Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis

by Davis, Warwick

  Although I wasn’t in any scenes with David Bowie and his spectacular trousers,b I did manage to get a brief audience with the Goblin King and David was completely delightful. He seemed to be really enjoying making the film and was always in good spirits.

  I was in the general goblin melee along with many other little people. The cast of Labyrinth contained many former Ewoks, including my good friend Peter Burroughs and his daughter Sam. Peter was also a stunt goblin. In one scene he had to swing over a castle wall. He was counted in on three, coordinated by the stunt director. Unfortunately, his assistant had steered a gaggle of goblins directly into his arc and despite desperate if confusing screams of “Duck!” and “Heads up!” Peter scattered them all like bowling pins.

  I was into radio-controlled cars in those days and would amuse myself between scenes by racing my latest snazzy model around Elstree. I thought I was very cool and believed my wizardry with the remote control was something quite magnificent to behold. I even had dreams of turning pro and getting sponsorship. (When Sam saw me doing this for the first time, she sighed, “What a spoiled little brat.”)

  A lot of the film involved my fellow goblins and me being chased by radio-controlled rocks of all sizes. They ranged from about five feet across to the size of a pebble. A guy with the controller would get them to roll using a powerful motor and steered them using an internal gimbal. They were a little unreliable, though, and their inertia would sometimes get the better of them so I’d still be running for my life long after Henson yelled “Cut!”

  While many were mechanized, there were also plenty of rubber boulders that were simply rolled downhill toward us. Sometimes, in an effort to make the rocks look as if they were chasing us, we were fastened to them with thin cables – but we often became entangled and would land flat on our faces before the giant stone rolled over us.

  Jim had problems when the rocks were meant to chase me uphill and into my house. After some thought and experimenting with my video camera, I came up with the bright idea of running backward with the rocks rolling downhill after me. “Reverse the film and voila!” I said.

  It worked and I was convinced I was a cinematic genius in the making.

  There were quite a few accidents during the filming of Labyrinth. My animatronic head was made of fiberglass and metal and I had a moving beak attached to my chin. In one scene I had to run across an alleyway while being chased by goblins that were riding weird ostrich Muppet costumes, each operated by an actor inside. The actor’s torso was made up to look like the goblin rider, while the actor’s legs, hidden in the costume, maneuvered as the ostrich’s legs.

  There were six of these riding goblins that charged through all at once. I couldn’t see them coming and take after take I ended up flat on my back as they took me straight out. It was like being inside a bell being repeatedly struck with a metal bar – and it always seemed to be the biggest bloke who managed to hit me.

  Kenny Baker had it even worse. He was standing next to the castle wall when a cannonball was fired at it. The cannonball was of course magical and goblin-like – it had arms and legs. It was supposed to explode when it hit the building and it certainly did that. A huge cascade of sparks fell onto an unwitting, highly flammable Kenny, who promptly erupted into flames. For some seconds he just stood there, in that blissfully unaware state people go into when their hair is on fire, after which – when most of their hair has burned away – they innocently ask, “What’s that smell? It smells just like . . .”

  Just as the flames of recognition flickered across Kenny’s face, a stagehand came sprinting from the side and slapped him to the floor with an almighty forehand to his enflamed head. The flames were extinguished in seconds but poor Kenny was left with a severe case of sudden-onset baldness and temporary double vision.

  The Davis family home was far, far away from Elstree and the hotel we were offered as accommodation had less charm than a real-life Farty Owls (a.k.a. Fawlty Towers). For some reason, as soon as you stepped into your room, the temperature dropped to something close to freezing.

  Then Dad had an epiphany.

  “Well, we’ve just bought a bigger and better caravan, why don’t we stay in that?”

  It was true – in a rare fit of extravagance Dad had bought a caravan with double-glazing, cold running water, and so much space it had an echo. He parked it just twenty feet from the stage door that led to the Goblin City. Suddenly I had a bigger and better dressing room than David Bowie – and it was closer to the stage. All I had to do was wake up and wander in to work.

  Unfortunately, Dad made my life more difficult by staying with me for the entire five weeks of filming and inviting everyone to “his place” for a drink. I struggled to sleep as the little actors Jack Purvisc and Kenny Baker traded showbiz stories with Dad.

  With filming completed a wrap party was organized. Oddly enough, I met one of my childhood heroes – Miss Popov from Rentaghost – at the party, which was held on the Goblin City set. By then she was playing Audrey in Coronation Street but she still very kindly did Miss Popov’s accent and touched her nose for me (this was how one disappeared in Rentaghost).

  Kenny and Jack had formed a group called the Mini-Tones and they performed a cabaret atop the castle wall. It was a crazy place to have a party. This was the mid-1980s and everybody was dressed in white, the set was filthy, and it wasn’t long before everyone looked as if they’d just been down a coal mine.

