turns his wrist as if to look at his watch, but when filming actually forgot to look as all his powers of concentration were taken up with remembering his soliloquy: “It’s late. We should get to the party.”
One of our neighbors had a red Ferrari, which he was crazy enough to lend us for the film. We thought this was incredibly cool but we were also terrified of damaging it so David (who was a truly terrible driver) drove it off down a very long country lane in first gear at five miles an hour. It took forever to get out of the drive, which kind of reduced the Ferrari’s impact.
Anyway, the party goes terribly wrong and Mark returns home alone, puts on the TV, and falls asleep at midnight. We switch to the exterior of the house (where the sun has clearly just set – where were we? Lapland?) and my dad enters the house as the creepy murderer and kills Mark with a scythe while the TV plays “Auld Lang Syne.”
The horror movies of the 1980s were a tremendous influence on me. I’d often use the music of horror maestro John Carpenter as the soundtrack to my homemade films. Like thousands of other teenage boys I went through the rite of passage of seeing R-rated horror films when I was underage, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween being two particular favorites.
We saw Nightmare on Elm Street at a special midnight screening in Ewell, which seemed to have quite a relaxed attitude as to who could see an R-rated film. In those days, cinemas were much larger (they’ve all been carved up into smaller screens today) and Ewell was about the same size as Cheddar Gorge with equivalent acoustics. If you were unlucky enough to end up at the back you’d end up hearing the movie about five seconds after the people at the front.
The cinema was pretty rough and had all the atmosphere of a bawdy East End pub. During the midnight screening we noticed that a haze had appeared in front of the screen. Some boisterous troublemakers had actually managed to set fire to one of the seats. The ushers threw a bucket of sand on it and we carried on watching, coughing through the smoke haze.
These days I hardly watch any horror movies at all, but one of my favorite films of all time remains Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Anthony Perkins’s performance as Norman Bates made me really think about what it was possible to achieve as an actor for the first time – it wasn’t just about delivering your lines in the right voice. His performance was so edgy, so different from the bloodthirsty movies Hollywood normally fed us.
Psycho also taught me about suspense, what was possible with sound and music. I bought the soundtrack and, as an avid soundtrack collector, I still think it’s one of the best scores ever recorded. I had a poster of Anthony Perkins holding a knife-shaped key to Room One of the Bates Motel on my wall throughout my teenage years, and I studied the movie in great depth at film school.
There were so many other wonderful films, aimed more specifically at my age group, at that time. The Goonies, Gremlins, Innerspace, and so on. I don’t mean to say there was some great golden age in the 1980s but I feel that films nowadays try to take themselves too seriously; films then were much more rough and ready and audiences were happy to use their imagination during dodgy effects or forgive gaping plot holes as long as the movie was fun. They were so digestible and now I love nothing more than sharing these films with my children, who love them just as much as I did – especially The Goonies.
The mid-1980s also saw the dawn of the pirate video. There weren’t many video recorders about then. We relied on our wealthier neighbors in Kingswood who always seemed to get these new gadgets first. They’d buy the very first video recorder, the very first games console, the very first CD player, the very first DVD player – which were all usually obsolete within a month, at which point they’d then sell them on to the residents of Lower Kingswood, my dad being a particularly good customer.
There was one friend who had a swimming pool, an Atari, and two video recorders (so he could record two things at once). The recorders were about the same size as a small family car and they sold one of these to Dad, who heaved it through our front door, sweating, huffing and puffing. “This is the future!” he exclaimed, “and it’s bloody heavy!” When he set the device down, the lounge floor bowed slightly. It was a huge top-loader with giant dials and knobs on the front: setting the timer was done using an analog clock. The keys on the top were so big and heavy with such strong springs that they were impossible for me to depress, even when pushing down with both my feet. It was so complicated to operate and relied on so many mechanisms that it never recorded anything we wanted to watch. To me, it was just amazing to know that it was technically possible to record TV.
A friend of mine got hold of a pirate copy of ET: The Extra-Terrestrial and we watched it at his house. We were all incredibly excited; we were getting to see a great film for free! Of course, when we played it, it was a dodgy copy of someone filming a cinema screen; it was indecipherable. I’m very much against pirate videos these days and if I see one I go crackers and try to take the tape/DVD away from whoever has it. They are always of terrible quality and are an insult to all the people who have done everything they can to make a film look and sound as amazing as possible.
My own teenage movie masterpiece was called Nightmare. There were three of us involved in this, all of us about fourteen. My coproducers were Alex Cotton and Courtland Stibbe (pronounced Stibbey), so we called ourselves CDS Productions.
