by Cary Elwes
7
ROB’S TRAVELING CIRCUS
There is nothing ordinary about life on a movie set, particularly when you shoot a film on location for any length of time. There is a wonderful line in Cameron Crowe’s movie Almost Famous, when Russell Hammond, the charismatic lead guitarist played by Billy Crudup, tries to explain to the wide-eyed, and increasingly skeptical, adolescent journalist William Miller, played by Patrick Fugit, the appeal of the endless nights living on the road.
“This is the circus,” Hammond says. “Everybody’s trying not to go home.”
I’ve never been on tour with a band or with a circus for that matter, but I imagine it has something in common with the moviemaking experience. On most films you find yourself sequestered far from home with a tightly knit group of people, trying to create something special while passing the hours in ways most people can’t even imagine.
When you are on location for months on end, your job almost becomes your whole life. You don’t go home to the wife and kids at the end of the day. You have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with your coworkers, and in the evening you gather together over coffee or a drink and rehash the highs and lows of the day while getting to know one another. It can be an intense, almost claustrophobic environment. But with the right group of people, and the right director, it can also be the adventure of a lifetime.
And so it was with The Princess Bride.
Acting, by any reasonable standard, cannot be merely defined as just “work.” Actors do get paid to work, but we also get paid to essentially play, something most people abandon when they enter the adult world (if not well before that). In a way, as I have said, there is something very childlike in getting to perform either onstage or on film. All kids like to play dress-up, whether it’s cowboys and Indians or knights and princesses. When it gets to be both fun and work at the same time, it can be a truly wonderful, rewarding experience, as it was on this movie.
If I had to describe our production, I would say it was more like a circus troupe than any I had been on—traveling around Sheffield, pitching tents, putting on costumes and makeup, and staging our show. If you think about it, we had a “show” that involved giants, little people, wizards, albinos, swordfights, and death-defying stunts (and plenty of clowning around), all with Rob as the ultimate ringmaster. Heck, we even had four white horses! Looking back I feel certain that Bill must’ve spent some quality time at the circus with his kids while the idea for the book was still fermenting in his head. When I asked him this, he just laughed.
CHRISTOPHER GUEST
Everyone hopes, I think, when you’re doing a movie that you get the cast you want and that everything is fine. That everything kind of goes smoothly. That people have fun and in the end the product is something that everyone likes. You can’t really engineer that all the time, for many reasons. Sometimes it just comes together and, in this case, that’s what happened. Maybe it’s more boring to say this than to say that so-and-so was getting drunk and throwing stuff out the window. But it wouldn’t be true. It was kind of a miraculous thing. I remember feeling that very same thing at the time. And I’m not just looking back and painting some rosy picture. It was approached in a very loving way.
I also think there is a reason everyone involved with The Princess Bride still enjoys talking about it more than twenty-five years later: it really was that much fun. There is a certain pride in the finished product, of course, and of being forever associated with such an enduringly popular movie. But it’s the process itself that I remember most, and how much fun it was to go to work every day. I would say it was as close to a perfect moviemaking experience as I have ever had, or expect I’ll ever have. That’s a rare thing on a movie set, and it all starts with the director. He sets the tone for the whole show.
CAROL KANE
A director has so much power. If he were to be on the set, worried to death and always saying, “What are you doing now?!” and blah-blah-blah-blah . . . as an actor, you feel that. It tightens you up. Rob was quite the opposite. He was somebody trying to make a movie that would please him in a very specific, personal way. And that’s what works. Not, Maybe they’ll like it if I do this? He was tickling himself and that tickled the world.
Directors, like anyone in the process of recruiting employees, tend to be on their best behavior when you meet them for the first time. They can be generous of spirit, warm, even compassionate. Unfortunately, one occasionally discovers from time to time (and in some cases not long after the ink on the contract is dry) that one has been tossed into a lifeboat with wounded people who have been using the medium of filmmaking to either exorcise their demons or air their dirty laundry or other hang-ups in public. When that happens it can be a thoroughly unpleasant and depressing prospect for everyone on the whole crew. One finds oneself asking, Oh boy, what have I signed on to?
CHRIS SARANDON
We had such a good time making it. The set itself was, as you can imagine, a lot of laughs. It was such a collegial group. And we had a director who knew what he was doing, and who had a great sense of humor. As an actor, you know you’re in good hands with Rob. So you never find yourself thinking, Oh, God, am I going to do this right? I’ve really been lucky in that I’ve worked with some great directors. And on one or two films I had experiences that I still tell stories about. Things like, just before you go on camera being told that your chin is, you know, that you’ve got wattles . . . or that you’re not at all funny and you’re not charming and you’re this and that. And then it’s “Okay—action!” Literally. But Rob is never like that.
