Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (7 page)

The resulting twenty-three-minute film was never finished or officially released and has since become part of
Star Wars
folklore; the original 16mm print was lost and only six VHS copies still exist. I have one of them, which I’ve since converted to DVD. It has occasionally been shown at conventions and it’s a film
Star Wars
fans always talk about.

I still have the original script and looking at it now I can see it was completely bonkers – in a good way. David told me that these crazy ideas had come to him in the middle of the night and he’d scribbled them down in a frenzy until the whole concept was complete.

The plot (such as it is) is that I (as Warwick, in human form) have left home to seek my fortune. After a stint as a Chelsea goalkeeper (this was filmed at Stamford Bridge on match day), I decide to become an actor.

To cut a long story short, I end up backstage on the set of
Jedi
. Viewing the film after all this time I can’t believe the state of the dressing rooms. These were the stars of the film and they had these tiny, drafty boxes with a chair, a shoddy plywood desk, and quite possibly the most depressing 1970s paisley curtains ever made. The dodgy furniture must have been especially hard to bear for former custom carpenter Harrison Ford; he was making a portico for Francis Ford Coppola when George gave him the break of a lifetime and offered him the part of Han Solo.

In the film, I meet Han who then takes me to Mark’s dressing room where he’s also in costume. Sadly, neither of them know about Ewoks or where they live. “Let’s ask Carrie,” Mark says . . . and sure enough, we do.

And
whoah
! Cue wolf whistles and a sudden increase in advance bookings for
Jedi
. Carrie is in
the
gold bikini, with very little left to the imagination.

Carrie had apparently complained about her costumes in
Star Wars
and
The Empire Strikes Back
, saying they were so long and shapeless that no one could tell she was a woman. So she asked George Lucas if she could wear something “womanly.” Bearing in mind that, in George Lucas’s words, “there is no underwear in space,” the costume designers did remarkably well to come up with a matching metal bikini, which revealed that Carrie was – absotively posilutely – a woman.

The problem was the metal didn’t always follow Carrie’s body, so there were numerous “wardrobe malfunctions” during which certain parts of her anatomy made unexpected appearances – I didn’t see it, but it happened in the scene where she strangles Jabba the Hutt, for example. For the action sequences a rubber version was made so Carrie could leap about without fear of embarrassment.

Anyway, back to
Return of the Ewok
. Carrie turns this way and that and then looks down and bends forward to talk to me.

I got a little wobbly at this point. I wasn’t sure why exactly – I was just on the cusp of adolescence so I wasn’t able to fully appreciate the loveliness of Carrie’s outfit. But I did notice that the eyes of my costume steamed up a little quicker.

David had asked Mum and Dad to appear in this promo film (they were supposed to have flown on a space cruiser to pick me up from Endor at the end of my adventures) and they dressed up in their Sunday best for the occasion. When they arrived on set, David said, “I want you to walk through those brambles, nettles, across that mud, then through that ditch toward Warwick who’s coming down the hill toward you.”

Being English and overly polite they failed to point out to David that they had dressed in their Sunday best, wearing heels and brogues, and that the last thing they were able or willing to do was fight their way up the swampiest, brambliest hill in the world. But struggle they did (for several takes) – and then walked back down again afterward. You can clearly see that Dad was desperately trying not to slip as he gingerly fought his way down the impossibly steep hill.

Their dialogue was added in later.

Mum: Oh, Warwick, there you are.

Dad: Where on Earth have you been?

Me: I’ve been in a movie, which reminds me, could I have my pocket money? I need to pay my agent ten percent.

Mum: You won’t be getting any pocket money for a very long time. Do you realize how much it costs to hire a rocket these days?

Me: We could always get a lift back in the
Millennium Falcon
.

Dad: Don’t be ridiculous. Stop these fantasies immediately. Who’s that little green man?

Yoda: May the Force be with you . . . Dad.

It was completely nuts but hilarious.

One day on the set producer Robert Watts asked me to sit in front of a white screen while I was photographed in and out of costume.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“Warwick, how would you like to go to America?”

