Val and I did a few meet-the-fans signings. The routine was that we’d both sign the same photo; Val usually signed them first before passing them on to me. What he’d actually done was written a message to me on the photo such as “When’s lunch?” or “She’s hot!”
The initial reviews for Willow were somewhat mixed. Time magazine said that Lucasfilm had “hit its dark age” and that Willow was simply “a reprise of his Star Wars plot” while the New York Times praised my “earnest performance” and Variety said, “kids will love it.”
It was a hit at the box office, grossing $57.27 million from a $35 million budget in the United States and, while this wasn’t as profitable as George had hoped, it was a slow grower. Its popularity has increased over time and it is arguably regarded as a bit of a cult movie today. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have told me that they wore out their VHS copy of the film from playing it so much. Thank goodness for DVD.g I think its success is due to its timelessness. It isn’t particularly dated and certainly follows no particular fashion.
Audiences seem to enjoy underdogs and they don’t come much more underdog than Willow. It’s filled with interesting characters and, as George always said, the focus is on the characters, not the special effects: “The special effects are there to help tell the story, that’s all.”
There’s romance and comedy, especially with the tiny sidekicks, the Brownies. Willow and Madmartigan have a really interesting relationship and are a real odd couple. It’s one of those films where everybody can get something out of it, from an eight-year-old to an eighty-year-old. Trying to find a film at the local video store that the whole family can watch and enjoy can be quite tricky, they’re either too boring for adults or too violent for children. I rented Kindergarten Cop the other day to watch with my kids and I’d forgotten just how surprisingly violent it was.
I’m asked almost every day if there’s going to be a sequel to Willow. Well, I asked George Lucas and Ron Howard that very question at a party a couple of years ago. “I’d love to,” Ron said, “but you’d better check with George.”
I found George and asked him. “Ron and I talked about it for a while,” he replied, “and I thought about doing a TV series,” adding in his deadpan voice (but with a glint in his eye), “Of course when we do it we’ll have to recast, you’d be too old to play Willow now.”
So the jury is still out. Lots of talented screenwriters have sent in scripts for Willow II but George just isn’t interested, he only develops projects that he’s written or come up with himself.
Back then, however, I had plenty of my own projects to worry about.
“Weren’t you in Time Bandits?”
It may look like it but Sam and I weren’t going out together here. This was the night of the Willow party, when we first started to hit it off.
a Thank goodness for cell phones. I couldn’t climb up the inside of the new call boxes they use these days as they’re wider and have no footholds.
b I can still perform a nifty derobement.
c They might not have become members but by the end of the flight they’d definitely filled out the application for “The Mile-High Club.”
d Well, that’s what it felt like.
e I can say that because he was even shorter than me.
f Sadly, David is no longer with us – a great talent much missed.
g As a bonus feature, there’s a DVD commentary by yours truly.
Chapter Nine
Oh, Rats!
I spent a truly incredible day with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Harrison Ford on the set of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I even got to see Sean Connery “shot” by a Walther PPK.
Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.
Just before I was due to attend the UK premiere of Willow, David Tomblin, the man behind Return of the Ewok and George’s assistant director, called me at home.
“Why don’t you come up to Elstree this weekend?”
“Sure, mind if I bring a friend?”
David had invited me to Elstree a couple of times since Jedi and I was getting quite used to it. For Daniel, my best mate and obsessive Princess Leia fan, this would prove to be an entirely novel and overwhelming experience.
We arrived on Saturday morning and sought out David. When we finally found the right studio we couldn’t believe our eyes.
Hundreds of crew members were frantically going about their business on an enormous set. They were sawing, hammering, yelling, and piling up mountains of sand. In one corner, some men were stacking huge mesh cages containing thousands of enormous live rats.
A woman was rearranging dozens of silver, gold, and bejeweled goblets on an old wooden table. Hydraulic systems hissed and clanked below her. Gantry cameras whirred past. A dozen men in Nazi uniforms were smoking cigarettes, checking their guns, and brushing their trousers. The atmosphere was electric. It was clear that something very big was about to happen.
“There’s something strangely familiar about all this,” I said to Daniel.
Daniel was looking over my shoulder, mouth agape. Something tapped me on the head.
“Hi, shortstuff.”
I turned and looked up.
It was Indiana Jones.
“Harrison!”
Harrison Ford was in full costume, hat on head, whip in hand (he’d just used it to tap me on the head). I felt my hair reverentially. I’d just been tapped on the head by Indiana Jones’s whip. Unbelievable. But it was him all right, down to the last detail, right down to the scar on his chin.
“Come to join us for the last day, have you?” he asked. “I’m pretty certain there’s no Ewoks in this. Who’s your friend?”
