After we’d wrapped, I went back to the changing room and spent an hour wrestling with the hair extensions.
I found a passing makeup artist. “Excuse me, could you help?” I pleaded.
After another few minutes of wrangling she gave up. “I don’t think they’re meant to come out,” she said suddenly, and then quickly left the room.
I turned and looked in the mirror. “Good God!” I exclaimed. She’d managed to make them look even worse. I looked like TV scarecrow Worzel Gummidge after he’d been zapped by an electric chair. My hair, real and fake, was perpendicular to my skull. I yanked and yanked at the extensions and eventually I had most of them out but the glue stayed put and knotted my hair. The damn stuff simply wouldn’t wash out.
I ran from the studio straight to the nearest hairdresser’s. As I came in they all pulled expressions that said, “I’m not touching that, you do it,” and I saw that any chance of rescue was hopeless. I sighed despondently.
“All right, just shave it off then.”
Location filming was done in the deserts of Tunisia. I wanted Annabelle and Sam to come but it was just too hot and a tad risky, especially by my standards. My general rule of travel is not to fly anywhere where innoculations are required. Generally speaking, these areas tend to contain animals, large and small, that like to eat or poison humans. Tunisia required lots of injections. I didn’t really want to go but the producers weren’t going to move the location just for me; besides, everybody else was already there. I was the last to arrive.
I flew overnight to Tunis. “A driver will meet you tomorrow to take you to the location,” the production assistant said. “Bring lots of water.”
The following morning, carrying two enormous bottles of water and a suitcase, I was met by a short man (well, shorter than average) in the tiniest car I had ever seen. It was of an uncertain model (I think it may have been Libyan) and vintage.
“They take you there,” the man said over and over, “they take you there, nice car. They take you there, nice car.”
“Nice car, yes,” I said loudly, exaggerating my mouth movements as one does when trying to speak to someone whose English isn’t that great. I threw my suitcase in the backseat and climbed on top of it so I could see out the window. We bounced madly on a very rough street and I banged my head on the car roof, a first.
“How long?” I asked, hoping this would be a short journey.
“Eight day,” he replied with a cheery smile.
It was about then that I experienced one of those alarming moments when you seriously question yourself: What am I doing here? What have I done? Why haven’t they sent a helicopter?
These questions only grew louder in my mind when the driver suddenly took a turn off the dusty main road and into a little town. It looked like something out of Indiana Jones. We navigated our way through smaller and smaller roads until we were driving through little more than alleyways.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Carpet,” he replied, as he pulled up outside a little building.
He climbed out and beckoned me onward, “Come, come, come, come.”
“Oh God,” I said to myself, “I’ve been kidnapped.” I half-expected to walk in and see half the cast tied up and being photographed holding the latest copy of the Tunis Times. The house was full, all right, but it was full of people all smiling at me and pointing at the walls.
After a few minutes I realized they were trying to sell me a rug. Ah! I thought. Now I know where I am. But if there’s one thing I am good at, it is saying no, and I take special delight in doing this to salesmen – from any country and for anything.
These guys were persistent, I had to admit, but so was I.
“You buy carpet.”
“No.”
“This one?”
“No.”
“This one?”
“No.” And on it went. Hours passed. Eventually they gave up and the driver, with a gloomy expression, waved me back to the car. I got in, a smug smile upon my face. “Well, that was fun,” I said.
We carried on through the desert and arrived at a small oasis just as the sun was setting. We carried on through a tiny town, which looked like it had been hit by a bomb and only partially rebuilt. It turned out that unfinished buildings were exempt from building tax so nobody ever completed their homes.
I was relieved to see that the hotel had been properly finished and it looked fabulously exotic. As I checked in I noted that the luggage room was full of rolled-up rugs. I guessed that not everybody had been able to say no to the persistent rug-selling driver.
My room was perfect and, much relieved, I threw my suitcase on the bed and popped it open. It looked as if I was an international biscuit smuggler. It was filled with two dozen packets of McVitie’s plain chocolate digestives.
I’m dreadfully paranoid about foreign food, so I had reasoned that as long as I had my biscuits and a ready supply of drinking water, I would survive. I steered clear of the local cuisine and rotated between two staple foods, pasta with tomato sauce and pizza margherita; no salad and no fruit. It worked, in that while lots of other people got sick, I didn’t.
The crew call was 4 a.m. every day. On my first morning, I walked into the corridor and joined the cast and crew as we all quietly shuffled our way through the hotel to the lobby. Although at that time of the morning we looked like a troop of miserable zombies who hadn’t so much as sniffed a fresh brain for weeks, we were all terrifically excited to be working on the new Star Wars movie.
