Now and again, film studios will donate some amazing items for me to auction off for local charities, which makes the whole experience a delight. One example, courtesy of Warner Brothers, was the original handwritten letter from Dumbledore to Harry Potter as seen in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It was inside a wax-sealed envelope with the Hogwarts crest on it and was addressed to “Harry Potter, The Cupboard Under the Stairs.” It came with a photocopy of the letter so you could see what was inside without having to break the seal. It sold for £800.
I also auctioned a Quidditch World Cup program, signed by Daniel Radcliffe. Warner Brothers’ amazing art department produced these perfect programs with team listings, form guides, and notes about the day’s events for every match featured in the films. It went for a healthy £2,000.
Those sorts of things are quite fun to auction off, as collectors are desperate to have them and they are works of art in themselves, so there’s no shortage of enthusiasm and excitement.
It isn’t always like that, though.
Once, Sam said “yes” on my behalf. “Okay then,” I grumbled after she broke the news that I’d sacrificed my forthcoming Saturday night. “What’s it in aid of?”
“I’ve forgotten.”
“What? Are you sure they need me?”
“Well, you have to go now, I’ve said yes. They’ve promised a good dinner.”
Sam dragged me moaning and groaning all the way. I’d brought a few signed photos of me to auction off; it was all I had at short notice. I hate auctioning “me” as it looks bad either way – if I sell them for ten pounds each it looks like I’m not worth much, but if I keep pushing for higher bids it seems as if I’m flogging a dead horse and think I’m worth more.
On this occasion the dinner was very nice; Sam decided to have a few wines and was quite merry, while I stayed professionally sober. Eventually, the organizer, Pauline Miley, called me to the stage, while the 200-strong crowd looked on.
The first item, an old portrait of some bigwig, went well enough.
“Sold!” I exclaimed, “to the gentleman at the back.”
A gruff voice said, “I’m not a man.”
One of the many hazards auctioneers face.
“Sorry, it’s rather dark back there. Um . . . moving on.”
The next item was a weekend for eight in a caravan in Norfolk.
Aw, no, I thought to myself, here we go.
I loved caravans, but even I knew that you’d have to be extraordinarily optimistic to think we were going to shift this, especially as we were already in Norfolk.
The bidding started at £140. I didn’t try to oversell it, as I didn’t think it was that amazing. Unsurprisingly there were no takers.
I suddenly felt a prodding in my shoulder.
“Tell them it’s got air-conditioning,” she said.
I did. No takers.
“And heating.”
I did. Still no takers.
“And a power shower.”
It was then that I realized it was her caravan and that she was determined to find a buyer – and that meant I’d be flogging it all night. The pressure was on.
Suddenly, Sam’s hand shot up.
My mouth fell open in surprise. What on earth was she up to? I pretended not to see it. This evening was suddenly about to get very expensive. I’d be damned if I was going to come here, lose my quiet Saturday night in, make small talk with perfect strangers for two hours, and fork out £140 for a caravan holiday I most certainly neither needed nor wanted.
Pauline elbowed me in the shoulder. “She’s bidding!” she hissed urgently. “Can’t you see? Over there. Take it, take it!”
“Are you sure? Yes, you are. Right, um, yes, well, indeed we do have a bid, ladies and gentlemen. Anyone else? Anyone else for this beautiful van with all mod cons?”
I dragged it on . . . and on . . . and on.
“Going . . . Anybody, an amazing bargain here, it sleeps eight . . . eight people! Isn’t that amazing?”
“Going . . . A weekend in Norfolk with your whole family, come on, what’s not to love?”
I scanned the audience looking for the slightest twitch. Everybody stayed perfectly rigid, petrified in fact, like a spaceship full of people in suspended animation. They knew what I was up to. None of them dared move.
Pauline, meanwhile, was staring at me as if I were totally insane.
I saw a hand move at the back of the crowd, right on the edge of my vision. With lightning reflexes I slammed the gavel on the table.
Bang!
“Sold for one hundred and fifty pounds! To that gentle– . . . lady at the back.”
I wasn’t sure if she meant to bid or not but it was good enough for me.
I grinned with relief at Pauline who was looking at me incredulously. “See? Good job I held out there.”
Afterward I asked Sam what she was up to. “I thought it’d be fun for me and some friends.”
“But we own a caravan in Norfolk already!”
“It doesn’t sleep eight, though.”
All arguments about caravans were forgotten the next morning when I had a very interesting call from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. They wanted Willow Management to find an actor who could play a robot in a movie that had just been green-lit.
