As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride (21 page)

As I say, the director’s mood and character set the tone on the production, and it has a domino effect. If the director is miserable, then invariably everyone else will be, too. If he doesn’t know what he is doing and shows up completely unprepared, that’s also a recipe for disaster. However, if the director is confident in his or her talent and is fun, cool, mellow, and so on, then you have “lucked out,” so to speak. Fortunately for us, Rob is a relentlessly positive kind of guy. In all honesty, unexpected British crew tea breaks notwithstanding, I never saw him get frustrated. In fact, I never witnessed anything even approaching a temper tantrum.

He may not even remember this, but in fact only once during the entire production did I witness Rob briefly get his mettle tested, and even then it didn’t last long. It happened when we hit a patch of bad weather while filming in the mountains of Higger Tor. Specifically the scene where the Man in Black confronts Buttercup about her “faithfulness.” In the UK, exterior filming, or “shooting,” as it is commonly known, can be a director’s nightmare. The weather is, more often than not, completely unpredictable. One minute you can be experiencing a heat wave, the next a flood of biblical proportions. Sometimes you get all four seasons in one day. You can find yourself shooting a scene
in which the characters are bathed in sunlight one moment, and then cloaked in shadow the next. And the way that clouds move in England, especially in the Peak District, can either be intensely fast or slow, to say the least. Both are a disaster for a director of photography trying to maintain continuity of lighting for a scene. Well, on this particular afternoon, we got two seasons: summer and fall. We started the day with glorious sunshine, which by lunch gave way to dark clouds, and steel-gray skies that would periodically brighten just long enough to give you hope, only to dash them moments later. This went on for hours, with the cast and crew sitting around waiting for a break in the weather.

Today, thanks to CGI and other technology, lighting continuity is not such a big issue. Computerized cloud cover is a wonderful tool for a director to have at his disposal. In those days, though, shooting outdoors in England you were always at the mercy of Mother Nature, no matter what time of year. So there we were . . . the whole crew forced to sit on the mountainside, waiting and watching the clouds. And, as the day grew short, I could see for the very first time Rob’s confidence beginning to wane.

Directors are by nature and necessity somewhat like generals. They are leading the troops into battle. And the enemy is time. You are constantly fighting it, trying to make it your slave, trying to control it. But on this day, control had been wrested from Rob. I remember seeing
Adrian Biddle, our director of photography, a truly wonderful guy just recently discovered by James Cameron, who had hired him for
Aliens,
patiently holding his small, tinted eyepiece up to the sky to gauge the speed of the clouds.

“How long this time, Adrian?” Rob asked.

“Could be fifteen . . . maybe twenty minutes,” came the somber reply.

This was a long cloud cover. One that was moving at an extremely slow pace. The worst kind. We had shot most of the sequence in perfect sunshine, which is what we were hoping for in order to match that footage. This change in the climate was now cutting into precious time. Time we couldn’t afford to spend just sitting around. I looked over at Rob sitting in his director’s chair. His naturally upbeat demeanor had begun to wilt and he was actually betraying a little disappointment. I remember thinking it looked as if he had his own personal dark cloud hanging over his head, pouring a little rain—the kind you see in comic books or cartoons. I guess it’s my nature but whenever I see someone down, my inclination is to try to cheer them up. So I walked over to where he was sitting.

“You okay?” I asked him.

“It’s these bloody clouds,” Rob answered, having taken to using British swear words. “But what’re you gonna do?”

“Not much you can do,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll get through it, though.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t help. Rob politely mumbled, “Yeah, I guess,” then slipped right back into his funk.

As I walked away, I noticed Andy stroll over to Rob. Then, without saying a word, he produced three Hacky Sacks from his pocket and then did the most amazing thing. He began juggling. Yes, you heard me . . . juggling. It was the most extraordinary and beautiful thing I had ever
seen on a set or indeed anywhere, for that matter: a man trying his best to cheer up his friend—by juggling, of all things.

I can still see Rob sitting there, slumped in his chair, hands in his pockets, furry hood over his head, and that little, dark, rainy cloud hovering above him. And then something miraculous happened. A huge smile began to slowly spread across his face as he became entranced by the simple phenomenon of three bean-filled sacks flying in a circle. The little, dark cloud began to melt away.

“We good now?” Andy said, while continuing to juggle.

Rob merely nodded. And the next thing I heard was that laugh—that deep, booming laugh that carried across the peaks as they shared a joke. That was the type of friendship these guys had. You didn’t have to push the right button often with Rob, but when circumstances dictated, Andy knew exactly which one to push.

