As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride (5 page)

Today
The Princess Bride
is acknowledged and recognized as one of the more popular and successful films in Hollywood history. It is ranked among the 100 Greatest Film Love Stories by the American Film Institute, is on Bravo’s list of the 100 Funniest Movies, and Goldman’s script is ranked by the Writers Guild of America as one of the top 100 screenplays ever produced.

All of these things, and a whole lot more, were running through my head that night at Lincoln Center. At some point during the evening, we all were asked what the movie meant to us. There wasn’t time for me to adequately put into words exactly how I felt, so that’s what I’m trying to do now with this book. The film really gave me a career in the arts and the life that I have today, a life I feel privileged to enjoy. That’s not an overstatement. Other movies have surely helped, but this was the one that put me on the map and allowed me to stay there.

I still get fan mail today from children all over the world, sending me drawings and sketches of pirates dueling, or of princesses kissing them. I even have to be careful not to walk down the wrong aisle at Toys “R” Us, lest I find myself suddenly under siege by little tykes with plastic swords and shields.

Everyone associated with the film has heard stories by now of
Princess Bride
weddings, where the bride and groom are dressed as Buttercup and Westley and the pastor even recites Peter Cook’s dialogue from the movie. Or the late-night dress-up interactive screenings, not unlike the ones they do for
The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
where things like peanuts are thrown at the screen after Fezzik’s now famous line. The
Princess Bride
nights at the Alamo Drafthouse cinemas, a national restaurant/movie house, have become so popular that they now produce their own licensed
Princess Bride
wine.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I consider it a blessing. Clearly
The Princess Bride
has become a truly remarkable phenomenon. The film has
literally millions of devotees. They know every line, every character, every scene. And, if they’d like to know a little bit more about how their favorite film was made, as seen through the eyes of a young actor who got much more than he bargained for, then all I can say is . . .
As you wish.

1

T
he note simply read: IMPORTANT.

It was a message from my agent, Harriet Robinson, that had been slipped under my door by a bellhop at the Hotel Kempinski, where I was staying.

I immediately picked up the phone and dialed her number. This would be the call that actually changed my life. After I reached Harriet on the line she began to tell me that she had arranged an important meeting for me. That the director of
This Is Spinal Tap
, Rob Reiner, and his producing partner, Andy Scheinman, were planning on coming to Berlin to see me.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

She said they were hamstrung by a tight preproduction schedule and
were still looking for an actor to play the pivotal role of Westley in a film version of
The Princess Bride.

“Not
The Princess Bride
by William Goldman?”

“I think so, yes,” came the response.

I couldn’t believe it. This was a book I had read when I was just thirteen. And here I was being considered for one of the leads by the director and the producer. Fortunately, for me, they did not change their plans.

A little backstory on where I was at that time. I was a neophyte, just twenty-three, with only a handful of films to my credit. But I already knew what I wanted out of life. I knew I wanted to be an actor. I was born and raised in London and briefly attended the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art, one of the world’s most prestigious training grounds for serious stage actors. I enjoyed studying but my ultimate goal back then was simply to be a working actor, preferably in film. Besides, I had already done plenty of studying when I moved to New York to attend the Actors Studio and the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. After leaving LAMDA, I picked up an agent, Harriet, and started going out on auditions.

I’d already been a production assistant on a handful of movies, including the James Bond feature
Octopussy,
where I had the unique experience of being asked to drive Bond himself, Roger Moore, to work a couple of times. I was a nervous wreck, I can tell you. All that kept going through my mind was, What if I killed Bond on the way to work in a traffic accident? How’d that be? It would certainly put a halt to my burgeoning career in the film industry. I could already see the headlines: “Lowly Production Assistant Kills Bond!” During one of our early-morning drives, Mr. Moore actually looked up from his newspaper and said, in that very calm and collected manner of his, “You can speed up a little if you want to.”

By the mid-1980s, I had a résumé that was short but not unimpressive. My first movie, released in 1984, was
Another Country,
a historical drama based on a popular West End play by Julian Mitchell, with Rupert Everett and Colin Firth. I had costarred with Helena Bonham Carter in
Lady Jane,
director Trevor Nunn’s period drama about Lady Jane Grey, the nine-day queen of England whose brief reign followed the death of King Edward VI. Apparently this was the film that Rob had been able to see, and the one that convinced him to take a chance on me.

