Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (40 page)

“It’s brilliant! Can we make the head bigger?” he asked.

Once Garth had given his approval, construction of the fiberglass suit began. It steadily became heavier and heavier. Eventually, when it was finished, Paul and Nicola did a show-and-tell session in front of Garth.

“It’s great, but the head’s still too small.”

Paul and Nicola went back to the drawing board. They were worried about the weight of the head – how much would my neck be able to take? It would get even heavier because several special gizmos had yet to go inside.

They eventually constructed a metal body brace where two rods came up from my shoulders. These would support the fiberglass head, taking the weight away from my neck. The head would then rotate on a gimbal, which I would control by moving my head.

I felt a bit like I was wearing a Formula One racing car, as Paul and Nicola played with the design, trying to shave off a few grams of weight here and there.

The first time I tried the finished costume on it was about twice as heavy as the prototype we’d started out with.

“Just the head to go, Warwick,” Paul said.

“They’re not paying me enough for this,” I muttered as the head clicked into place and the world turned dark. With the head, the costume weighed about fifty pounds, not much less than me.

Then the lights came on.

“Wow, now
this
is cool.” In front of me were two TV screens. One was linked to a pinhole camera in between Marvin’s eyes, so I could see in front. The other screen was linked to a remote camera that provided me with a director’s-eye view of the scene so I could see what was going on around me.

I wore a headset and microphone so I could communicate with my support crew. When we started rolling, my voice was broadcast through speakers placed around the set so the other actors could hear my dialogue.

Above me, a small fan whirred away, in an effort to cool the giant cranium that was nonetheless heating up pretty quickly.

It felt like I was inside the Millennium Dome, there was this enormous space above me.

“Hey,” I said, testing the microphone, “I could tape my lines to the inside of Marvin’s head!”

Marvin looked amazing. He was painted the exact same white that BMW uses on their snazziest models.

“Just be careful, Warwick,” Paul told me. “Marvin scratches very easily and if you fall over he’ll crack. We’ve got one set of spare body parts but that’s all, he’s just too expensive.”

Once again, I was under tremendous pressure not to let an enormous team down during filming. If I fell, it didn’t bear thinking about. Marvin’s fiberglass body (which cost a lot more than a brand-new BMW) would shatter into a hundred pieces – not to mention what might happen to me.

While the suit was fairly easy to get into, I found it much harder to get into Marvin’s character. I’d never experienced depression and extended boredom. I’d been through my fair share of tragedies and had my heart broken but that wasn’t Marvin. Marvin was bored and depressed by the futility of his own existence and he didn’t mind letting everyone else know about it.

Besides, once I was in the costume all my strength and concentration were taken up by moving this massive, incredibly heavy costume – as well as keeping it upright. I wasn’t able to act and move at the same time, it was simply impossible.

I had a chat about this with Garth.

“Why don’t you speak to Peter Elliott?” he suggested. “He’s an expert at that sort of thing and we’ve hired him as the Vogon coordinator. I’m sure he’d be able to help.”

Peter was a movement director; we’d met briefly when I was filming
Jedi
. He’d been on a nearby stage in the same studio, playing the silverback gorilla in
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes
.

Peter is the world’s primary primate performer. You’d never know that any gorilla he’s played wasn’t real and he’s helped hundreds of actors behave un-humanly – as animals, aliens, and androids.

The actors who played the Vogons (the bureaucratic aliens who demolished the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass) were having a very hard time of it. They looked like a cross between a giant slug and a turtle without its shell. The costumes were extraordinarily huge, wobbly, and had poor visibility. I watched as the actors rebounded off each other, teetered and then tripped, arms a-flailing as they tried to find something to stop their plunge to earth.

I sighed nostalgically. “Reminds me of my days as an Ewok,” I told Peter.

After the rehearsal was over, I explained my problem.

Peter nodded enthusiastically. “You’ve been approaching it from entirely the wrong angle,” he said. “You’re trying to work as a puppeteer rather than treat this as a proper acting job. Get into character first, then worry about the puppeteer part, that will come naturally if you’re thinking like Marvin.”

I liked Peter straight away. He was straight-talking, short (for a tall person), and packed full of positive energy. He then demonstrated how it was possible to drain all that positive energy when we went to his studio and got into character.

“Think like Marvin,” he said. “Come on, what would he say if he were here now?”

I stared at a vacuum cleaner. “Such a primitive device,” I said morosely.

“That’s it!” Peter said. “Come on, keep going.”