  Finally, after eight weeks spent running around the huge stage being chased by radio-controlled rocks and admiring (from afar) Peter’s gorgeous daughter, the film was done and it was back to school.

  a Henson kept my life cast in his house as an ornament. It’s still out there somewhere. Come to think of it, there are bits of me everywhere.

  b They left nothing to the imagination.

  c Jack Purvis was one of the few cast members who’d been in all three Star Wars films – as a Jawa, an Ewok, a Dustbin Droid, and Chief Ugnaught. Jack also played a key role as Wally in Terry Gilliam’s cult movie Time Bandits. There were plans for a sequel but Terry Gilliam later indefinitely shelved it after both Jack and David Rappaport, who played the other key role, suffered terrible tragedies. Jack was paralyzed after his car rolled backward and crushed him (he died six years later), while David, struggling with depression, killed himself in 1990.

  Chapter Seven

  Skating for Spielberg

  CDS productions hard at work.

  Showing off our cinematic awards (although I could only manage third place in the BBC’s Screen Test Young Filmmaker of the Year, the Oscars for young people – a travesty!).

  We made a camera dolly out of a pram. I don’t know why we were filming a radiator, though.

  The (very) odd couple: Daniel was into Metallica while I was into Jean Michel Jarre – but we were united by our love for all things Star Wars.

  My first major cinematic effort, The Outing, starring Mum’s 2CV, my sister, and friend Stuart, was inspired by BBC’s Rentaghost. It involved lots of disappearing things, including Mum’s car.

  Me, overacting while goose-stepping, from my short film Russian Guard.

  Video Nasty, in which a man is eaten alive by his videocassette recorder (VCRs were about the size of mechanical diggers in those days).

  “And all because the lady hated Milk Tray.”

  Act I, Scene I, from Nightmare: Just another average day, fourteen-year-olds drinking beer and playing poker – but it’s about to be disrupted by a possessed statue (which will later cause me to explode).

  A selection of outfits from the Warwick Davis wardrobe. I don’t know why I did this, I just thought it was a good idea at the time – can you guess what decade this was?

  The careers officer came to give us advice. He took one look at me and raised his hands skyward in exasperation.

  “Not the fire brigade?” I asked. “I could get in all those hard to reach places.”a

  While I still hadn’t realized that acting could act
ually be my career, I thought that filmmaking made sense. Mum and Dad agreed; after all, I now had lots of connections in the biz and so I ended up doing my schoolwork experience back at Elstree as a runner on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

  Yes, that’s right, a runner. I thought runners were very cool. They used walkie-talkies and their main job seemed to be screaming at everyone to shut up before the filming of a scene started, something I knew I’d be very good at.

  I was more than a little outraged when I discovered that “running” was actually an important part of the job. I had to dash back and forth carrying scripts, papers, coffees, props, and anything else they could think of between Robert Zemeckis, Bob Hoskins, Steven Spielberg, and the entire production team. I was also given the most boring job in the world, photocopying and stamping every single page of every single script with a unique number, so if anyone sold a script to a journalist then the film company would know whom to sack and sue.

  On my second day I rolled into work on my roller skates, which helped considerably, but I was already certain that production wasn’t for me.

  A few days later I was rolling through the set when a man with a beard, glasses, and baseball cap waved me over. “Would you come here for a second?” he said.

  I pointed at myself and said, “Who, me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  I walked over to Steven Spielberg.

  “I think,” he said, looking me up and down thoughtfully, “that you’d be the perfect solution to a little problem we’re having.”

  By a stroke of luck, I was about the same height as Roger Rabbit and so I played the role of Roger for half a day during rehearsals, giving the actors something to focus on – that way their eyes were all looking at the right height when they came to shoot their scenes, making the animators’ jobs a lot easier. Unfortunately, it was also at the end of my work experience and all too short-lived.

  After Jedi, once I was back in the UK, I bought my own video camera and started making short films. My early twelve-year-old efforts centered on making animals, people, and objects disappear à la Rentaghost. I loved the way it was possible to shoot, then pause and remove something – a rock, for example – from a scene and then start recording again (without moving the camera) so it looked as if the rock had disappeared. My mother, my sister, my friends, everyone and everything vanished and then rematerialized all under my expert direction.

  My first major production was The Outing, starring my sister and Stuart, one of my friends, who also supplied titles and music (he was good at calligraphy and liked to tinkle the ivories). They played an old couple having a picnic on Epsom Downs. They arrive in an orange and white Citroen 2CV (Mum’s car), which then disappears. They’re left sitting in their wigs and hats in the seats on the road. The seats of a 2CV were known as “deckchairs” because they could be removed. Goodness knows why. Where on earth would you want to take a pair of car seats? They were extremely heavy and made for terribly uncomfortable deckchairs.b

  There were very few young people making films then. It’s completely different today, of course. It’s so easy for kids if they want to get started now and they can get their work seen by thousands, if not millions, of people on hosting sites such as YouTube. Back in the old days, all we had was Screen Test presented by the besuited and legendary Brian Trueman, the voice behind such children’s TV classics as Chorlton and the Wheelies, Jamie and the Magic Torch, Danger Mouse, and Count Duckula.

