As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From the Making of the Princess Bride by Elwes Cary & Layden Joe

Author:Elwes, Cary & Layden, Joe [Elwes, Cary & Layden, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Criticism, Personal Memoirs, Social Science, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Biography, Autobiography, History, Popular Culture, Humour, Film, Adult, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781476764047
Amazon: 1476764042
Goodreads: 29868613
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2014-10-14T07:00:00+00:00

7

ROB’S TRAVELING CIRCUS

There is nothing ordinary about life on a movie set, particularly when you shoot a film on location for any length of time. There is a wonderful line in Cameron Crowe’s movie Almost Famous, when Russell Hammond, the charismatic lead guitarist played by Billy Crudup, tries to explain to the wide-eyed, and increasingly skeptical, adolescent journalist William Miller, played by Patrick Fugit, the appeal of the endless nights living on the road.

“This is the circus,” Hammond says. “Everybody’s trying not to go home.”

I’ve never been on tour with a band or with a circus for that matter, but I imagine it has something in common with the moviemaking experience. On most films you find yourself sequestered far from home with a tightly knit group of people, trying to create something special while passing the hours in ways most people can’t even imagine.

When you are on location for months on end, your job almost becomes your whole life. You don’t go home to the wife and kids at the end of the day. You have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with your coworkers, and in the evening you gather together over coffee or a drink and rehash the highs and lows of the day while getting to know one another. It can be an intense, almost claustrophobic environment. But with the right group of people, and the right director, it can also be the adventure of a lifetime.

And so it was with The Princess Bride.

Acting, by any reasonable standard, cannot be merely defined as just “work.” Actors do get paid to work, but we also get paid to essentially play, something most people abandon when they enter the adult world (if not well before that). In a way, as I have said, there is something very childlike in getting to perform either onstage or on film. All kids like to play dress-up, whether it’s cowboys and Indians or knights and princesses. When it gets to be both fun and work at the same time, it can be a truly wonderful, rewarding experience, as it was on this movie.

If I had to describe our production, I would say it was more like a circus troupe than any I had been on—traveling around Sheffield, pitching tents, putting on costumes and makeup, and staging our show. If you think about it, we had a “show” that involved giants, little people, wizards, albinos, swordfights, and death-defying stunts (and plenty of clowning around), all with Rob as the ultimate ringmaster. Heck, we even had four white horses! Looking back I feel certain that Bill must’ve spent some quality time at the circus with his kids while the idea for the book was still fermenting in his head. When I asked him this, he just laughed.

CHRISTOPHER GUEST

Everyone hopes, I think, when you’re doing a movie that you get the cast you want and that everything is fine. That everything kind of goes smoothly. That people have fun and in the end the product is something that everyone likes.

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