And this wasn’t just any film. This was for the decades-long-awaited film adaptation of the funniest, most philosophically fascinating, and all-around amazing book in the universe: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
They needed someone to play Marvin the Paranoid Android, arguably the Guide’s most famous and cherished character, which is somewhat surprising considering that Marvin was afflicted with severe depression and boredom. He even had his own fan club, the short-lived Marvin Depreciation Society.a
In the book, Marvin was built as a prototype of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s GPP (Genuine People Personalities) technology. They had the extremely irritating idea that machines should be given “personalities.” They manufactured doors that took great delight in telling you how much of a pleasure it had been opening and closing for you and robots that were so depressed they would turn Disney chipmunks into lemmings. Marvin’s morose nature seemed to stem from the fact that he had a “brain the size of a planet,” which he was seldom able to put to good use.
Peter and I met with Jamie Coutier, the Creature Shop’s creative supervisor. He showed us a CGI model of Marvin on his Mac. He was a short white robot with an enormous head and he looked as if Apple may have influenced his design.
Jamie and I talked a bit about the costume; I wondered how we were going to find anyone short enough for the role, as I imagined that the actor’s head would have to be below Marvin’s to make the costume work. Then there was the question of how an actor would cope with the weight of the enormous head on their shoulders.
Jamie said, “Don’t worry, we’ll make all that work. Look, I’ll show you how. Do you mind if I take a picture of you, Warwick?”
“Not at all.”
He snapped a pic of me with his mobile phone and uploaded it onto his laptop. He overlaid my image with Marvin’s. “That’s interesting. You fit the prototype precisely,” he said.
“Do I?”
He showed me. I had to admit it did seem that way; in fact it was like Cinderella and her glass slipper.
“Warwick, how would you feel about doing it?”
“Blimey, well . . . I don’t know.”
As I’ve already mentioned, I didn’t take roles that came via Willow Management, so I hesitated. Jamie, however, was already certain. He was totally convinced that I was the right size and, moreover, the only person with enough experience to take on what would be one of the most physically and mentally demanding roles a short actor had ever attempted.
“Wow . . . er, can I let you know?”
On the drive home I told Peter about my reservations about taking the role. I’d gone to the meeting on behalf of the actors we represented,
not for my own personal gain. It didn’t seem ethical to me. Then Peter reminded me that it was Jamie who’d come up with the idea of using me. I half wondered if he’d planned it all along.
I called Jamie back to accept.
Two Henson artists, Paul and Nicola, built Marvin. They assembled flexible plastic foam pieces to form a prototype suit for me and when I tried them, without the head, I looked like a mini Stormtrooper.
I was very impressed. “Gosh, it looks a lot heavier than it actually is,” I said. The final version, made of fiberglass, would be a lot heavier.
I then met Garth Jennings, the director, a very bubbly effervescent man who was incredibly enthusiastic about . . . well . . . well, about life, the universe, and everything!
“It’s brilliant! Can we make the head bigger?” he asked.
Once Garth had given his approval, construction of the fiberglass suit began. It steadily became heavier and heavier. Eventually, when it was finished, Paul and Nicola did a show-and-tell session in front of Garth.
“It’s great, but the head’s still too small.”
Paul and Nicola went back to the drawing board. They were worried about the weight of the head – how much would my neck be able to take? It would get even heavier because several special gizmos had yet to go inside.
They eventually constructed a metal body brace where two rods came up from my shoulders. These would support the fiberglass head, taking the weight away from my neck. The head would then rotate on a gimbal, which I would control by moving my head.
I felt a bit like I was wearing a Formula One racing car, as Paul and Nicola played with the design, trying to shave off a few grams of weight here and there.
The first time I tried the finished costume on it was about twice as heavy as the prototype we’d started out with.
“Just the head to go, Warwick,” Paul said.
“They’re not paying me enough for this,” I muttered as the head clicked into place and the world turned dark. With the head, the costume weighed about fifty pounds, not much less than me.
Then the lights came on.
“Wow, now this is cool.” In front of me were two TV screens. One was linked to a pinhole camera in between Marvin’s eyes, so I could see in front. The other screen was linked to a remote camera that provided me with a director’s-eye view of the scene so I could see what was going on around me.
I wore a headset and microphone so I could communicate with my support crew. When we started rolling, my voice was broadcast through speakers placed around the set so the other actors could hear my dialogue.
Above me, a small fan whirred away, in an effort to cool the giant cranium that was nonetheless heating up pretty quickly.
It felt like I was inside the Millennium Dome, there was this enormous space above me.
“Hey,” I said, testing the microphone, “I could tape my lines to the inside of Marvin’s head!”
Marvin looked amazing. He was painted the exact same white that BMW uses on their snazziest models.
“Just be careful, Warwick,” Paul told me. “Marvin scratches very easily and if you fall over he’ll crack. We’ve got one set of spare body parts but that’s all, he’s just too expensive.”
