Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (14 page)

These days I hardly watch any horror movies at all, but one of my favorite films of all time remains Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho
. Anthony Perkins’s performance as Norman Bates made me really think about what it was possible to achieve as an actor for the first time – it wasn’t just about delivering your lines in the right voice. His performance was so edgy, so different from the bloodthirsty movies Hollywood normally fed us.

Psycho
also taught me about suspense, what was possible with sound and music. I bought the soundtrack and, as an avid soundtrack collector, I still think it’s one of the best scores ever recorded. I had a poster of Anthony Perkins holding a knife-shaped key to Room One of the Bates Motel on my wall throughout my teenage years, and I studied the movie in great depth at film school.

There were so many other wonderful films, aimed more specifically at my age group, at that time.
The Goonies, Gremlins, Innerspace,
and so on. I don’t mean to say there was some great golden age in the 1980s but I feel that films nowadays try to take themselves too seriously; films then were much more rough and ready and audiences were happy to use their imagination during dodgy effects or forgive gaping plot holes as long as the movie was fun. They were so digestible and now I love nothing more than sharing these films with my children, who love them just as much as I did – especially
The Goonies.

The mid-1980s also saw the dawn of the pirate video. There weren’t many video recorders about then. We relied on our wealthier neighbors in Kingswood who always seemed to get these new gadgets first. They’d buy the very first video recorder, the very first games console, the very first CD player, the very first DVD player – which were all usually obsolete within a month, at which point they’d then sell them on to the residents of Lower Kingswood, my dad being a particularly good customer.

There was one friend who had a swimming pool, an Atari, and two video recorders (so he could record two things at once). The recorders were about the same size as a small family car and they sold one of these to Dad, who heaved it through our front door, sweating, huffing and puffing. “This is the future!” he exclaimed, “and it’s bloody heavy!” When he set the device down, the lounge floor bowed slightly. It was a huge top-loader with giant dials and knobs on the front: setting the timer was done using an analog clock. The keys on the top were so big and heavy with such strong springs that they were impossible for me to depress, even when pushing down with both my feet. It was so complicated to operate and relied on so many mechanisms that it never recorded anything we wanted to watch. To me, it was just amazing to know that it was technically possible to record TV.

A friend of mine got hold of a pirate copy of
ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
and we watched it at his house. We were all incredibly excited; we were getting to see a great film for free! Of course, when we played it, it was a dodgy copy of someone filming a cinema screen; it was indecipherable. I’m very much against pirate videos these days and if I see one I go crackers and try to take the tape/DVD away from whoever has it. They are always of terrible quality and are an insult to all the people who have done everything they can to make a film look and sound as amazing as possible.

My own teenage movie masterpiece was called
Nightmare
. There were three of us involved in this, all of us about fourteen. My coproducers were Alex Cotton and Courtland Stibbe (pronounced Stibbey), so we called ourselves CDS Productions.

Courtland was a computer whiz, and he made some nifty titles on his Acorn computer. With the room darkened, I used my camera to zoom in on the monitor, to make it look as if the titles were coming toward the viewer.

And now for the plot. It centered on a cheap souvenir that Alex had brought back from his family holidays in Egypt, a clay model of Tutankhamun’s head.

In the first scene we’re all sitting around playing poker and drinking beer (as most fourteen-year-olds like to do) when Courtland, after suffering a heavy loss, marches off in a huff and has a sulk in the abandoned shed at the bottom of the garden, where he dislodges a floorboard, uncovering Tutankhamun’s head.

I should point out that Alex had made it very clear to me, on pain of death, that the head should remain intact. So we used a rock as a stunt double whenever it was supposed to be thrown and we got pretty good at the old switcheroo.

Alex passes it to Courtland, who chucks it (the stunt double) onto the rubbish heap. Cue scary music. Alex then walks past the swimming pool in the garden and comes across the statue sitting on the wall. Strange. Surely it should be in the rubbish? He reaches out to touch it and – cue thunder and lightning effect – Alex is electrocuted and falls into the pool.

Cut to later on that day. I’m drinking beer (of course) and watching TV news (read by my mum). Cut to a shot of a pair of hands cutting the power line in the meter cupboard. I don’t know where those hands came from, whose they were, and where they went afterward but don’t worry, it’s not important.

Cut back to me in the lounge. The power goes. I pull a face. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? I pick up the phone, as obviously that’s the first thing you do in that situation. The line is dead. I let the receiver fall to the floor. Things start being thrown about the room.

