As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride (4 page)

 
“Get used to disappointment.”

 
“I’m not a witch. I’m your wife.”

 
“Mawidge. That bwessed awangement!”

 
“You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you”
 . . . “
You seem a decent fellow. I hate to die.”

 
“Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”

 
“Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!”

 
“There’s a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage yours.”

And of course . . .

“As you wish.”

Classic:
a small word that carries enormous weight, although sometimes it’s tossed around a bit too casually; a reputation earned over the course of time, and given only to those rare films that stand up to repeated viewings. That being said,
The Princess Bride
has aged remarkably well. I think this is in part because of the quality of the writing, the directing, and the wonderful ensemble of actors I had the sheer pleasure of working with.

Even though it is the fans who have truly kept the memory of the movie alive, each of us in the cast has remembrances of making the film, things that have stayed with us over the years. All of us have stories about encounters or moments, like being approached and asked to recite a favorite
Princess Bride
line. Mandy swears that barely a day goes by that he isn’t asked by someone, somewhere, to recite Inigo Montoya’s most famous words, in which he vows vengeance on behalf of his father.

“And I never let them down,” he says.

I read somewhere recently that a passenger on a plane was asked to leave the flight as his Montoya T-shirt bearing that infamous line
frightened one of the passengers who had never seen the movie. After it was explained to them, apparently the T-shirted passenger was allowed to stay on the aircraft.

Mandy, himself, has a long and impressive résumé. The man has won a Tony, an Emmy, and countless other honors. But, like most of us at Lincoln Center tonight, he knows that someday his obituary will feature, more prominently than anything else, his affiliation with
The Princess Bride
.

And that’s just fine with him, as it is with all of us.

There might be a shortage of perfect breasts in the world, but there is no shortage of actors who achieve a degree of recognition or fame due to the popularity (or, in some cases, the ignominy, which is an entirely different story) of a specific movie and their role within that movie. It can become a blessing or a curse; sometimes a little of both, depending on the circumstances. Over the past three decades I’ve appeared in nearly a hundred movies and television shows. I’ve been a leading man and a supporting actor and worked in almost every genre. But whatever else I’ve done or whatever else I might do,
The Princess Bride
will always be the work with which I am most closely associated; and Westley, with his wisp of a mustache and ponytail, the character with whom I will be forever linked.

Not
Glory,
which earned higher critical praise upon release and won more awards; not
Days of Thunder
or
Twister,
both of which were summer blockbusters. Not even
Saw,
which was shot in eighteen days on a budget smaller than most movies spend on catering, and earned more than $100 million; and that’s just fine by me.

When I started
The Princess Bride
I was very young and fairly new to the world of film. I was cast in a movie that frankly could have been interpreted as preposterous, were it not for the fact that it was so well written, so well directed, and populated with such a ridiculously talented
cast. As I look around the stage at Rob Reiner, the director, and William Goldman, the writer, who so deftly and lovingly adapted the screenplay from his equally imaginative novel, I think how incredibly fortunate I was to have been part of this project. To have been plucked from relative obscurity and dropped onto a set with these two insanely talented men and this extraordinary cast.

I’d be lying if I told you I had even the slightest inkling that our movie, made on a modest budget over a period of less than four months, and shot in and around London and the magnificent Peak District of Derbyshire, was destined to become a classic. But I think it withstands the rigors of time because it seems to be a timeless story—a tale of love and romance. Of heroes and villains. And, although it is a film from the 1980s, there is nothing on the screen that betrays its birth date (notwithstanding perhaps the Rodents of Unusual Size).

Instead of a bouncy techno-pop sound track, you have the elegant slide guitar of Mark Knopfler; instead of big hair and shoulder pads, you have the period style of a swashbuckler and a princess. Perhaps the only thing that serves as a time stamp is Fred Savage’s video game at the very start of the movie (which, by the way, is where the film gets its first laugh). It is, of course, a movie within a movie. A story within a story, much like the book itself. Even in the scenes between Peter Falk and Fred Savage, a grandfather reading to his bedridden sick grandson, there is a timeless grace and elegance to the filmmaking. And then there is the dialogue:

“They’re kissing again. Do we have to read the kissing parts?”

What preteen boy hasn’t said that or thought that? Or at least something like that? It’s the kind of dialogue that holds up. It endures. In fact, like a good wine without iocane powder, it seems to get better with time.

The movie, believe it or not, opened to mostly positive, if occasionally befuddled, critical response. Even those who praised the movie
weren’t quite sure what to think. Was it a comedy? A romance? An adventure story? A fantasy? The fact is, it was all of those things and more. But Hollywood abhors that which is not easily categorized, and so the film didn’t quite gain the kind of traction it might have deserved, grossing a respectable, though hardly overwhelming, $30.8 million in its first run ($60 million when adjusted for inflation). This meant it made almost twice the budget, but still only a tenth of what that year’s top-grossing movie,
Fatal Attraction,
made only the week before.

Within a few months of finishing the movie, we all moved on with our lives, putting
The Princess Bride
in our respective rearview mirrors. There were other projects, other films, families to raise, careers to nurture. And then—though I can’t pinpoint the time when it actually occurred—a strange thing began to happen:
The Princess Bride
came back to life. Much of this can be attributed to timing—in particular to the newly developing video market.
The Princess Bride
came to be enormously popular in the VHS format. And it was via this relatively new medium that the film began to gain traction, and not simply as a rental. After careful scrutiny by those who do these things, it became clear that fans were not only recommending it to friends and family members, they also began purchasing a copy for their own home libraries. It became that rare kind of movie that was viewed and enjoyed, and ultimately beloved by entire families. Copies of it were being passed down from generation to generation in much the same manner that children were introduced to the magic of
The Wizard of Oz
by nostalgic parents who wanted to share one of their favorite movies. So, too, was
The Princess Bride
uniquely family entertainment. Parents with their children, and even their grandchildren, could watch the movie together, and each enjoy it for what it was. There was nothing condescending or embarrassing about it. Nothing offensive. It seemed to be as smart and funny on the tenth viewing as it was on the first.