Once again, I was under tremendous pressure not to let an enormous team down during filming. If I fell, it didn’t bear thinking about. Marvin’s fiberglass body (which cost a lot more than a brand-new BMW) would shatter into a hundred pieces – not to mention what might happen to me.
While the suit was fairly easy to get into, I found it much harder to get into Marvin’s character. I’d never experienced depression and extended boredom. I’d been through my fair share of tragedies and had my heart broken but that wasn’t Marvin. Marvin was bored and depressed by the futility of his own existence and he didn’t mind letting everyone else know about it.
Besides, once I was in the costume all my strength and concentration were taken up by moving this massive, incredibly heavy costume – as well as keeping it upright. I wasn’t able to act and move at the same time, it was simply impossible.
I had a chat about this with Garth.
“Why don’t you speak to Peter Elliott?” he suggested. “He’s an expert at that sort of thing and we’ve hired him as the Vogon coordinator. I’m sure he’d be able to help.”
Peter was a movement director; we’d met briefly when I was filming Jedi. He’d been on a nearby stage in the same studio, playing the silverback gorilla in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.
Peter is the world’s primary primate performer. You’d never know that any gorilla he’s played wasn’t real and he’s helped hundreds of actors behave un-humanly – as animals, aliens, and androids.
The actors who played the Vogons (the bureaucratic aliens who demolished the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass) were having a very hard time of it. They looked like a cross between a giant slug and a turtle without its shell. The costumes were extraordinarily huge, wobbly, and had poor visibility. I watched as the actors rebounded off each other, teetered and then tripped, arms a-flailing as they tried to find something to stop their plunge to earth.
I sighed nostalgically. “Reminds me of my days as an Ewok,” I told Peter.
After the rehearsal was over, I explained my problem.
Peter nodded enthusiastically. “You’ve been approaching it from entirely the wrong angle,” he said. “You’re trying to work as a puppeteer rather than treat this as a proper acting job. Get into character first, then worry about the puppeteer part, that will come naturally if you’re thinking like Marvin.”
I liked Peter straight away. He was straight-talking, short (for a tall person), and packed full of positive energy. He then demonstrated how it was possible to drain all that positive energy when we went to his studio and got into character.
“Think like Marvin,” he said. “Come on, what would he say if he were here now?”
I stared at a vacuum cleaner. “Such a primitive device,” I said morosely.
“That’s it!” Peter said. “Come on, keep going.”
Maintaining my glum, suicidal tone, I continued, “Do you come here often?” Obviously, the vacuum cleaner failed to respond. “Okay, be like that then. See if I care. Brain the size of a planet and they’ve got me talking to the likes of you.”
“Keep going!”
“And you,” I said, dragging myself toward Peter. “You’re so happy it makes me sick. You could fit my capacity for happiness into a matchbox without removing the matches first. Do you want me to fall apart now, or should I just sit here and rust away?”
“Hold that thought,” Peter said. “Not another word until you’ve got the costume on.”
Once I was in costume, Peter recorded the scene. I mooched around the studio saying things like: “Life. Don’t talk to me about life. Just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.”
Peter started interacting, quoting lines at me. “Haven’t you got any ideas as to how we get out of this?”
“I have a million ideas. They all point to certain death.”
When we watched the playback, Peter said, “Now we can see what you’re thinking.”
He was dead right. The walk I’d given Marvin was now so different. I didn’t even think about technique. Sure, it was still incredibly tough to move in there, but if anything that only helped me to bring out Marvin’s character. Every movement was an effort and so that came out in his character.
Peter also taught me how the robot would turn its head depending on what it was saying and how other people were responding, something he called “the continuity of movement.”
He was absolutely brilliant, he had taught me so much in no time at all and he helped me bring a lot more to my performance than I would have done otherwise.
The Heart of Gold spaceship, where a great deal of the action takes place, was constructed on the George Lucas Stage at Elstree Studios. The Heart of Gold was supposed to be the most amazing spac
eship ever constructed and the builders had done an exquisite job. The set was a fully realized, three-dimensional space with a bathroom, kitchen, bedrooms, connecting corridors, cargo hold, and a central crew area.
The only catch was that lighting it took 10,000 lightbulbs. Within seconds, despite the fan, I felt like I was in one of those little machines that once appeared on Dragon’s Den, you know, the one that supposedly boils an egg perfectly without water.b
They’d leave switching the lights on until the last possible moment because it would get extremely hot in no time at all. The terrible thing was that the motor that powered the fan in Marvin’s head was too loud so it had to be switched off whenever we were about to start a scene. I’d hear it whirr to a halt with no little dread.
Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis Page 24