As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride (8 page)

W
ithin a few short weeks after wrapping
Maschenka,
I was back home in London, which was also the base for the production of
The Princess Bride
. Much of the crew and some of the cast were already assembling. Indeed, the first cast read-through of the screenplay was only a few days away. Soon after I arrived I got a phone call from the production office. I was instructed to go for a wardrobe fitting with our costume designer, Phyllis Dalton, who had done fantastic work with one of my favorite directors, David Lean, on both
Lawrence of Arabia
and
Doctor Zhivago,
for which she won an Academy Award. One thing I knew for sure was that my costume was going to be first-rate. I was to meet her at Angels, one of the oldest costume houses in London and a perennial Oscar winner for design in that field. When I walked into the lobby, the first thing I noticed was an assortment of ornate
costumes elegantly fitted on mannequins. Upon closer inspection I noticed that some of them appeared to be authentic, dating back to the eighteenth century.

Within minutes I found myself in an upstairs office, where Phyllis, a demure and very pleasant lady, politely introduced herself. We sat and drank tea as we chatted about the role for a bit. She then leaned forward and grabbed a portfolio she had on a coffee table nearby and proceeded to show me some of the sketches that she had already done for Westley and the other characters in the movie. It was all very carefully laid out, with each sketch including swatches of the material she wanted to use. From the first glimpse I could tell she had nailed the tone and feel of Goldman’s book. The colors, textures, and the look of the materials were beyond what I had imagined. For Humperdinck and Rugen there were fine velvet doublets with intricate embroidery. For the Spaniard, Montoya, there was a mixture of brown burlap and leather. For Buttercup, her main look would be a flowing red floor-length dress, contrasting nicely with the black leather, suede, and cotton of the Man in Black.

After studying them carefully I turned to her and said, “Wow, Phyllis! These are really beautiful.”

“Oh, thank you. You know, it’s funny . . . I don’t really like doing sketches,” came the unexpected response.

“Really? But you are so good at it,” I blurted out, trying to steer the conversation toward one of my favorite films of all time. “What about
Lawrence
? You must’ve done a few for that, surely?”

“Oh, that!” she said. “Well, on that one I had to do more sketches than I have ever done before.”

“Why?” I inquired.

“Because a lot of the costumes had to be made in Damascus and it was hard to get the tailors over there to do exactly what we wanted.”

She then told me she had already put together some rough costumes
for Westley and that she’d like to have me try them on so that the seamstress could make any necessary adjustments. Her assistant then showed me to a dressing room, where hanging on a rack was the costume that would come to be iconic: a pair of black suede pants, black leather boots, a thin black belt, a pair of black lace ruffled shirts, black gloves, and a black mask. It was all very elegant and surprisingly comfortable. I tried on the great, billowing shirt, with its huge sleeves. I had already worn one much like it for
Lady Jane
, so it felt a little familiar. Then the tight-fitting suede pants. And finally the boots.

Once fully dressed, I looked in the mirror. Even without the mask, I knew what it must have felt like for Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn trying on their costumes for the first time on any one of their classic pirate movies. A knock at the door took me out of my reverie.

“Are you decent?” came Phyllis’s voice from behind it.

“Yes.”

She opened the door, looked at me, and said, “Ahhh . . . that’s not bad at all.” She stopped to ponder. “But . . . there’s something missing.”

She then called over her assistant and asked her to go and fetch some black satin. When the assistant returned with the material, Phyllis tied one piece around my head and another around my waist like a sash.

“There,” she said, “that’s better!”

She then had me try on some temporary masks that she had designed, which were in fact not unlike the one worn by Fairbanks in
Zorro
. But none of them fit properly. Phyllis explained that since I would be wearing it throughout much of the film, not only did it have to fit perfectly but, most of all, it had to be comfortable and that the only way to do that was to take a plaster mold of my head. This is a fairly standard procedure on movie productions that involve action or special effects or superheroes that wear masks, although I hadn’t experienced it before.