I don’t mean to convey a false impression that Rob is a guy who thought that every day was sunshine and rainbows. And I don’t doubt that he endured some anxious, pressure-filled moments that I was not privy to. In fact, one of the true managerial genius-like qualities of a director is to shield his cast from those moments and to hide their own insecurities if they have any. In other words to keep some of their cards hidden, as Rob might put it, being a fan of poker metaphors. As a longtime thespian himself, Rob has a genuine affection for his fellow actors and, having grown up on sets, has a great deal of empathy for the filmmaking process. He is also very decisive, which is a very good thing in a director with a vision.

The only other thing that neither he nor Andy cared much for besides the weather in the UK was, as I have already said, the food. And, having grown up in England, I can tell you that traditional British fare has never been anything to write home about. Today TV chefs may have ushered in a new age of cuisine in the UK and indeed throughout the
world. But to an outsider at that time, especially in the hinterlands of Great Britain, it must’ve seemed like a veritable culinary wasteland.

It’s not so much that the food was bad; it was mostly just bland and unadventurous. So being decisive as he was, Rob opted to take the matter into his own hands and ordered a hibachi grill to be installed in his suite at the Hallam Tower Hotel. At the end of each day he would invite us all to gather in his suite for hamburgers and hot dogs. It was great fun, with Chris, Rob, and Mandy crooning harmonies to Rob’s favorite doo-wop songs as he flipped burgers on the grill. Although these parties involved a beer or some wine they never went on too late, as we had early call times the next day.

One night, right after we had all gone to bed, the fire alarm went off in the hotel. Loud, noisy, high-pitched sirens. The kind you couldn’t speak over, they were so deafening. Security personnel began to immediately clear the rooms, sending all of the hotel’s occupants out into the street. We all stood there in the cold night air, in our pajamas, nightgowns, and robes, while the local firemen, who had just arrived, made sure that the building was safe before letting us return to our rooms. We all sort of milled around, occasionally making eye contact with one another, wondering which one of us was responsible for the mayhem. We figured it had to be someone from our crew, since we had basically taken over the entire hotel.

No one ever officially owned up to it, and I suppose it might have
been someone sneaking a cigarette in bed that triggered the alarm. But that seems unlikely, as it ended up happening two or three more times. For a long time I was convinced that Rob’s hibachi may have been responsible and that he must’ve left it on by mistake. When I asked him later about it, he denied it with a smile and said he thought it was André, who also had a hibachi in his room, claiming that after eating the hotel out of all their food for that day, he was always still hungry in the middle of the night. Which is an image itself. Sadly, André is no longer around to defend himself, so I guess we’ll never know who the culprit was.

Besides turning Rob into the crew cook, England had also somehow transformed him into a big darts fan. Not long after he arrived he bought a dartboard and had it set up in his suite at the Dorchester Hotel, where he and Andy eventually had to redecorate the wall from all the times they completely missed. He even brought it with him to Derbyshire. Strangest of all, he had also become a fan of sheepdog
trials, which were on television almost as often as the darts competitions in Sheffield. He was amused that these two shows seemed to dominate the British TV schedule. I remember walking into his room one night, and there was Rob, transfixed by the trials.

“Cary, come here . . . check this out,” he said, giddy as a schoolboy. “This has to be the craziest sport ever!”

“What is?” I asked. Rob then nodded to the TV. “Look . . . the idea is that each dog rounds up these eight or nine sheep and herds them into a little paddock, right?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“And each farmer that owns that dog in the competition uses his whistle to make the dog herd the sheep into the paddock, and the fastest dog to get them in there wins, right?”

“Right,” I said, smiling at Rob’s amusement. “So?”

“So . . . how dumb do these sheep have to be?” he exclaimed, gesturing at the TV. “I mean, after the twenty-sixth dog, they’re still confused about where they should be herded?”

He was right. It was pretty funny. But that didn’t stop him from watching the show start to finish.

8

I
didn’t know much about Robin before
The Princess Bride
. I wasn’t even familiar with her work on
Santa Barbara,
so I didn’t know what to expect when I met her. I’m sure she knew nothing about me, either. I was only marginally more experienced than she was, and certainly not as popular, as daytime fans tend to be fervently loyal.

I found myself thinking, Wow, she can act. She’s funny.
And
she’s beautiful. What’s wrong with this girl? Well, truth be told, there wasn’t a thing wrong. Even her British accent was flawless, which is not nearly as simple an achievement as you might think. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in America, and listened to many Americans try to affect a British accent, and it’s not easy. But Robin has a great ear, and, like myself, Billy, and Chris Guest, she loved to imitate accents. Not maliciously, but in a fun sort of way. And in doing so make a study
of that dialect. I have always been that way as well. Whenever I hear an interesting accent, I feel an urge to make a study of it, too. Which I guess goes back to my father, who was an incredible mimic, and to my love for Peter Sellers, who may have been one of the greatest connoisseurs of dialects of all time. From his very first role playing an East End thug in
The Ladykillers
and all the varied roles in
Dr. Strangelove
to his flawless, yet wonderfully absurd, French accent portraying Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther series, he switched something on in my brain as a kid.