Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (20 page)

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 2,498
^c
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. While 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.

While my filmmaking career hadn’t exactly entered hyperspace, my acting career was moving along nicely. Mum was still my agent; she took the calls and did the paperwork. And not long after I’d finished filming
Willow
, the BBC called her to offer me the role of Reepicheep the talking mouse in their adaptations of
Prince Caspian
and
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
, from C. S. Lewis’s wonderful
Chronicles of Narnia
. These BBC children’s dramas were a real institution and a major televisual event broadcast on Sunday evenings.

It was amazing to work on a BBC drama; most of the series was shot on location on beaches in Wales and Milford Haven (I would return to the exact same beach many years later for
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
) and on board a full-scale replica of the
Dawn Treader
. The deck and everything above looked completely authentic, while a production studio was belowdecks.

The storm scenes were filmed at London’s Ealing Studios where the special-effects team had built a mock-up of the
Dawn Treader
’s upper deck. This had been mounted on a hydraulic system, which would simulate the boat at sea in a violent storm.

I was in a fairly bulky foam mouse bodysuit, complete with screw-on tail. I was also wearing a glued-on foam-latex mouse nose, complete with whiskers made from stripped feathers.

When the “storm” started, I wobbled and rolled my way back and forth across the boat. After what seemed to me to be an eternity the director finally yelled “Cut!”

Relieved the ordeal was over, I tried to return to my starting position. I couldn’t move. The problem was that my foam suit had now absorbed so much water that it had turned into an extremely heavy water suit. It sagged dramatically, giving me a rather unfortunate knee-level potbelly. My once perky foam nose drooped impotently.

After a quick discussion, it was decided that I needed to be “wrung out” before the next take. To save time, the makeup girl placed her hands around the nose and twisted in opposite directions. This was followed by a sudden undignified nasal downpour. Fortunately, they let me out of my bodysuit before they wrung that dry.

I was delighted to follow
Dawn Treader
with a performance as Glimfeather the Owl in
The Silver Chair,
the next book in the series. For Glimfeather, I decided to do some preparation and went to an owl sanctuary to study their behavior. However, apart from learning that the collective noun for owls is a parliament, it was of limited benefit. I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried, turn my head all the way round, tuck my head under my arm, or produce a shower of tiny pellets every twenty minutes or so.

Luckily, my voice was a few octaves higher in those days, so I was able to do a pretty good “twit-twoo” and spoke every sentence with an “oo” on the end or in the middle, so lines became “Pleased to meet yooooooou,” and “She’s oooover there.” I’d sometimes carry it on after a loooong day, withoooout thinking.

A real highlight of this production was meeting and acting with Tom Baker during
The Silver Chair
; he was still hugely famous then for playing the best Doctor
Doctor Who
had ever seen.
^a

Tom’s wonderful voice – later put to good use as the narrator for
Little Britain
– was a delight to hear and I tried to get him to talk as much as possible. I found him to be a wonderfully honest person with a very peculiar dark side. He had the kind of stare that snakes use to hypnotize small furry animals before they swallow them whole.

He loved talking about death, ghouls, and spooky places. He once said, “All my life I have felt myself to be on the edge of things. All my life I have suffered from bad dreams. All my life I have had difficulty in knowing whether I am awake or in a nightmare.”

In fact we’ve both shared the same nightmare, having filmed in the same freezing Welsh quarry, me in
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, Tom in
Doctor Who
. The TARDIS materializes in the same quarry in almost every episode of
Doctor Who
– that quarry must be the center of the universe.

Tom and I also shared almost precisely the same view about acting; he never took the job for granted and considered himself extremely fortunate to have had as much success as he did. He added that
Doctor Who
was the best job he’d ever had. “All I had to do was speak complete gobbledygook with utter conviction.” Nobody’s done it better.

I was delighted to bump into him at a sci-fi convention in 1990. “Where’s your scarf?” I joked, referring to the fact that he wasn’t wearing his trademark nine-foot scarf. He smiled suddenly, and I felt like a small furry animal in the gaze of a king cobra – which, as a former Ewok, was only natural, I suppose.

After I’d finished filming
Dawn Treader
and while
Willow
was still in cinemas, Robert, my accident-prone Willow stuntman double, was appearing in
Snow White
at the Cambridge Arts Theatre with the late,
^b
great singer and comedienne Marti Caine as the Evil Queen, and I popped along to see the show. I hadn’t seen a panto
^d
since I was a child and wasn’t expecting much, so it was with some surprise that I discovered it had a deliciously infectious atmosphere and I found myself shouting, “He’s behind you!” along with everyone else. It looked chaotic but it seemed as though the actors were having enormous fun and the energy coming from the crowd was like nothing I’d ever experienced.

I admired the abilities of one performer in particular, the Queen’s Cat – called Catsmeat – who at one stage leapt into the audience and nimbly ran along the backs of the chairs, over kids’ screaming heads. Quite an amazing feat. He turned out to be an exceptional choreographer, Paul Harris, whom I’d work with very closely on another famous project, far in the future.

After the performance, I saw a man with a rather stressed and frazzled appearance marching toward me. He came straight to the point: “I’m directing this travesty,” he opined. “Our leading dwarf is a raging alcoholic, I’ve just fired him. Do you want the role?”

This was a bit sudden. I hesitated.

“I’ve got to let him go. He’s been caught stinking of booze in front of the children once too often. Luckily, he’s playing Sleepy so we’ve got away with it so far.”

“I don’t know,” I began.

“We keep an eighth dwarf spare so he can take over but we’d love to have you as Sleepy if possible, otherwise we don’t have an eighth man.”

I then spotted Samantha on stage, who’d been a Newlyn villager in
Willow
and whom I’d admired from afar on the set of
Labyrinth
. I recalled the night we’d finally met properly during the
Willow
dinner at the Waldorf and how well we’d got on.

“Okay, why not?” I said.

“Great, you can start tomorrow.”

“Hang on . . .”

Taking to the stage in a nightshirt was a very strange experience at first, but I loved every minute. It was odd because at the time my name was everywhere on cinema billboards, newspapers, and magazines, as
Willow
was still showing. But as Sleepy in
Snow White
I wasn’t given any billing whatsoever and I don’t think anybody in the audience realized who I was.