After I wrapped
Lady Jane,
Trevor Nunn offered me an opportunity to spend a year in residency with the Royal Shakespeare Company, of which he was the director. I was flattered almost to the point of distraction—most young actors would kill for such an opportunity. But by this time I was living in London, and I knew that spending a year with the RSC, as prestigious as it was, would be the equivalent of doing graduate work in theater: the compensation wouldn’t even cover my rent. Nevertheless, I seriously considered the offer, as it came from a talented director whom I admired and still admire a great deal. Might things have been different for me had I said yes? Who knows? I have very few regrets about the life I’ve been fortunate to lead. But this much seems certain: if I had taken up residency with the RSC, I would not have been free to accept the role of Westley. In fact, I might not have even been considered. You could say I was rather lucky, for as it turned out, I happened to be in the right place at the right time.

By the time Rob Reiner had started looking for someone to play his leading man, I had a body of work that was thin but perhaps worth investigating. Through fate or skilled representation or a combination of these I came under consideration for the role of the farmhand turned pirate, Westley—a character created in a renowned novel that had long been considered incapable of being adapted for the screen. And one that I had already read and enjoyed as a kid.

How did that come to be? Well, it turns out my stepfather had worked in the literary department of the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles and, after leaving to make movies, had produced William Goldman’s very first screenplay, adapted from the novel
The Moving Target,
by Ross Macdonald. The film version was released in 1966 under that same title in Britain but was renamed
Harper
for release in the United States, where it became a modest hit and helped further establish the stardom of its young lead, Paul Newman. And it wasn’t bad for Goldman, either, who won an Edgar Award for best screenplay and subsequently became one of the hottest writers in Hollywood.

Being a huge fan of Goldman’s, my stepfather naturally kept a copy of
The Princess Bride
in his library and one day gave it to me to read. Needless to say, I loved it. I remember reading the author’s own description of the “good bits” from S. Morgenstern’s fictitious novel:

Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautiful ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Pain. Death. Brave men. Cowardly men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.

Now if that didn’t sound exciting to a thirteen-year-old, nothing would.

When the call came from Harriet, I was in Berlin shooting a little indie film called
Maschenka
, based on a semiautobiographical novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the man who gave us one of the most controversial examples of twentieth-century literature,
Lolita
. The film was a British-Finnish-German coproduction and was being shot in both Germany and Finland.

This was the early summer of 1986, only a few months after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which had caused quite a fear at the time. Harriet actually told me that Rob and Andy had seriously thought about canceling their trip because of “the whole nuclear thing.” My recollection is that it wasn’t of much concern to those of us working
on our small European coproduction. I recall a crew meeting being called on a set in a place called Katajanokka, in Helsinki, only a week before and being told that there was nothing to fear because the winds were in our favor and that the fallout was likely to be blown in another direction. We
were
warned, however, that as a precaution we probably shouldn’t drink the local milk. At least not until it had been declared safe. Like a good many of the others on the crew, I went back to work, scratching my head, wondering if we shouldn’t be taking the whole thing more seriously. We were, after all, only eight hundred miles away from the accident. All I can say is that insurance policies for the film industry back then were not as sophisticated as they are now, so shutting down production wasn’t really an option.

Anyway, not exactly what you want to hear, but the show did indeed go on. And, as far as I know, no one got sick from the experience, thank God. The last few weeks of the shoot took place in Berlin at Studio Babelsberg, which is how I came to be staying at the Kempinski.

I pressed for more information from Harriet. She said all she knew was that Rob and Andy were trying to meet as many British actors who might be right for the part, and that they were obviously interested in me. I subsequently found out that Rob had gotten a call from the casting director, Jane Jenkins, suggesting that he watch
Lady Jane,
and if he liked it, fly out to meet me. It seemed reasonable to think that I was in good shape if they were traveling such a long way—and not only that but to a region that might be contaminated with radioactive material. I wasn’t accustomed to this level of interest, and (even though it happens quite often now) no director had ever come to visit me on location before.

“Do I have to read for the part?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“It’s possible, since they’re coming all that way,” Harriet replied.

As an actor you lose far more roles than you gain at readings. You
learn pretty early on that most things are beyond your control, and that it is better to “let go and let God” and to “get used to disappointment,” as Goldman so eloquently had the Man in Black say in the movie. I kept trying to tell myself there would always be another film, another job on the horizon—that it didn’t matter. But deep down I knew I wasn’t kidding anyone, least of all myself. This was far from being “just another job.” This was two of my heroes, Bill Goldman and Rob Reiner, working together!

Although the novel was published in 1973 to immediate acclaim and passionate reader response, it was already thirteen years old by the time I was approached to play the role of Westley. Goldman’s screenplay, which he had adapted from his own book, had in fact become something of a legendary property in Hollywood circles, having been declared by those in power at the studios as an impossible film to make.