Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (13 page)

On my second day I rolled into work on my roller skates, which helped considerably, but I was already certain that production wasn’t for me.

A few days later I was rolling through the set when a man with a beard, glasses, and baseball cap waved me over. “Would you come here for a second?” he said.

I pointed at myself and said, “Who, me?”

“Yes, you.”

I walked over to Steven Spielberg.

“I think,” he said, looking me up and down thoughtfully, “that you’d be the perfect solution to a little problem we’re having.”

By a stroke of luck, I was about the same height as Roger Rabbit and so I played the role of Roger for half a day during rehearsals, giving the actors something to focus on – that way their eyes were all looking at the right height when they came to shoot their scenes, making the animators’ jobs a lot easier. Unfortunately, it was also at the end of my work experience and all too short-lived.

After
Jedi
, once I was back in the UK, I bought my own video camera and started making short films. My early twelve-year-old efforts centered on making animals, people, and objects disappear à la
Rentaghost
. I loved the way it was possible to shoot, then pause and remove something – a rock, for example – from a scene and then start recording again (without moving the camera) so it looked as if the rock had disappeared. My mother, my sister, my friends, everyone and everything vanished and then rematerialized all under my expert direction.

My first major production was
The Outing
, starring my sister and Stuart, one of my friends, who also supplied titles and music (he was good at calligraphy and liked to tinkle the ivories). They played an old couple having a picnic on Epsom Downs. They arrive in an orange and white Citroen 2CV (Mum’s car), which then disappears. They’re left sitting in their wigs and hats in the seats on the road. The seats of a 2CV were known as “deckchairs” because they could be removed. Goodness knows why. Where on earth would you want to take a pair of car seats? They were extremely heavy and made for terribly uncomfortable deckchairs.
^b

There were very few young people making films then. It’s completely different today, of course. It’s so easy for kids if they want to get started now and they can get their work seen by thousands, if not millions, of people on hosting sites such as YouTube. Back in the old days, all we had was
Screen Test
presented by the besuited and legendary Brian Trueman, the voice behind such children’s TV classics as
Chorlton and the Wheelies,
Jamie and the Magic Torch,
Danger Mouse,
and
Count Duckula
.

It was essentially an observational film quiz and was insanely popular. It also ran a “Young Filmmaker of the Year” competition for budding Spielbergs. The prize was a plastic trophy. The most famous winner was Jan Pinkava, who won in 1980. Nope, I’d never heard of him either, but he went on to win the Oscar for best animated short in 1997 and then conceived the idea for and codirected Pixar’s Oscar-winning 2007 film
Ratatouille
.

One tricky problem with stop-start filming was trying to overcome the slight delay from pressing record and the actual moment when the camera started to record. Getting the cry of “Action!” just right was key.

In one very early effort I played a disturbingly accurate Professor Filius Flitwick – which was pretty impressive, considering this was in 1982. There was no plot as such, I was simply a mad professor who made potions while wearing an extraordinarily ill-fitting black wig. I also hit my sister in the face with my geography textbook for no discernible reason and remember my performance involved a great deal of shouting about Cheddar cheese – one of my favorite foods.

My next production was a very sophisticated affair and involved a dramatic 1980s-style synth soundtrack. It was based on the famously patronizing ads for Milk Tray that featured the immortal endline: “And All Because the Lady Loves Milk Tray.”

In those ads a James Bond character would brave hell and high water to bring his lady (usually living in total luxury in a heavily guarded turret) her favorite chocolates. He’d sneak them in while she was in the bath or shower, only to mysteriously disappear, leaving only his calling card and the chocolates behind him.

I didn’t have a real box of Milk Tray, so I made one. It was white with “Milk Tray” scrawled across it in black marker in my terribly immature handwriting. The film also involved me waving a giant plastic fly over my sister (The Lady), not because it was necessary to the plot, you understand, but just because I had one. You could see my shadow, holding a long pole, in the shot. It turned out in this case that The Lady hated Milk Tray and killed The Man (me) after he’d made his delivery by throwing a rock at his head. This was my first stunt scene and I placed my wig on top of a cycle helmet so my sister could really throw the tiny stone at my head.
^c

The Russian Guard
was another masterpiece, one that could have been influenced by Sergei M. Eisenstein. Again I played the lead in my wig, goose-stepping like a loon while carrying a spud gun and an old-fashioned gas lamp (even though it was broad daylight).

I still relied upon the old stop-and-shoot method, and I think that editing in-camera should be taught by film schools today because it really makes you think about how you’re going to construct each scene, there’s no room for error, and it can’t be fixed in post-production. As I was operating the camera, I’d often find myself trying to direct my sister while the film was rolling. Not wanting to be heard, I’d wave frantically, mouthing the word “Go!” over and over again when I wanted her to walk, or “Climb the tree!” You could tell when I was doing this because the camera would wobble.

