As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Rob Reiner

  Introduction

  1

  MEETING ROB

  2

  PRE-PRODUCTION AND MEETING BUTTERCUP

  3

  THE TABLE READ AND MEETING FEZZIK

  4

  “EN GARDE!”

  5

  WRESTLING R.O.U.S. IN THE FIRE SWAMP

  6

  STORMING THE CASTLE AND BEING MOSTLY DEAD

  7

  ROB’S TRAVELING CIRCUS

  8

  TRUE WUV

  9

  VIZZINI AND MIRACLE MAX

  10

  A COUPLE OF MISHAPS

  11

  THE GREATEST SWORDFIGHT IN MODERN TIMES

  12

  ALL GOOD THINGS . . .

  13

  A FAIRY-TALE ENDING

  Epilogue by Norman Lear

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About Cary Elwes and Joe Layden

  Index

  For my little princess, Dominique

  FOREWORD

  William Goldman once said about the movie business, “Nobody knows anything.” The Princess Bride is Exhibit A in defense of that truism.

  As I was starting my career as a filmmaker, I thought, naively, Why not make a film based on The Princess Bride? That should be easy. It’s a brilliant story written by one of America’s greatest writers. Why wouldn’t everyone just jump at this idea? Little did I know that for fifteen years it had been the story that no studio would touch. Fortunately, Norman Lear, my All in the Family boss, and the man whom I would come to call my second father, had faith in this wonderful fractured fairy tale.

  Making The Princess Bride was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Living in England for six months, working with old friends, and people who would become old friends, creating a film based on my favorite book of all time. Nothing could be more satisfying.

  When you start a film, you have an idea of what you want it to become, but you never know if anyone else will share your interest. Bill Goldman once referred to the book he wanted on his tombstone as an oddball story. When it came time for the movie’s release, no one had any idea of how to sell it. Was it a fairy tale? Was it a swashbuckling adventure? Was it a love story? Or was it just a nutty satire? The fact is it was, and is, all of the above. Not easy to capture in a two-minute preview trailer or a thirty-second TV ad.

  We opened to some critical success, but only moderate business. Luckily through VHS, DVD, and TV it managed to take hold, and over the past twenty-five years its popularity has grown. I can’t tell you the pleasure I get from people who first saw it when they were kids, telling me how much their kids love it. What a thrill to know that a film you’ve had a hand in is getting passed down to future generations.

  Reading Cary’s book has brought back wonderful memories. He has so beautifully recounted what was for me, and I’m sure for all of us, one of the truly great creative experiences of our lives. He takes us, as only he can, through the Man in Black’s eye view of the world of the R.O.U.S., Miracle Max, and the Cliffs of Insanity. And he does it with style and grace. So curl up in a comfy spot and have fun storming the castle.

  —Rob Reiner

  INTRODUCTION

  NEW YORK, OCTOBER 2, 2012

  Standing onstage at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, surrounded by cast members and some of the crew, many of whom I’ve not seen in years, I feel an almost overwhelming sense of gratitude and nostalgia. We have gathered here at the New York Film Festival to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Princess Bride, a movie whose popularity and resonance now span generations.

  That fact alone boggles the mind—how such a quirky and modestly conceived film could achieve such a lofty position in the pantheon of popular culture. What really strikes me, though, as I look down the row at the faces of my fellow actors, is how quickly the time has passed. Has it really been twenty-five years? A quarter century? The passing of time is most critically noted by those who are missing, the great Peter Falk and that gentle mountain of a man, André the Giant. But to counter that sadness is the camaraderie of being back with those who are here tonight and who stood alongside me so many years ago: Rob Reiner, Billy Crystal, Carol Kane, Wallace Shawn, Chris Sarandon, and Mandy Patinkin, not to mention Robin Wright, looking as lovely as she did the day I first laid eyes on her so many years ago. Then again, she has always set a rather ridiculously high standard for beauty, and that seems not to have changed. The only ones who couldn’t make it were Christopher Guest and Fred Savage, who unfortunately were busy working on other projects.

  This is a night of red carpets and remembrance, of interviews and a screening filled with laughter and joy. It is also only the third time that I have seen the film in its entirety with an audience since its initial screening in 1987 at the Toronto Film Festival. That previous event, while successful, did not exactly produce the sort of response one would expect of a film destined to become a classic.

  Is it fair to call The Princess Bride a classic? The storybook story about pirates and princesses, giants and wizards, Cliffs of Insanity and Rodents of Unusual Size? It’s certainly one of the most often quoted films in cinema history, with lines like:

  “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

  “Inconceivable!”

  “Anybody want a peanut?”

  “Have fun storming the castle.”

  “Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”

  “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

  “Rest well, and dream of large women.”

  “I hate for people to die embarrassed.”

  “Please consider me as an alternative to suicide.”

  “This is true love. You think this happens every day?”

  “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.

  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.
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  1

  MEETING ROB

  BERLIN, JUNE 29, 1986

  The 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.”