The picture was for a passport photo; six Ewok actors had been chosen to fly to America to film the final phase of
Revenge of the Jedi
. We would be joining forty or so American little people who were also playing Ewoks. This was done for the sake of continuity, so that the audience would recognize key characters within the two distinct groups of Ewoks and they would appear to be part of the same tribe.

The sail barge scene in the Tatooine desert (where Luke rescues a recently defrosted Han Solo and Princess Leia kills Jabba the Hutt) and the Endor exteriors were the only scenes shot in the United States. In those good old days the British film industry was in rude health and the UK had a wealth of technicians who were able to make great movies for less money than Hollywood.

To me this was utterly mind-blowing. I’d been filming with my screen heroes for five weeks, with no school to speak of, and now I was going to get on a plane for the first time in my life, and fly to Disneyland (that’s what I thought America was) to fight Stormtroopers for eight weeks.

I flew with Mum, Dad, and my sister, along with five other families, including Nicky’s. The plane seemed to me to be as big as the Albert Hall. This was still a time when transatlantic travel was the preserve of the rich and famous, so the plane was almost empty.

The in-flight entertainment was decidedly dodgy – they tried to project a 16mm film onto a screen in the middle of the cabin but the film kept falling off the spool every time we hit a spot of turbulence. So Nicky and I played hide and seek for about five hours, never running out of hiding places.

And then suddenly, there I was, in California, standing under redwood trees about three hundred feet tall, where I was introduced to Ray, our schoolteacher.

“Hang on a minute,” I said. “Schoolteacher? Nobody told me about this.”

The law said I was only allowed to work for four hours a day as an actor but I had to do six hours of schooling. I was ready to cry “Mutiny!” But that was before I got to know Ray.

Ray didn’t look like your average teacher. He had long blond hair, wore Ray-Bans, and was tanned a golden brown. Imagine a younger Owen Wilson but with a slightly less impressive nose.

The first thing he taught us was how to hatch and raise chickens and to identify poisonous plants. There was not so much as a sniff of algebra.

“What are you gonna need algebra for?” Ray asked with a smile. “Now, who wants to know how to start a fire without using matches?”

Where did they find this guy? I loved Ray and school became almost as much fun as fighting Stormtroopers. One moment I was out battling the Empire alongside Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, and the next I was running back to the trailer, desperate to check that George the chicken was still happily eating his daily seed ration.

The cast and crew immediately made me feel like a member of the Lucasfilm family. I think they warmed to me in part because I had no inhibitions. I still had absolutely no idea how I ought to behave on a movie set. I was just a little kid having fun and I didn’t quite realize just how important or significant the people around me were. Including the man himself.

It was David Tomblin who plucked me from out of the crowd and brought me to the attention of George Lucas.

“Warwick, this is George Lucas,” David said. If David had told me that George played a Stormtrooper, then I would’ve been impressed, but all I could tell at that point was that George was a man with big hair, glasses, and a beard.

“Oh, right,” I said without any enthusiasm whatsoever.

Thus started a lifelong friendship.

There was much falling over of Ewoks in the redwood forest set. The undergrowth was always dealing us funny little surprises; even the Stormtroopers were having trouble staying erect.

A few days later, a slightly worried-looking David approached me: “Warwick, we’ve got a bit of a problem,” he said. “Kenny Baker’s been taken ill with food poisoning and he had a big scene to shoot today. George would like you to take over Kenny’s role as Wicket.”

“No problem!”

“This one’s really important, Warwick, you’ll be filming a five-minute scene with Carrie Fisher.”

I ran around in circles in excitement, waving my spear in my own Ewok dance of victory.

Kenny was consigned to the background and became Paploo but, bless him, he never felt any ill will toward me. “I’m just happy to be able to spend a bit more time out of the sweatsuit,” he said graciously. Besides, he still had the great chase scene where Paploo steals a Biker Scout’s speeder.

My big scene took place after Leia crashes her speeder bike while being chased by Biker Scouts. Wicket finds her unconscious and together the Princess and the Ewok take out two Biker Scouts before heading off to find Han and Luke.