My sister played the role of the thief who wanted to steal whatever it was I was guarding (a block of gold, cunningly disguised as a cinder block). To do this she shot at me with a spud gun; we used a stone in place of a bullet – it missed me, but only just.

Putting on my sternest Brezhnev face, I march around in fury, outraged that someone has dared to shoot at me. Cut to my sister half on and half off the shed roof, screaming “I can’t!” and me waving frantically, the camera wobbling. “Yes, you can,” I mouth, “Keep going!” She jumps down from the roof and we cut back to the Russian Guard who has now ratcheted the goose-stepping to Olympic levels. Finally, after falling for about thirty seconds, my sister lands on me, knocks me out, and steals the cinder block, only to drop it on her foot during her getaway.

Cut to my sister hopping her way Benny Hill–style across the field next to our house. I’d wanted to film her until she reached the other side but it was much farther than we both realized and although she was getting tired as she hopped into the distance I waved at her frantically, mouthing, “Keep hopping! Keep going!”

It was perhaps inevitable that when I left school I decided to study media at the nearby East Surrey College. The course consisted of film studies and video production. For our exam, we had to make a film based on the title “New Year’s Resolution,” demonstrating all the techniques that we had learned during our year’s study.

I employed my cousin Mark and my friend and fellow film student David Tulley, who gave two truly memorably dire performances in what became my first horror film. The soundtrack was made up of swirly Jean Michel Jarre synthesizers. The best thing we did was to manufacture an impressive dolly (essentially a camera on wheels that allows for smooth tracking shots) from the wheels of an old pram.

The story went like this. Mark is in the shower when David enters the house wearing a long black coat and hat, looking very suspicious. The synthesizer whirls itself up to feverish levels as David climbs the stairs toward the shower and . . . cue
Psycho
music . . . but no! David opens the bathroom door, shouts, “Happy New Year!” and throws Mark his car keys.

I didn’t realize it then but looking back on it now, this seems to me to have some slight homoerotic undertones. Two young men living together in a big house in the country – one of whom casually enters the shower without knocking and throws his friend the keys to his Ferrari. If anyone had walked in on me in the shower in real life I would have covered my privates and let the keys hit me in the face, before telling them to clear off.

Anyway, I’d had a kettle boiling in the bathroom for about half an hour to try and get some steam up, because the water just wasn’t hot enough. It took us about twenty takes before the guys stopped fluffing their lines or falling about laughing – Mark kept dropping the keys because he had soap in his eyes. By the time they finally got their act together the hot water had run out; Mark left the shower shivering and as wrinkly as a Shar-Pei dog. When we compiled the outtakes from this scene, they were longer than the actual film.

The next scene was downstairs where they shared a whisky from my father’s drinks cabinet. After having a drink, David turns his wrist as if to look at his watch, but when filming actually forgot to look as all his powers of concentration were taken up with remembering his soliloquy: “It’s late. We should get to the party.”

One of our neighbors had a red Ferrari, which he was crazy enough to lend us for the film. We thought this was incredibly cool but we were also terrified of damaging it so David (who was a truly terrible driver) drove it off down a very long country lane in first gear at five miles an hour. It took forever to get out of the drive, which kind of reduced the Ferrari’s impact.

Anyway, the party goes terribly wrong and Mark returns home alone, puts on the TV, and falls asleep at midnight. We switch to the exterior of the house (where the sun has clearly just set – where were we? Lapland?) and my dad enters the house as the creepy murderer and kills Mark with a scythe while the TV plays “Auld Lang Syne.”

The horror movies of the 1980s were a tremendous influence on me. I’d often use the music of horror maestro John Carpenter as the soundtrack to my homemade films. Like thousands of other teenage boys I went through the rite of passage of seeing R-rated horror films when I was underage,
Nightmare on Elm Street
and
Halloween
being two particular favorites.

We saw
Nightmare on Elm Street
at a special midnight screening in Ewell, which seemed to have quite a relaxed attitude as to who could see an R-rated film. In those days, cinemas were much larger (they’ve all been carved up into smaller screens today) and Ewell was about the same size as Cheddar Gorge with equivalent acoustics. If you were unlucky enough to end up at the back you’d end up hearing the movie about five seconds after the people at the front.

The cinema was pretty rough and had all the atmosphere of a bawdy East End pub. During the midnight screening we noticed that a haze had appeared in front of the screen. Some boisterous troublemakers had actually managed to set fire to one of the seats. The ushers threw a bucket of sand on it and we carried on watching, coughing through the smoke haze.