Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (17 page)

I, on the other hand, brought out Joanne’s motherly instincts. I seemed to have this effect quite often when I was younger and, like Carrie Fisher, Joanne always wanted to make sure I was well cared for.

I was being made up when a production assistant popped her head around the door.

“Is Warwick ready yet?” she asked.

“Just five more minutes,” the makeup artist replied.

“Okay. I just wanted to let you know that the helicopter is ready and standing by, so just come straight over when you’re done.”

As the door closed I suddenly sat up. “Helicopter? Nobody mentioned a helicopter!”

And nobody had. We had to fly by helicopter to a remote location for one of the more action-packed sequences of the film. Most of the crew weren’t so lucky and had to view the spectacular scenery from a bus, which wound its way along narrow mountain roads with 200-foot drops and hairpin bends galore.

Mum elected to take the bus because she was afraid of flying. I suspect she came to regret this decision when the bus turned one mountainside hairpin corner, skidded, and came to a halt with its rear end hanging, à la
The Italian Job
, over a sheer drop.

“Nobody move!” the bus driver said. “If we all keep still the bus won’t slide any more. I’ll call for help.”

The “help” turned out to be a tractor, which, in its haste to reach the stricken bus, lost control on the very same bend. It started skidding down the road toward the bus.

“Everybody out!” the driver yelled, triggering a mad scramble for the doors.

Fortunately, the tractor managed to stop just in time and towed the bus back onto the road.

Although I was a bit nervous about flying I thought it would be fantastic to fly over what had to be some of the most spectacular mountain scenery in the world. My excitement was quickly replaced by anxiety, however, when I saw what we would be traveling in.

“That’s it?” The chopper had four seats. To me it looked like a flying lawnmower. Ron and Val were already on board. When I climbed into the capsule I looked up at the rotors that had started to turn above me and tried to stop thinking about the bolts that were holding them to the chopper’s body.

I glanced at the pilot, a large mustachioed macho-looking American. “Don’t worry,” the production assistant said as he helped me into the chopper, “Bud here flew hundreds of missions in ’Nam, he knows what he’s doing.”

Before I had time to digest this fascinating new piece of information, Bud, who was chewing furiously on some gum, pulled back on the stick and took us straight up at a hundred miles an hour.
^d
I felt my spine compressing and my shoulders sinking. “Great,” I thought, “by the time we get there I’m going to be even shorter.”

It was incredible flying in New Zealand. I never realized it had so many mountains, something I came to be very aware of as every time we flew over one we were hit by a tremendous updraft shooting us up a couple of hundred feet higher in a stomach-squeezing vertical climb.

One time, when it was just Bud and me, we were forced to land due to bad weather. Bud, bless him, put us down in the middle of a swamp – luckily it was one of the firmer bits. It was truly amazing to be standing somewhere so incredibly remote, somewhere no human had ever been before.

Even though I was probably the only person in the entire world who didn’t have to, I instinctively ducked my head whenever I climbed out of the helicopter. Val crouched down beside me and said, “You really don’t need to do that, you know.”

A short while later Val and I were sat on a tiny, frictionless, and brakeless steel sled on top of a New Zealand mountain. I stared down at the glacier that seemed to stretch off into infinity below us. Quoting Han Solo, Princess Leia, and C-3PO, I said, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

In the film, the bad guys were chasing us and we were supposed to escape them by sliding down the mountain on a shield. I
had
thought this scene sounded like fun – until I saw the glacier as we swept up the mountain in the helicopter. All thoughts of the rotors falling off and of us plummeting to our doom were suddenly forgotten. What was the location scout on? Did he have any idea how long and steep this was?

I did have a stunt double who sometimes covered for me in distance shots. I say doubled, but Robert actually looked nothing like me, although he was roughly the same height. He was also the most accident prone and physically fragile man I’ve ever met. He disappeared down a hole in a field when we shot a sunset scene at Skywalker Ranch. He also nearly scalped himself when he caught his wig in a tree, no little achievement for someone less than four feet tall. Robert would trip over anything and everything, once falling over his own spear during a campfire scene – he almost turned himself into a shish kebab.

Goodness knows what would have happened to him on that mountain but, fortunately for Robert, Ron wanted the camera to be
on
the sled, to show that this was actually us going down the mountain.