  It was essentially an observational film quiz and was insanely popular. It also ran a “Young Filmmaker of the Year” competition for budding Spielbergs. The prize was a plastic trophy. The most famous winner was Jan Pinkava, who won in 1980. Nope, I’d never heard of him either, but he went on to win the Oscar for best animated short in 1997 and then conceived the idea for and codirected Pixar’s Oscar-winning 2007 film Ratatouille.

  One tricky problem with stop-start filming was trying to overcome the slight delay from pressing record and the actual moment when the camera started to record. Getting the cry of “Action!” just right was key.

  In one very early effort I played a disturbingly accurate Professor Filius Flitwick – which was pretty impressive, considering this was in 1982. There was no plot as such, I was simply a mad professor who made potions while wearing an extraordinarily ill-fitting black wig. I also hit my sister in the face with my geography textbook for no discernible reason and remember my performance involved a great deal of shouting about Cheddar cheese – one of my favorite foods.

  My next production was a very sophisticated affair and involved a dramatic 1980s-style synth soundtrack. It was based on the famously patronizing ads for Milk Tray that featured the immortal endline: “And All Because the Lady Loves Milk Tray.”

  In those ads a James Bond character would brave hell and high water to bring his lady (usually living in total luxury in a heavily guarded turret) her favorite chocolates. He’d sneak them in while she was in the bath or shower, only to mysteriously disappear, leaving only his calling card and the chocolates behind him.

  I didn’t have a real box of Milk Tray, so I made one. It was white with “Milk Tray” scrawled across it in black marker in my terribly immature handwriting. The film also involved me waving a giant plastic fly over my sister (The Lady), not because it was necessary to the plot, you understand, but just because I had one. You could see my shadow, holding a long pole, in the shot. It turned out in this case that The Lady hated Milk Tray and killed The Man (me) after he’d made his delivery by throwing a rock at his head. This was my first stunt scene and I placed my wig on top of a cycle helmet so my sister could really throw the tiny stone at my head.c

  The Russian Guard was another masterpiece, one that could have been influenced by Sergei M. Eisenstein. Again I played the lead in my wig, goose-stepping like a loon while carrying a spud gun and an old-fashioned gas lamp (even though it was broad daylight).

  I still relied upon the old stop-and-shoot method, and I think that editing in-camera should be taught by film schools today because it really makes you think about how you’re going to construct each scene, there’s no room for error, and it can’t be fixed in post-production. As I was operating the camera, I’d often find myself trying to direct my sister while the film was rolling. Not wanting to be heard, I’d wave frantically, mouthing the word “Go!” over and over again when I wanted her to walk, or “Climb the tree!” You could tell when I was doing this because the camera would wobble.

  My sister played the role of the thief who wanted to steal whatever it was I was guarding (a block of gold, cunningly disguised as a cinder block). To do this she shot at me with a spud gun; we used a stone in place of a bullet – it missed me, but only just.

  Putting on my sternest Brezhnev face, I march around in fury, outraged that someone has dared to shoot at me. Cut to my sister half on and half off the shed roof, screaming “I can’t!” and me waving frantically, the camera wobbling. “Yes, you can,” I mouth, “Keep going!” She jumps down from the roof and we cut back to the Russian Guard who has now ratcheted the goose-stepping to Olympic levels. Finally, after falling for about thirty seconds, my sister lands on me, knocks me out, and steals the cinder block, only to drop it on her foot during her getaway.

  Cut to my sister hopping her way Benny Hill–style across the field next to our house. I’d wanted to film her until she reached the other side but it was much farther than we both realized and although she was getting tired as she hopped into the distance I waved at her frantically, mouthing, “Keep hopping! Keep going!”

  It was perhaps inevitable that when I left school I decided to study media at the nearby East Surrey College. The course consisted of film studies and video production. For our exam, we had to make a film based on the title “New Year’s Resolution,” demonstrating all the techniques that we had learned during our year’s study.

  I employed my cousin Mark and my friend and fellow film student David Tulley, who gave two truly memorably dire performances in what bec
ame my first horror film. The soundtrack was made up of swirly Jean Michel Jarre synthesizers. The best thing we did was to manufacture an impressive dolly (essentially a camera on wheels that allows for smooth tracking shots) from the wheels of an old pram.

  The story went like this. Mark is in the shower when David enters the house wearing a long black coat and hat, looking very suspicious. The synthesizer whirls itself up to feverish levels as David climbs the stairs toward the shower and . . . cue Psycho music . . . but no! David opens the bathroom door, shouts, “Happy New Year!” and throws Mark his car keys.

  I didn’t realize it then but looking back on it now, this seems to me to have some slight homoerotic undertones. Two young men living together in a big house in the country – one of whom casually enters the shower without knocking and throws his friend the keys to his Ferrari. If anyone had walked in on me in the shower in real life I would have covered my privates and let the keys hit me in the face, before telling them to clear off.