“Who, him?” I said, amazed that Harrison would be interested. “He’s only Daniel.”
Daniel was doing a very good impression of a zombie at this point. He was staring fixedly ahead, his mouth wide open, and he looked even more pale than usual.
“What’s up with you?” I asked.
“Uhm . . . uhm . . .” Daniel replied as Sean Connery ambled up, also in full costume.
“Hi,” Sean said, “who’s this then?”
Harrison did the introductions. It was very surreal to have Indiana Jones introduce my friend Daniel to Sean Connery. All Daniel could manage was “Uhm.”
“I’m only twelve years older than him, you know,” Sean said, pointing at Harrison, “but I’m supposed to play his father!”
“Yeah, well. He never tires of telling people that. C’mon, George is here, let’s go find him.”
We left Daniel in a trancelike state, turning this way and that to see a constant stream of wonders pour into the set from every direction. I spotted a familiar face among all the noise and chaos. George Lucas, who was executive producer, was with a very excitable man with glasses, beard, and a V-neck golf sweater: Steven Spielberg. He was buzzing, full of energy, something I’d seen before in George when he was setting the stage for a grand finale.
They were just finishing a conversation. “That’s it exactly!” Spielberg was saying. “Okay, I can see the whole thing unfolding now.”
Spielberg loves movies that rely on craft and collaboration, where every single department is as motivated as every other. “No computers!” used to be his motto (although there would be a famous bit of digital manipulation, when Julian Glover’s character drinks from the wrong grail cup at the end of the movie and starts to age very rapidly – this scene would help the film win the Oscar for best effects).
“Hello, Warwick!” George said, “Come and meet Steven.”
I sidled up alongside the great director.
“Willow!” Steven said. “You were great in that. We must work together some day.”a
Steven explained this was the last day of shooting for the third and final Indiana Jones movie (as we all thought it was back then): Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
“This is old Hollywood-style filmmaking,” Steven said. “Have you seen the rats yet? Alison said she could
handle them but when you see two thousand of them all running around loose, well.”
He was referring to the stunning Alison Doody, who played the blond Austrian Nazi turncoat, Dr. Elsa Schneider. In the film, she tries to kill Indy by sealing him in a tomb – not before sleeping with both him and his father (not at the same time, I hasten to add).
Rat breeders (sounds like more of an insult than a job title) had raised two thousand rats especially for this scene – which was set in a Venetian sewer. And these weren’t your average sewer rats; they’d been especially isolated and fed on vitamin-rich supplements so they wouldn’t be riddled with disease. Finally, once they were released on set, a rat orgy kicked off – they’d been isolated for so long that they were feeling extremely frisky.
“Poor Alison,” Spielberg said. “Do we have any shame? No, we don’t!”
Someone thrust a rat in my face. “Aaarrgh!” I yelled in disgust, only to see it was made of rubber. “Present for you, Warwick. One of our talented extras.”
Apart from the rubber ones there were hundreds of mechanical rats. Now they were scary. They wiggled and thrashed so they could swim through the sewers. Their jaws, filled with huge fangs, shut with a vicious snapping motion, like hundreds of those clockwork chattering teeth that were so strangely popular in the 1980s.
Harrison was constantly joking around and he’d managed to get his hands on a live rat that he cradled and cuddled. “Used to be a nature guide when I was a kid and had a couple of rats as pets. They have personalities, you know, not like snakes. Rats are fine creatures.”
I swear the rat wagged its tail as Harrison petted and then kissed it. Harrison then jokingly ran through the script with the rat, making sure it knew what it was supposed to do and exactly when it was supposed to jump into Alison’s hair.
The on-set activity increased to feverish levels as Steven walked over to the director’s chair. He conducted the film from behind a monitor that was remotely linked to a camera perched on the end of an enormous thirty-foot-long crane. He controlled the camera while directing a crane operator, who moved it up and down, backward and forward. This way Steven was able to “fly” all over the set.
The plan was to film the famous “Oh, rats!” scene as well as the finale of the film, where Indiana finally gets his hands on the Grail, albeit fleetingly. The Grail scene was up next.
Harrison nudged me. “Try and take it off,” he said, pointing at his hat, bending over so I could reach it.
Thrilled to have a chance to try it on, I yanked but it wouldn’t budge. I gave it a really good tug, but nothing.
“See?” Harrison said. “It’s stuck on. Impossible to remove. If it falls off, we stop filming and have to go again. In Jordan we had to reshoot the damn tank chase scene about thirty times. This is what I have to do to make a living, stick a hat to my head with glue and tape.”