Odd? Yes. I go outside in my slippers. There’s a strange noise coming from – the statue. It increases in pitch and I run across the garden and still the noise increases. I run into the field and still the noise increases, it’s shattering my eardrums. I can’t take it anymore!

Then I explode.

I should probably explain that last bit. We were all nerds and Courtland knew his way around a chemistry set. He knew that if we dismantled enough fireworks, we would be able to create a pretty nifty-sized explosion. We bought all the fireworks we could carry from a grateful newsagent, who’d overstocked the previous Guy Fawkes Night, and packed them loosely into a paper container with two pounds of flour. All we had to do then was film me running into the shot, dropping to my knees, holding my ears.

“Cut!”

I sprinted to a safe distance as Courtland lit the blue touchpaper. The resulting flash and the mushroom cloud could be seen from Swindon.

If we had done that today we would have had the counter-terrorism squad around before you could say, “The man in the newsagents sold them to us.”

Nonetheless, it was a great effect. But the film wasn’t over yet. Oh no, you don’t get off that lightly.

Once we were all dead, I switched the button on the camera marked “negative.” The resulting tone and color were supposed to represent us in the afterlife. Dressed in our best clothes (Alex was in a particularly fetching white shirt and white trousers), we worship the idol in front of a wall of flames (some gasoline in one of Mum’s baking trays placed just below camera) while
Carmina Burana
^d
plays. Then we place the artifact back under the floorboards in the shed. Goodness knows why it would kill to get back into that shed.

Finally, cut to me in bed. Aha, it was all a dream! But wait, the alarm clock starts ringing. I don’t wake up – I’m dead!

And the credits roll. They were very specific; as owner of the clay statue, Alex was credited as “Properties Manager.”

Unfortunately, I never got to find out what grade it would have got in college – by then I was starring in my own major motion picture.

^a
I did consider the police once they abandoned the height restriction, although I don’t think I would have made many collars.

^b
When Mum said she was going into town to pick up a new car I was overjoyed and hung out the window looking for her on her way back. I was gutted when I saw a newer, black and yellow model of the 2CV straining its way up the hill toward us. She hadn’t? She had.

^c
I’d learned the importance of safety procedures from the stunt coordinators on
Jedi
.

^d
We all knew it from the TV ads for Old Spice. The whole experience seemed to leave quite an impression on Courtland, who later became a monk.

Chapter Eight

Heroes Come in All Sizes

Val Kilmer and I didn’t have to act our fear once we hit the milelong glacier – I screamed until I ran out of air. “Luckily,” someone had the bright idea of piling up a mountain of loose powder snow right in our path to bring us to a halt.

 

Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

We repeated the sledding scene with a skier until Ron was certain he had enough footage of our terrified expressions.

 

Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

Discussing a scene with the wonderful Jean Marsh while director Ron Howard thoughtfully strokes his mustache. Jean played the evil sorceress Bavmorda with chilling conviction.

 

Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

Willow and Meegosh (aka David Steinberg), great friends both on-screen and off.

 

Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

“Stewpid Daikins” George Lucas and Ron Howard.

 

Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

Val Kilmer, Ron Howard, me, and Joanne Whalley. As can clearly be seen here, Joanne was madly in love with me but I broke her heart and she started dating Val on the rebound.

 

Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

“What are you trying to do? Drown me?” To add insult to injury, the storm scenes we filmed in Pinewood’s reservoir were never used.

 

Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

Paddling toward trouble.

 

That smile wouldn’t be on my face for much longer . . .

 

Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

Val and I did lots of public signings for
Willow
. Val, the joker, liked to write me amusing messages before he passed the photos over for me to sign.

 

Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.

 

Is
that
it?” I asked, and turned to look at Daniel. The “that” was pronounced with a mixture of disgust and disappointment.

“Yup,” Daniel said with some uncertainty.

As far as I was concerned Cornwall was supposed to be an exciting land of smugglers’ coves, warm cozy pubs, wild seas, rugged coasts, and the pasty. What I was looking at here was a cottage that would be described in an estate agent’s blurb as “charming” and “requiring extensive renovation and modernization.”

In a
Withnail and I
moment, Daniel had convinced me to let him “treat” me to a week’s holiday with his family in remotest Cornwall. “It’s payback for you having taken me to the USA,” he said. Hmmm . . . Stepping over the threshold was like stepping back into Edwardian times. I could hear the damp cottage crumbling.