Courtland was a computer whiz, and he made some nifty titles on his Acorn computer. With the room darkened, I used my camera to zoom in on the monitor, to make it look as if the titles were coming toward the viewer.
And now for the plot. It centered on a cheap souvenir that Alex had brought back from his family holidays in Egypt, a clay model of Tutankhamun’s head.
In the first scene we’re all sitting around playing poker and drinking beer (as most fourteen-year-olds like to do) when Courtland, after suffering a heavy loss, marches off in a huff and has a sulk in the abandoned shed at the bottom of the garden, where he dislodges a floorboard, uncovering Tutankhamun’s head.
I should point out that Alex had made it very clear to me, on pain of death, that the head should remain intact. So we used a rock as a stunt double whenever it was supposed to be thrown and we got pretty good at the old switcheroo.
Alex passes it to Courtland, who chucks it (the stunt double) onto the rubbish heap. Cue scary music. Alex then walks past the swimming pool in the garden and comes across the statue sitting on the wall. Strange. Surely it should be in the rubbish? He reaches out to touch it and – cue thunder and lightning effect – Alex is electrocuted and falls into the pool.
Cut to later on that day. I’m drinking beer (of course) and watching TV news (read by my mum). Cut to a shot of a pair of hands cutting the power line in the meter cupboard. I don’t know where those hands came from, whose they were, and where they went afterward but don’t worry, it’s not important.
Cut back to me in the lounge. The power goes. I pull a face. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? I pick up the phone, as obviously that’s the first thing you do in that situation. The line is dead. I let the receiver fall to the floor. Things start being thrown about the room.
Odd? Yes. I go outside in my slippers. There’s a strange noise coming from – the statue. It increases in pitch and I run across the garden and still the noise increases. I run into the field and still the noise increases, it’s shattering my eardrums. I can’t take it anymore!<
br />
Then I explode.
I should probably explain that last bit. We were all nerds and Courtland knew his way around a chemistry set. He knew that if we dismantled enough fireworks, we would be able to create a pretty nifty-sized explosion. We bought all the fireworks we could carry from a grateful newsagent, who’d overstocked the previous Guy Fawkes Night, and packed them loosely into a paper container with two pounds of flour. All we had to do then was film me running into the shot, dropping to my knees, holding my ears.
“Cut!”
I sprinted to a safe distance as Courtland lit the blue touchpaper. The resulting flash and the mushroom cloud could be seen from Swindon.
If we had done that today we would have had the counter-terrorism squad around before you could say, “The man in the newsagents sold them to us.”
Nonetheless, it was a great effect. But the film wasn’t over yet. Oh no, you don’t get off that lightly.
Once we were all dead, I switched the button on the camera marked “negative.” The resulting tone and color were supposed to represent us in the afterlife. Dressed in our best clothes (Alex was in a particularly fetching white shirt and white trousers), we worship the idol in front of a wall of flames (some gasoline in one of Mum’s baking trays placed just below camera) while Carmina Buranad plays. Then we place the artifact back under the floorboards in the shed. Goodness knows why it would kill to get back into that shed.
Finally, cut to me in bed. Aha, it was all a dream! But wait, the alarm clock starts ringing. I don’t wake up – I’m dead!
And the credits roll. They were very specific; as owner of the clay statue, Alex was credited as “Properties Manager.”
Unfortunately, I never got to find out what grade it would have got in college – by then I was starring in my own major motion picture.
a I did consider the police once they abandoned the height restriction, although I don’t think I would have made many collars.
b When Mum said she was going into town to pick up a new car I was overjoyed and hung out the window looking for her on her way back. I was gutted when I saw a newer, black and yellow model of the 2CV straining its way up the hill toward us. She hadn’t? She had.
c I’d learned the importance of safety procedures from the stunt coordinators on Jedi.
d We all knew it from the TV ads for Old Spice. The whole experience seemed to leave quite an impression on Courtland, who later became a monk.
Chapter Eight
Heroes Come in All Sizes
Val Kilmer and I didn’t have to act our fear once we hit the milelong glacier – I screamed until I ran out of air. “Luckily,” someone had the bright idea of piling up a mountain of loose powder snow right in our path to bring us to a halt.
Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.
We repeated the sledding scene with a skier until Ron was certain he had enough footage of our terrified expressions.
Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.
Discussing a scene with the wonderful Jean Marsh while director Ron Howard thoughtfully strokes his mustache. Jean played the evil sorceress Bavmorda with chilling conviction.
Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.
Willow and Meegosh (aka David Steinberg), great friends both on-screen and off.
Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.
“Stewpid Daikins” George Lucas and Ron Howard.
Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.
Val Kilmer, Ron Howard, me, and Joanne Whalley. As can clearly be seen here, Joanne was madly in love with me but I broke her heart and she started dating Val on the rebound.
Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.
“What are you trying to do? Drown me?” To add insult to injury, the storm scenes we filmed in Pinewood’s reservoir were never used.
Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.
Paddling toward trouble.
That smile wouldn’t be on my face for much longer . . .
Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.
Val and I did lots of public signings for Willow. Val, the joker, liked to write me amusing messages before he passed the photos over for me to sign.
Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.
Is that it?” I asked, and turned to look at Daniel. The “that” was pronounced with a mixture of disgust and disappointment.
“Yup,” Daniel said with some uncertainty.
As far as I was concerned Cornwall was supposed to be an exciting land of smugglers’ coves, warm cozy pubs, wild seas, rugged coasts, and the pasty. What I was looking at here was a cottage that would be described in an estate agent’s blurb as “charming” and “requiring extensive renovation and modernization.”
In a Withnail and I moment, Daniel had convinced me to let him “treat” me to a week’s holiday with his family in remotest Cornwall. “It’s payback for you having taken me to the USA,” he said. Hmmm . . . Stepping over the threshold was like stepping back into Edwardian times. I could hear the damp cottage crumbling.
“Wow! Look at the TV!”
It actually had woodworm. I swear it was powered by a gas and valve system. I switched it on and it shook and hummed into life. I stared at the screen. And stared. The screen lightened fractionally.
“Maybe it’ll have warmed up in half an hour or so,” Daniel said hopefully.
“I suppose you don’t come on holiday to watch TV,” I said gloomily, not believing that to be true at all.
Outside it was raining cats and dogs but I had to admit, after a quick walk on a nearby wild beach, the scenery was really quite spectacular.
After two days of rain, as we still waited for the TV to warm up, I decided to call home. This was before the days of cell phones and meant I had to go in search of a public call box. “I’ll be back in a tick,” I said, and went on the hunt for a telephone. Luckily, I soon spotted the familiar red box in the local village.
Using a phone box was just one of many situations in which I had to employ a certain unusual ingenuity to compensate for my lack in height. After heaving open the heavy metal door, I then had to climb up the inside of the box, with one foot on either side, using the windowpanes as steps until I was halfway up. Then, pretty much doing the splits, I was able to make a precarious and short (it was quite tiring) phone call.a An old lady strolled past and did a double take.
“Mum?” I said, slightly breathlessly. “It’s me.”
“Oh, Warwick, thank goodness you’ve called!”
“What is it?” I asked, sensing the urgent tone in Mum’s voice.
“It’s George, he wants you to come and meet him and Ron Howard at Elstree Studios to talk about a new film.”
That was all I wanted to hear. “I’ll be right there!” I hung up, carefully made my way back down the interior of the phone box, and ran back to Daniel. Once I’d explained, he insisted on accompanying me. Fortunately for us, his wonderful parents clearly understood that meeting George Lucas was about one million times more important to us than staying in Cornwall with them.
Ten minutes later we were packed and hopping up and down with excitement on the station platform. After a couple of slow starts, we got an express that whisked us back to London. Mum met us at the station and took both Daniel and me to meet George and Ron at Elstree.
We were in a big office right at the far end of the building. As usual, whenever he met anyone famous, Daniel turned into a babbling wreck and just managed to introduce himself as my “friend.”
“Warwick,” George said, “this is a project I’ve had in mind for some time. I told your mum back in ’83 and we decided we needed to wait until you were old enough.”
George said he and Ron were considering me for the title role in Willow, a $40 million fantasy adventure.
“To be honest,” Ron said, “I think you’re too young. I mean, the character we have in mind is a father – married with two kids – a worldly kind of fellow.”
I resisted the temptation to insist that, at seventeen years old, I was of course by now a worldly fellow. George was in my corner and fought hard
to persuade Ron. Eventually, he said to Ron: “Well, you’re the director so feel free to do more casting.” I was going to have to fight for the part.
I was soon auditioning alongside hundreds upon hundreds of little people as the casting director scoured the globe for actors to play Willow and his wife and children. I went to several auditions where I was paired up with various actors, to see who went with who. Finally after about ten of these auditions, Ron asked me to go to America and audition there.
Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis Page 8