Terry Gilliam was there as well,b admiring the mechanical rats. Fresh from the critically acclaimed but commercial flop of Brazil, Terry had already embarked on his next madcap venture, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Apparently it was being filmed in Spain, so I had no idea what had brought him to Elstree.
Daniel was pretty much where I’d left him, except now he was agog at Alison Doody, who still looked rather attractive, despite her Nazi costume.
Eventually, when Spielberg called action, the set fell completely silent. Indiana and his dad were being held at gunpoint by the Nazis in the temple that held the Grail. Indy was the only one able to get the Grail back but both he and his dad agreed they’d rather be shot than hand the Grail over to the Germans.
When the clapperboard finally fell, I watched as Julian Glover (a.k.a. evil Nazi sympathizer Walter Donovan) spoke his lines. I was instantly mesmerized, completely caught up in the drama.
“Step back now, Dr. Schneider. Give Dr. Jones some room. He’s going to recover the Grail for us. Impossible? What do you say? Ready to go down in history?”
Suddenly Donovan turned his Walther PPK (yes, I know, clever, isn’t it?) onto Sean Connery and shot him in the stomach. I actually jumped with shock and watched with horror as Sean fell to the floor.
He can’t die! Can he?
“The healing power of the Grail is the only thing that can save your father now. It’s time to ask yourself what to believe.”
“Cut!”
“Wow.” I was completely blown away. What on earth was coming next?
George told me that the film was all about leaps of faith, as well as the love between father and son, something that was close to Spielberg’s own heart – like Indy’s dad, his father hadn’t been around when he was young.
By the end of the film, Indy and his dad would realize that being with each other was more important than everything else that was going on around them – they’d have a meeting of minds and hearts.
“So his dad doesn’t die, then?” I asked hopefully. George grinned.
The rest of the day zipped by in a blur as one amazing sequence followed another. I saw the temple set break up and move on five incredibly powerful hydraulic systems that simulated an earthquake and the collapsing temple; I saw Alison fall from Harrison’s hand to her “death”; I watched as Harrison hung over a “precipice,” his fingertips brushing the Grail as Sean held his other hand, and saw everything that was going on around them, the hundreds of people who made it all look so good. Harrison had one foot on a stepladder as Sean pulled him up from the precipice. About a dozen men were off camera, busy with smoke and wind machines.
I saw 5,000 rats – 2,000 real, 500 mechanical, and 2,498c rubber ones – terrorize a beautiful blonde. After the scene was shot it took a dozen men about twenty-four hours to find and home all the real ones.
Finally, Daniel and I reluctantly admitted it was time to go home and so we collected our rubber rats and strolled off into the Elstree sunset, going over and over this most incredible of days, determined that we would never, ever forget it.
a I’m still waiting for the call.
b No, I wasn’t in Time Bandits.
c Once he saw I had one, Daniel had to have one, too.
Chapter Ten
Hiii-Hoooooooo!
I sense another storm scene coming. . .
I really knew how to cultivate my image in those days.
Despite having starred in a major motion picture, I still hadn’t realized that my career as an actor was well and truly under way. In fact, I never had a defining moment where I said “I want to act” or “I am now an actor.”
I still thought of myself as a budding film director and continued to make short films with my friends, entering several festivals. Horror works really well as a genre for the short film; you don’t need much of a story and the idea – as far as I was concerned – was to try to shock the audience.
Up until this point I’d only recruited my friends to act in CDS Productions but I decided to find a professional for my new solo project, Video Nasty. Eventually, I persuaded my friend, voice coach and normal-sized Willow extra David Sibley, to act for free. As ever, the set was the Davis family home.
Video Nasty was the story of a man who watches TV twenty-four hours a day (he takes pills to keep himself awake). One day he gets eaten by his video recorder and ends up trapped inside the TV but gets spat out during a commercial break. There were some pretty sophisticated special effects in there (I went through a fair bit of fishing wire to achieve most of them) for the time and I was so pleased with the end result that I sent it into the Holy Grail for young filmmakers: the Screen Test “Young Filmmaker of the Year” competition.
I was delighted but not surprised when I heard I’d been selected for the final. I went off to appear on the program and, so I thought, to collect my trophy. I was therefore left reeling when presenter Brian Trueman announced I was in third place and was now the proud owner of a certificate stating as much. I left the studio feeling a little short-changed.
In those days it was very hard for kids like me to make a film. Whi
le I was writing this book I taught my kids how to use Apple’s editing software and how to do stop-motion animation using digital cameras. It’s amazing; you can even keep a ghost image of the previous frame on screen while you move your model to position it for the next frame. And if anything looks a bit untoward it can always be fixed in postproduction.
Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis Page 11