A seamstress then appeared and began to pin the pants so that they
would be even more skintight. I asked Phyllis whether I would be able to put them on without difficulty once they had been sewn. She replied that she would prefer to sew them on each day, but that wouldn’t be practical given that I would be doing a lot of stunts in them. And, being suede, they would start to give a little anyway with time, she explained. I joked about knowing how Jim Morrison must’ve felt wearing his signature skintight leather pants.

I then tried on an outfit made mostly of burlap and thick cotton, which would be Westley’s clothes as the infamous Farm Boy. Phyllis told me she had been inspired by paintings by N. C. Wyeth and Bruegel, and they felt very authentic to me, but she wasn’t entirely happy.

“No, let’s come back to these. You need a hood of some kind.”

She said she needed a little more time to figure that out and told me we would have more fittings soon. After a few Polaroid photographs were taken to show Rob, I changed back into my boring old jeans and T-shirt, thanked Phyllis, her assistant, and the seamstress, and headed home. The Man in Black was starting to take shape.

*  *  *

The next day I got another call from the production office and was given instructions about where to get a mold taken of my face. I had to travel to Shepperton Studios, where our production offices were set up, and visit the folks in the special effects (known as “FX”) department. Shepperton is located in the countryside in Surrey, about a half hour or so outside of London, and is generally regarded as one of the great European film studios. From a historical perspective, it’s the sort of place that has an almost reverential appeal to most people in the business. Among the movies that have been filmed there are
Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Strangelove
,
2001: A Space Odyssey, The Elephant Man, Star Wars, Alien, Gandhi
 . . . to name but a few.

Having worked as a production assistant in my teens, I knew my
way around film lots a little bit, but to be here, at the famed Shepperton Studios, as the lead in a major Hollywood movie was a different experience altogether. Map in hand, I walked to one of the “shops” assigned to our FX department on the lot and met with Nick Allder, our special effects supervisor. Nick had a great body of work behind him, having already worked on
Alien
(yes, that was his nasty creature escaping from John Hurt’s chest),
The Empire Strikes Back
(for you Jedis reading this, there is a strong
Star Wars
connection to
Princess Bride
, which I will get to later on),
Conan the Barbarian,
and
The Jewel of the Nile.
Nick, a very affable fellow, introduced me to his team, one of whom was already in the process of working on an unfinished animatronic Rodent of Unusual Size (R.O.U.S.)—the one that would end up biting me during our fight in the Fire Swamp. It was made of white foam rubber and had no hair, which made it even more grotesque-looking. You could see all the wires and pulleys attached to electronic servos that allowed the “puppeteer” to move the mouth. Even at this stage it looked very effective and they were proud to show it off to me. As I stared at the giant rat with its dead eyes, I wondered if Bill Goldman had ever experienced the same giant rats I had encountered while living in Manhattan—the ones the size of cats, that make you freeze in your tracks. The kind that are not afraid of human beings and carry themselves with that swagger and give you that look that seems to imply, “Yeah, what are you gonna do about it?”

Nick explained that while the procedure of covering my face with wet plaster of Paris was relatively painless, it could be very tedious, as I would be spending a long time, perhaps an hour, sitting in a chair with my face covered in said plaster. He asked if I was claustrophobic, which was kind of unnerving in and of itself, to which I replied, “No, not really,” not having any idea just how claustrophobic this whole process would be. He then said, “We’re gonna be covering your whole head but
we will provide you with a couple of straws to put up your nose so you can breathe.”

Thank God for that!

He continued, “If at any time you feel uncomfortable, can’t breathe, or if you are having some kind of panic attack, just make a slashing sign with your hand across your throat and we will begin taking off the plaster.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering just how many actors had had panic attacks before me.

“Just so you know,” Nick went on, “if we do that we will have to repeat the process all over again to get it done.”

I replied that I understood.