Luckily for us, we had a director who, being an actor himself, not only nurtured his cast and respected their technical ability, but was the same with his crew. Rob was like a big kid on the set, laughing, applauding, encouraging, and generally acting like a fan as well as a filmmaker. Any guy who greets you with a “Hiya!” before saying your name is clearly someone in touch with their inner child, which is a beautiful thing. The unpleasant alternative is if you happen to arrive on the set to find out you are working with either a benevolent dictator or a narcissist to some degree. Then you find yourself in the awkward position of having to stroke their ego. But, every so often, if you are fortunate, you find yourself working with someone who is as excited as you are to make each day’s discovery. Someone who views the entire process as an adventure, and invites everyone along for the ride. In other words, someone like Rob.
CHRIS SARANDON
Rob is calm. After a take he’ll say, “Oh, my God, you’re such a craftsman. Thank you! But can we try it again?” Sometimes you could see him, just off camera, holding himself to keep from laughing. That’s a great way to work.
As I say, the director’s mood and character set the tone on the production, and it has a domino effect. If the director is miserable, then invariably everyone else will be, too. If he doesn’t know what he is doing and shows up completely unprepared, that’s also a recipe for disaster. However, if the director is confident in his or her talent and is fun, cool, mellow, and so on, then you have “lucked out,” so to speak. Fortunately for us, Rob is a relentlessly positive kind of guy. In all honesty, unexpected British crew tea breaks notwithstanding, I never saw him get frustrated. In fact, I never witnessed anything even approaching a temper tantrum.
He may not even remember this, but in fact only once during the entire production did I witness Rob briefly get his mettle tested, and even then it didn’t last long. It happened when we hit a patch of bad weather while filming in the mountains of Higger Tor. Specifically the scene where the Man in Black confronts Buttercup about her “faithfulness.” In the UK, exterior filming, or “shooting,” as it is commonly known, can be a director’s nightmare. The weather is, more often than not, completely unpredictable. One minute you can be experiencing a heat wave, the next a flood of biblical proportions. Sometimes you get all four seasons in one day. You can find yourself shooting a scene in which the characters are bathed in sunlight one moment, and then cloa
ked in shadow the next. And the way that clouds move in England, especially in the Peak District, can either be intensely fast or slow, to say the least. Both are a disaster for a director of photography trying to maintain continuity of lighting for a scene. Well, on this particular afternoon, we got two seasons: summer and fall. We started the day with glorious sunshine, which by lunch gave way to dark clouds, and steel-gray skies that would periodically brighten just long enough to give you hope, only to dash them moments later. This went on for hours, with the cast and crew sitting around waiting for a break in the weather.
ROB REINER
The weather is always an issue, especially when you’re on a budget and you only have a certain amount of money to spend, and you want to be responsible. And the truth is you really don’t have control over those things. You can get a little crazy. But you’ve got to take a Zen approach because . . . what can you do? You can’t fix the weather. It is what it is.
Today, thanks to CGI and other technology, lighting continuity is not such a big issue. Computerized cloud cover is a wonderful tool for a director to have at his disposal. In those days, though, shooting outdoors in England you were always at the mercy of Mother Nature, no matter what time of year. So there we were . . . the whole crew forced to sit on the mountainside, waiting and watching the clouds. And, as the day grew short, I could see for the very first time Rob’s confidence beginning to wane.
Directors are by nature and necessity somewhat like generals. They are leading the troops into battle. And the enemy is time. You are constantly fighting it, trying to make it your slave, trying to control it. But on this day, control had been wrested from Rob. I remember seeing Adrian Biddle, our director of photography, a truly wonderful guy just recently discovered by James Cameron, who had hired him for Aliens, patiently holding his small, tinted eyepiece up to the sky to gauge the speed of the clouds.
“How long this time, Adrian?” Rob asked.
“Could be fifteen . . . maybe twenty minutes,” came the somber reply.
This was a long cloud cover. One that was moving at an extremely slow pace. The worst kind. We had shot most of the sequence in perfect sunshine, which is what we were hoping for in order to match that footage. This change in the climate was now cutting into precious time. Time we couldn’t afford to spend just sitting around. I looked over at Rob sitting in his director’s chair. His naturally upbeat demeanor had begun to wilt and he was actually betraying a little disappointment. I remember thinking it looked as if he had his own personal dark cloud hanging over his head, pouring a little rain—the kind you see in comic books or cartoons. I guess it’s my nature but whenever I see someone down, my inclination is to try to cheer them up. So I walked over to where he was sitting.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“It’s these bloody clouds,” Rob answered, having taken to using British swear words. “But what’re you gonna do?”
“Not much you can do,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll get through it, though.”
Unfortunately, that didn’t help. Rob politely mumbled, “Yeah, I guess,” then slipped right back into his funk.
As I walked away, I noticed Andy stroll over to Rob. Then, without saying a word, he produced three Hacky Sacks from his pocket and then did the most amazing thing. He began juggling. Yes, you heard me . . . juggling. It was the most extraordinary and beautiful thing I had ever seen on a set or indeed anywhere, for that matter: a man trying his best to cheer up his friend—by juggling, of all things.