Maintaining my glum, suicidal tone, I continued, “Do you come here often?” Obviously, the vacuum cleaner failed to respond. “Okay, be like that then. See if I care. Brain the size of a planet and they’ve got me talking to the likes of you.”

“Keep going!”

“And you,” I said, dragging myself toward Peter. “You’re so happy it makes me sick. You could fit my capacity for happiness into a matchbox without removing the matches first. Do you want me to fall apart now, or should I just sit here and rust away?”

“Hold that thought,” Peter said. “Not another word until you’ve got the costume on.”

Once I was in costume, Peter recorded the scene. I mooched around the studio saying things like: “Life. Don’t talk to me about life. Just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.”

Peter started interacting, quoting lines at me. “Haven’t you got any ideas as to how we get out of this?”

“I have a million ideas. They all point to certain death.”

When we watched the playback, Peter said, “Now we can see what you’re thinking.”

He was dead right. The walk I’d given Marvin was now so different. I didn’t even think about technique. Sure, it was still incredibly tough to move in there, but if anything that only helped me to bring out Marvin’s character. Every movement was an effort and so that came out in his character.

Peter also taught me how the robot would turn its head depending on what it was saying and how other people were responding, something he called “the continuity of movement.”

He was absolutely brilliant, he had taught me so much in no time at all and he helped me bring a lot more to my performance than I would have done otherwise.

The
Heart of Gold
spaceship, where a great deal of the action takes place, was constructed on the George Lucas Stage at Elstree Studios. The
Heart of Gold
was supposed to be the most amazing spaceship ever constructed and the builders had done an exquisite job. The set was a fully realized, three-dimensional space with a bathroom, kitchen, bedrooms, connecting corridors, cargo hold, and a central crew area.

The only catch was that lighting it took 10,000 lightbulbs. Within seconds, despite the fan, I felt like I was in one of those little machines that once appeared on
Dragon’s Den
, you know, the one that supposedly boils an egg perfectly without water.
^b

They’d leave switching the lights on until the last possible moment because it would get extremely hot in no time at all. The terrible thing was that the motor that powered the fan in Marvin’s head was too loud so it had to be switched off whenever we were about to start a scene. I’d hear it whirr to a halt with no little dread.

At the end of a day trying to walk around in costume I’d go home in agony. Every joint, muscle, and nerve ending in my body would scream at me not to get up in the morning. Each day was harder than the last. And then things got truly unbearable.

We went to shoot on location in Wales – in the
Quarry of Doom
. I found myself in the same nightmarish place that Tom Baker and all the other Doctor Whos know only too well.

When we arrived it appeared the Quarry of Doom was actually stuck in a parallel universe. While the rest of the UK basked in what was turning out to be a pleasant summer, the clouds that hung permanently over the quarry dropped freezing sleet upon us every single day. They clearly belonged in January, not July.

“Aha!” I hear you say. “Surely now your wonderful superheated suit would have come into its own?”

Oh, you poor naive fools. Have you learned nothing?

With the cold came ferocious winds, which threatened to blow me over, thanks to my terrifically unaerodynamic, enormously round head (thank you very much, Sirius Cybernetics Corporation!).

On top of this, there were loads of gaps in the costume, at Marvin’s limb joints (all the black bits were just Neoprene), so the wind just whistled its way straight in, turning Marvin into an icebox. And inside, all I was dressed in was a thin Lycra bodysuit.

In between takes everyone else was able to dive into their trailers to hide from the cold weather, but I had to stay put and freeze. This was what happened to Marvin in the film; he kept getting left behind for millions of years while everyone else had lots of jolly time-traveling adventures.

The first time I was left standing there, shivering, the rain pattering on my white head, I heard an ominous click, followed by a whirr. The fan had started up to “cool me down.”

“Oh, how thoughtful.”

As a chill ran down my spine I was suddenly struck by how familiar this all felt. “Ah, yes, that’s it,” I said to myself, “it’s just like our old Monza caravan.”

I was finding it easier and easier to get into Marvin’s character.

Paul and Nicola, bless them, stayed out there with me and threw their coats over me in an effort to keep some of the wind off.

“Yeah, cheers, thanks for that.”

It didn’t help.

To add insult to injury, everyone else was in comfy clothes. Martin Freeman (Arthur Dent) even got to wear a dressing gown for most of the movie. And thanks to my inaccessible costume, I didn’t really get to “see” and hang out with my fellow actors. But I liked Martin and I also liked Sam Rockwell (Zaphod Beeblebrox), who was about as mad as a hundred frogs in a pond spiked with LSD. He had a habit of drumming on my head between takes, which would create a donging echo louder than Big Ben.

Life? Don’t talk to me about life.