“Great!” said Nick. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

He and his colleagues then proceeded to completely cover my head with Vaseline and then plaster of Paris, and provided me with the aforementioned straws to put in my nostrils for breathing. Claustrophobic would be an understatement, folks. It felt like having your head encased in a suffocating, heavy, oversize pumpkin/helmet made of clay. After an hour or so they were done and the plaster eventually dried. It was then cracked neatly open and removed from my head, and the resulting product was used as a mold.

I was meant to look like a pirate. And not just any pirate, but the Dread Pirate Roberts (loosely based on notorious privateer Bartholomew Roberts), the scourge of the Seven Seas. His identity was supposed to be a secret. And while a leap of faith would be required to presume that the other characters in the film (most notably Buttercup) would not immediately spot the resemblance between Westley and the Man in Black, the audience was free to make the connection (which, of course, they did). Still, it had to look right. Despite going to great
lengths to create dozens of perfect masks, the makeup department still wound up having to use dark makeup around my eyes in some scenes to create a seamless transition between mask and skin, much like what I understand they do with all the folks who play Batman.

After I cleaned my face, I was met by a production assistant who told me that Rob wanted to see me in his office. We headed over to the production office following signs reading
BUTTERCUP FILMS, LTD
and went upstairs. As I walked in, Rob got to his feet from behind his desk and greeted me with that warm smile of his.

“Hey, Cary. How ya doin’?” A usual Rob singsongy refrain.

“Great, thanks.”

“Good to see ya.” He gave me a bear hug.

It should be noted that all hugs from Rob are bear hugs.

“So . . . how did the face mold go?”

“Weird,” I responded.

“I know, right?” He laughed. “Did they stick the straws up your nose?”

“Yes. And I almost threw up through them.”

Rob chuckled. “Come on, I wanna show you around.”

“We have a great crew,” he said. “And I want you to meet them.”

It was extremely thoughtful of Rob to extend the invitation; not many directors do that with their actors during preproduction. But Rob was different. I would learn later that he had handpicked nearly every member.

I ended up meeting quite a lot of them that day, from the bookkeepers to the folks in the props department and almost everyone in between. Every time we ran into someone, Rob would stop and introduce us, and, with unfailing enthusiasm, say to them, “And this is Cary. He’s playing Westley.”

In the art department I met our production designer, Norman Garwood, with whom I would end up working on two more movies. Norman is an ebullient, sweet guy and obviously very talented. He had worked on two magnificent Terry Gilliam movies,
Time Bandits
and
Brazil,
and on
The Missionary,
all of them containing one of my favorite comedians, Michael Palin (more about him later). Clearly Norman was a
Monty Python
favorite, which made him perfect for our production in my book, being a Python fan myself. Every inch of the walls was covered in magnificent drawings and paintings of all the sets, from Miracle Max’s cabin to Buttercup’s suite in Florin castle and from Fred Savage’s bedroom to the Pit of Despair. They were simply magical. One could really see the mythology of the film starting to take shape. As I expressed my excitement at the visual imagery surrounding me, Norman suggested to Rob that he take me for a tour of the sets they were already starting to build.

“Oh, yeah. You gotta see ’em!” Rob said enthusiastically. “They’re really something.”

Rob took me back outside and we walked over to H Stage, where carpenters, plasterers, and painters were deep into the process of constructing the set for the Fire Swamp, which was starting to get filled with fake trees, creepers, vines, and giant mushrooms. The detail was extraordinary. I remember turning to Rob and saying, “Wow! It’s like
The Wizard of Oz
!”

“Pretty cool, huh?” he replied.

He then took me over to C Stage, and as we walked onto the set
I stood and marveled at the sight of the massive clifftop where the famous duel between Westley and Inigo Montoya would take place. Standing on that soundstage, with its cloudy blue sky backdrop, I felt a palpable sense of . . . not relief, but more like joy. I didn’t doubt that Rob could pull this off; I just hadn’t envisioned how he would do it. Now it was becoming real. I could tell that this was clearly the most expensive production either of us had ever been involved with, and a lot of its success was riding on whoever was playing Buttercup and that fellow playing Westley.