I can still see Rob sitting there, slumped in his chair, hands in his pockets, furry hood over his head, and that little, dark, rainy cloud hovering above him. And then something miraculous happened. A huge smile began to slowly spread across his face as he became entranced by the simple phenomenon of three bean-filled sacks flying in a circle. The little, dark cloud began to melt away.
“We good now?” Andy said, while continuing to juggle.
Rob merely nodded. And the next thing I heard was that laugh—that deep, booming laugh that carried across the peaks as they shared a joke. That was the type of friendship these guys had. You didn’t have to push the right button often with Rob, but when circumstances dictated, Andy knew exactly which one to push.
I don’t mean to convey a false impression that Rob is a guy who thought that every day was sunshine and rainbows. And I don’t doubt that he endured some anxious, pressure-filled moments that I was not privy to. In fact, one of the true managerial genius-like qualities of a director is to shield his cast from those moments and to hide their own insecurities if they have any. In other words to keep some of their cards hidden, as Rob might put it, being a fan of poker metaphors. As a longtime thespian himself, Rob has a genuine affection for his fellow actors and, having grown up on sets, has a great deal of empathy for the filmmaking process. He is also very decisive, which is a very good thing in a director with a vision.
The only other thing that neither he nor Andy cared much for besides the weather in the UK was, as I have already said, the food. And, having grown up in England, I can tell you that traditional British fare has never been anything to write home about. Today TV chefs may have ushered in a new age of cuisine in the UK and indeed throughout the world. But to an outsider at that time, especially in the hinterlands of Great Britain, it must’ve seemed like a veritable culinary wasteland.
ANDY SCHEINMAN
We were out there in a foreign world, making a movie. We were cut off from the real world, especially up in Sheffield. I remember walking in on the first day and asking the guy at the hotel, “What’s the best restaurant in Sheffield?” And he says, “We don’t have one.”
It’s not so much that the food was bad; it was mostly just bland and unadventurous. So being decisive as he was, Rob opted to take the matter into his own hands and ordered a hibachi grill to be installed in his suite at the Hallam Tower Hotel. At the end of each day he would invite us all to gather in his suite for hamburgers and hot dogs. It was great fun, with Chris, Rob, and Mandy crooning harmonies to Rob’s favorite doo-wop songs as he flipped burgers on the grill. Although these parties involved a beer or some wine they never went on too late, as we had early call times the next day.
One night, right after we had all gone to bed, the fire alarm went off in the hotel. Loud, noisy, high-pitched sirens. The kind you couldn’t speak over, they were so deafening. Security personnel began to immediately clear the rooms, sending all of the hotel’s occupants out into the street. We all stood there in the cold night air, in our pajamas, nightgowns, and robes, while the local firemen, who had just arrived, made sure that the building was safe before letting us return to our rooms. We all sort of milled around, occasionally making eye contact with one another, wondering which one of us was responsible for the mayhem. We figured it had to be someone from our crew, since we had basically taken over the entire hotel.
No one ever officially owned up to it, and I suppose it might have been someone sneaking a cigarette in bed that triggered the alarm. But that seems unlikely, as it ended up happening two or three more times. For a long time I was convinced that Rob’s hibachi may have been responsible and that he must’ve left it on by mistake. When I asked him later about it, he denied it with a smile and said he thought it was André, who also had a hibachi in his room, claiming that after eating the hotel out of all their food for that day, he was always still hungry in the middle of the night. Which is an image itself. Sadly, André is no longer around to defend himself, so I guess we’ll never know who the culprit was.
CHRIS SARANDON
We were on location together for the first six or eight weeks, and we were all in the same hotel, which doesn’t often happen. It was like being at a great summer camp. We ate together, if not in the hotel dining room, then in Rob’s suite. We would sit around and eat, sing, and play games. It was just a great experience.
ROBIN WRIGHT
And so we would have these dinners four nights a week or whatever, in Rob’s room. All of us tog
ether, because we didn’t know anybody else and we were out in the middle of nowhere. And after a couple bottles of wine he, Chris Guest, and Mandy would always break into harmonizing old standards, and we would all join in.
Besides turning Rob into the crew cook, England had also somehow transformed him into a big darts fan. Not long after he arrived he bought a dartboard and had it set up in his suite at the Dorchester Hotel, where he and Andy eventually had to redecorate the wall from all the times they completely missed. He even brought it with him to Derbyshire. Strangest of all, he had also become a fan of sheepdog trials, which were on television almost as often as the darts competitions in Sheffield. He was amused that these two shows seemed to dominate the British TV schedule. I remember walking into his room one night, and there was Rob, transfixed by the trials.
“Cary, come here . . . check this out,” he said, giddy as a schoolboy. “This has to be the craziest sport ever!”
“What is?” I asked. Rob then nodded to the TV. “Look . . . the idea is that each dog rounds up these eight or nine sheep and herds them into a little paddock, right?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