Outside, a huge convoy of jeeps was waiting. George was at the front in “Yoda 1.” We climbed aboard and off we went, heading into the desert as a distant pink glow signaled the coming dawn.
We arrived at an enormous city of tents. These would be our trailers. They were arranged on decking, so they were off the ground and an old lady was busily sweeping the last traces of sand from them as we arrived. I wondered at what ungodly hour she had been forced to rise.
Everyone climbed out, still not speaking much, and we searched for our tents. Once I found mine, I entered with some trepidation. It was pitch black inside and I worried what creatures might be hiding there. Sure enough, I saw something small lurking in the corner.
“Awight, Warwick!”
It was the one and only Kenny Baker, a.k.a. R2-D2.
I sighed with relief. I was delighted to see Kenny again and we chatted as I got myself settled in. It was surprisingly cool inside the tent. An advantage of being so small was that we were the only people able to stand up straight once inside. But I was about to find out that my lack of height brought with it a much greater disadvantage.
I noticed that a trench had been dug all around the camp.
“I wonder why that is?” I asked Kenny, who shrugged.
I watched as two men made their way around the trench, which was about four feet deep. They were staring at their feet and every now and again they stopped and grabbed something with a stick and shoved whatever it was into a canvas bag. They grinned at me as they went past and it was then that I saw they were collecting snakes and scorpions that had fallen in overnight. The trench was supposed to keep them out of our tent city.
“I wouldn’t want to fall in there,” Kenny said.
Damn right, we’d never get out.
“I hope it works,” I muttered. “It’s bad enough having to put up with your snoring without having to worry about snakes slithering into our tent.”
Shooting started before sunrise and we would keep going until about two or three in the afternoon, when the sun would be too strong – especially for those in rubber heads. It was amazing how quickly the shadows disappeared as the sun rose. People were quickly caught out if they hadn’t drunk enough water. Actors were passing out all over the place. I was used to wearing rubber heads, and knew my limits pretty well, so as long as I kept well hydrated I knew I’d be okay. There was one crowd scene in which everyone was supposed to leap to their feet. When George cried “Action!�
� dozens of aliens leapt up and half of them promptly fainted.
I wanted to make the most of the experience and so on my days off I’d go and watch the filming. I wanted to witness a little piece of movie history being made. One day George spotted me hanging about. “What are you doing here today, Warwick?” he said, checking the schedule on a clipboard. “We’re not filming you, are we?”
“I just wanted to watch.”
“Well, seeing as you’re here, you can make yourself useful then. I’m going to put you in this scene. Run off to the makeup room and go and make yourself look different.”
“Like what?”
“I’m sure you’ll work it out with them.”
I quickly dashed off and found a free makeup person, explained I was going to be in a shot and they should make me look “different.”
The makeup and costume tents were amazing, all the costumes were hung up together on one side like a galactic Salvation Army store. The creature suits were all hung up on the other side of the tent, which resembled an alien slaughterhouse.
The makeup artist plastered my face with black greasepaint, which gave the appearance of a healthy growth of stubble. The costume department then did a mix-and-match of Wald’s and the “Willow shot” character’s costumes. The effect was to make me look like a local Bedouin who had somehow lost his camel and wandered onto the set.
I ran back to George, who did a double take. “Er . . . great!c Well, not bad . . . I suppose. What I want you to do is to walk alongside that incredibly tall guy over there with the black-and-white face, just behind where Liam is going to walk across the road with Jake.” (Jake Lloyd played Anakin Skywalker.)
I’d noticed that a tall blond lady was dashing about the set and was busy photographing the stars. It turned out that this was the world-famous photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was shooting a massive feature for Vanity Fair on Episode I, featuring all the Star Wars characters.
Everyone who was anyone seemed to be on the set that day, so Annie decided that today was the day for a massive group shoot that would appear as a double-page spread in the world’s most famous magazine. One advantage of being small was that I was naturally thrust towards the front of the group shot, and in the end Annie positioned me right between R2-D2 and C-3PO, front and center.
This character was barely visible in the film, I was just in the background for a few seconds, and so my appearance front and center in this shoot created enormous debate about his importance among Star Wars fans. They speculated whether he would come to have later significance in the next two films in the series (he didn’t). They eventually christened this mysterious character “Grimey.”
Another scene that caused much debate is when Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) tells Anakin that he’s a “special child.” Anakin has been having a fight with another Rodian, the same species as my rubber-headed character, and I had been in the background, egging Anakin on. Qui-Gon stops the fight.
Always looking for an opportunity, I asked George if I could have a line.