“It’ll be fine,” Val said, but his customary confidence was a little lacking this time.

I got as far as “Maybe we shouldn’t” – before Ron yelled “Action!” and someone gave us a good running shove in the manner of the bobsled, except they weren’t silly enough to hop on for the ride.

Some of the crew had spent a few days helpfully polishing the ice for us, so we’d have a smooth and fast journey. They really shouldn’t have bothered.

Cameras positioned all the way down the glacier captured our wide-eyed, non-acted terror as we zipped by at Mach 2, screaming at the top of our voices. Sparks flew behind us as we sheared through the ice in a blur. It was like the scene from
Star Wars
when the
Millennium Falcon
jumps into hyperspace and the stars become blurry streaks. Every so often I’d spot a cameraman desperately trying to keep us in shot as we flew past.

I screamed until I ran out of air and then kept on going silently, my mouth and eyes locked open. I could see where the ice ended and the rocky mountainside began. Luckily, someone had had the bright idea of piling up a mountain of loose powder snow right in our path and we hit it at the speed of sound, disappearing in a
whumpf
, shooting a little mushroom cloud of snowflakes into the sky.

After we’d been dug out, Val and I hugged. “We’re alive!” he shouted, and whooped with relief. I tried to unbend my fingers, with which I’d been clutching the sled. It wasn’t easy.

Ron was in radio contact with the cameraman at the bottom and I heard him say excitedly, “That was great, let’s go again!”

Val and I looked at one another. Then we looked back up the mountain. “You have to be kidding me. There’s no way,” Val said. Nonetheless, still shaking, we climbed on a waiting snowmobile and were driven back up the slippery slope and did exactly the same thing all over again. The terror did not lessen in the slightest.

And then that, as it turned out, was Val’s last ride on the sled. He refused point blank to get back on the thing. “I’ve already fallen off two horses and nearly broken my damn foot on this movie, I’m not going to break my neck for you as well!”

It was true. On one of the first days of filming in New Zealand a steel cage fell on Val’s foot. He had hopped off the set in fury and refused to come out of his trailer. I watched from my own trailer window as first Ron and then George tried to persuade him to come out, only to be sent packing with a string of expletives. It took them half a day, but they got there in the end. If you look closely, you can see Val walking with a slight limp in some scenes.

As is typical for movies of this scale, there were quite a few accidents of this sort – Joanne stuck her sword in a stuntman’s foot during a tavern scene, for example. There were also a few “incidents” outside of work. We weren’t really supposed to engage in risky activities while under contract but when we were in New Zealand about a dozen of us liked to go ice-skating at an outdoor rink. One evening we formed a line and started skating in circles around the rink. We got really good at this and started to build up some momentum. Little David Steinberg,
^e
who played Willow’s best friend, Meegosh, was on the outside end of the line and was therefore traveling faster than anyone else. Soon, we were traveling so fast that he was no longer able to hold on and his glove came off in the hand of the person he was holding onto.

I caught a brief glimpse of David zipping by at the speed of sound across the ice, his face frozen in terror as he shot toward the barrier that surrounded the rink. I half expected to find a David-shaped hole in the barrier, but instead it had done a very good job of being a barrier and David had bounced back off it and ended up lying face down on the ice. Fortunately, he only needed a few stitches to his head and his bushy eyebrows covered those up.

That proved to be the end of our ice-skating exploits.

Although Val had had enough I, on the other hand, remained a glutton for punishment and agreed to go down a third time with a camera fixed to the front of the sled, looking back toward me to make sure they got some nice close-ups of my “frozen-in-terror” look.

A stunt double was found to replace Val and, as a bonus treat, we were told that we would be towed down the glacier by a stunt skier. “You’ll be fine,” Ron said, “he’s a real pro, he can do it backward no problem.”

“Did he just say backward?” I asked.

Sure enough, the skier pointed himself the wrong way down the mountain and set off while filming us with a Panavision camera, whizzing from side-to-side, narrowly missing boulders to make it “more exciting” and adding some all new “I’m going to die!” expressions to my repertoire.

As an actor and person, Val was amazing; he had a depth to him that’s hard to describe. He really relished any chance to take his job to the limit; sometimes the production team would try and take advantage of this, not maliciously, but just because he was so good.