“Yes,” George said, “why not?” I spotted that glint in his eye. “Let’s give the fans something to talk about.”
Now, Star Wars aficionados will remember Greedo from the “original” 1977 film – he was the green alien shot dead by Han Solo in the cantina on Tatooine.
George decided to make the character whom Anakin was fighting into the young Greedo. George said to me, “After the fight’s done, say to Greedo, ‘Keep that sort of thing up and you’ll come to a bad end.’”
“Cool!”
“We won’t use it,” George said, taking the wind out of my sails somewhat, “but we’ll put it on the DVD extras and it’ll be debated at conventions.” Which it was.
To deliver my lines, I had to learn Huttese, the official language of the Rodians, created by Oscar-winning sound designer (and the voice of Wall-e) Ben Burt. I even got my own training tape, just as you would use to learn any other language, and I can still recall some to this day.
I’m sure you can imagine my joy when I was told we were moving from our palatial residence to film in a more “remote” area. I fretted. My supply of chocolate digestives was running dangerously low. However, I was relieved to see that George was staying at the same hotel as the rest of us; this was generally a sign that the hotel would be pretty good.
And it was true – the hotel was the best in town.
It was also the only hotel in town.
There were no windows in the thick stone walls, just a collection of holes. The bed was lumpier than the Leprechaun’s skin and dozens of insects bustled their way across the floor and chattered through the night. I slept with one eye open, watching the digestives.
I couldn’t understand why we’d moved from one patch of sand to another but then I realized that George wanted to use the amazing houses the locals lived in as a location. They looked a bit like white, smooth honeycombs and the people who lived there were very welcoming and put up with an awful lot as we turned their village into a film set for a few days.
The only tricky part came was when the call to prayer came at midday. Men spent the rest of the day taking it in turns to climb to the top of little towers that were dotted around the town and shriek at the top of their voices for an hour or so. In the end we had no choice but to carry on filming through the cacophony – a bit of a challenge for the sound engineers.
I remember waking up on the morning we were due to leave with pure joy in my heart. I was down to my last couple of melted and crumbled digestives, so the end came just in the nick of time. I traveled with Jake Lloyd and his dad by ferry to the island of Djerba, the Blackpool of Tunisia and the location for some of the scenes from the original Star Wars movie (including the Mos Eisley spaceport exteriors).
Jake was as overjoyed as I was to be returning to civilization. He’d already done a fair bit of acting prior to The Phantom Menace so it wasn’t as if the movie biz was new to him. We didn’t really talk too much about the film during the journey. I really liked Jake, he spoke to me as if we were on the same level, as if I were just another ten-year-old. He even tried to sell me a lizard; goodness knows where he found the poor creature. We’ve since kept in touch and these days he’s much more interested in making films than appearing in them.
We had to spend one night in Djerba before flying back to the UK and while the cast and crew went wild with the food, drink, and ice after weeks of being careful, I decided to keep up my precautions until we were off the continent, and tucked into the very last of my crushed and melted McVitie’s. Everyone else came down with food poisoning. My beloved chocolate digestives had saved me.
Once all the location filming had been done, George went off to edit. After this was completed it was time to film the pickups in a second wave of filming where any missing bits were added. These scenes were filmed at Ealing Studios in the UK.
I was very surprised to be called by Robin Gurland, the casting director. I really wasn’t expecting to have to film any more of my parts. “George wants you as Yoda in a scene,” she said.
“You must be mistaken,” I said. “Yoda’s a puppet and I’m not having Frank Oz putting his hand –”
“Well, yes he is, but now George needs him to walk across the ground with the other characters near the end of the film and Frank can’t do that.”
Wow, I was going to be Yoda! Because I’m a bit larger than the actual puppet, the costume department made me my own Yoda outfit, complete with walking stick. They also gave me Frank Oz’s Yoda gloves, which had Frank’s name on the inside of the cuff.
Sam was called in at the last minute to act in the same scene, as the original little actress playing Even Piell was away on holiday. It took place at the end of the film when Anakin and Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) and members of the Jedi Council exit a space cruiser and are met by Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) and Queen Padme (Natalie Portman).
On the day, producer Rick McCallum was directing. As I was so excited to be playing Yoda I couldn�
�t help myself and slipped into my occasional bad habit of adding my own sound effects. I grumbled and hurrumphed in Yoda’s voice as I made my way down the gangway. Sam, unrecognizable in her prosthetics, was right beside me.
A few seconds later, I heard “Cut, cut!” Rick then said, “Warwick, I need you to hurry up a bit and keep up with everyone else.”
“But I’m Yoda,” I said. “He can’t walk fast and neither can I in this costume.”
Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis Page 18
