Read As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride Online
Authors: Cary Elwes,Joe Layden
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride (12 page)
I
was not a particularly noteworthy athlete growing up. Like most other schoolboys in the UK, I played soccer, rugby, and cricket, but not well. The only sport I excelled in was long-distance running. And even though I generally tried to stay active physically, my interests from an early age focused more on the arts than athletics. So it was with some trepidation that I began to fully consider the requirements of the part I had been assigned to play.
It wasn’t just about having the right “look” or even the proper sense of comic timing. There was a specific physicality to the role as well. And while I was young enough, fairly fit enough, and perhaps even foolish enough to think I could handle almost anything thrown my way, the reality of the situation was something quite different.
I knew I could run through Fire Swamps, wrestle Rodents of Unusual Size, and maybe even fight a giant. But when it came to sword
fighting? I have to admit that I simply had no idea of the complexity of the preparation that would be required to perform it adequately. And to be honest, simply “adequate” was not going to cut it. Not for a scene that was described by Goldman himself in the screenplay as the Greatest Swordfight in Modern Times. Goldman had apparently spent months researching sword fighting, and all those references to certain defenses and styles were all based on completely accurate sixteenth- and seventeenth-century techniques by legendary swordsmen. You can still purchase some of the fencing manuals written by them online. Books like
The Academy of the Sword
(1630) by the Flemish master Gerard Thibault d’Anvers. Or
Great Representation of the Art and Use of Fencing,
written by the Italian maestro Ridolfo Capo Ferro and dating back to 1610. And even
Treatise on the Science of Arms with Philosophical Dialogue
by his fellow compatriot—the noted fencer, engineer, mathematician, and architect of the Renaissance—Camillo Agrippa, published in 1553.
Back then I knew who none of these people were or indeed very much about sword fighting at all. I had confessed as much to both Rob and Andy early in the process. And I told them that even though I had taken some minor fencing lessons at acting school, it had been determined by my tutors that this was not something they thought I would ever be able to master. I wasn’t just a novice; I was clueless.
“Don’t worry,” Rob insisted. “You’ll be training with the best. It’ll be fun!”
Training, with the best!
It always sounds fun in conversation. But the practical reality is something quite different. More like, “Don’t worry, you’ll be training with the best Sherpa to help you climb Everest!” or “Don’t worry, you’ll be training with the greatest human cannonball before we fire you out of the cannon.” I’d long admired serious athletes, and I always try to
treat a challenge as an opportunity. And then I began to think, Wait a minute! How hard could it really be? I’d seen plenty of Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks movies. My developing, inane theory was that if they could do it, so could I. It didn’t seem all that difficult. A few quick thrusts, some fancy footwork. More like dancing than combat.
I could handle it, I thought. No problem.
I was, of course, somewhat deluded.
ROB REINER
Because the swordfight is described as the greatest swordfight in modern history, I wanted to make good on that. I wanted it to be great and I wanted Cary and Mandy to be able to do it. I knew that in all the old Errol Flynn movies,
Captain Blood
and
Robin Hood
and stuff, he only did his sword fighting in the close-ups; for the wide shots they would always get stunt people to do it, and great swordsmen. As a matter of fact, one of the swordsmen that we used, Bob Anderson, doubled for Flynn. He was an Olympic fencer, and he and Peter Diamond were the two guys who constructed this fencing sequence.
On the same day that I first visited the production offices at Shepperton Studios, I was told I would be contacted by one of the two gentlemen who would be in charge of the fight training and coordinating stunts for the film. Their names were Peter Diamond and Bob Anderson. It shames me somewhat to admit this now, but I had never heard of either of these two men when I received the message that day. I reasoned correctly that Rob knew what he was doing and would only assign such an important task to seriously qualified people.
That, as it turned out, was an understatement.
Peter Diamond was a good three decades into what is generally regarded as one of the most legendary careers of any stuntman or stunt
coordinator in both television and film. As a sword-trainer he had worked with both Errol Flynn and Burt Lancaster. And in the previous decade alone, he had served as stunt coordinator on the original Star Wars trilogy. For you “Wookieepedias” reading this, the Tusken Raider that surprises young Luke Skywalker on the Tatooine cliff top with that horrifying scream? That was Peter. He had also been the stunt arranger and coordinator on movies like
From Russia With Love, Raiders of the Lost Ark,
and
Highlander.
Classically trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Peter had also appeared in front of the camera, not only as a stuntman but sometimes as an actor as well. That’s him as the German soldier Indy notices in his side mirror climbing along the side of the eighty-mile-an-hour speeding truck without a harness in
Raiders
. Peter logged more than a thousand credits before passing away in 2004, at the age of seventy-five. He was vibrant and actively employed until the last year of his life.
Bob Anderson was also a native of England and also something of a national hero, having served in the Royal Marines during World War II and as a representative of Great Britain on the fencing team in the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki. He later became president of the British Academy of Fencing and a coach for the British national team. His expertise as a swordsman eventually took him to Hollywood, where he became a sought-after stuntman and fight coordinator. The man’s résumé was breathtaking, from coaching Errol Flynn like Peter in the 1950s to choreographing fight scenes for several James Bond films in the 1960s, and working alongside Peter in
From Russia With Love
and (Star Warrior alert) on the Star Wars trilogy. That is Bob using the dark side of the Force as Vader in all the light-saber sequences. Bob also passed away, in 2012, at the age of ninety, but worked until the last, serving as “sword master” for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
There was no Google back then, and in hindsight, I almost think
it was better that I was blissfully unaware of the incredible reputations of the two men with whom I would be training. Had I known of their backgrounds, I might have been completely intimidated. But I was curious about the man I would be dueling with. Over drinks after the first table read, I had started to get to know Mandy a little. At some point the conversation naturally turned to the subject of sword fighting and the preparation we’d both be expected to endure prior to filming. I casually asked him if he had any experience with fencing.
MANDY PATINKIN
Goldman wrote in the introduction to my character that he is “the world’s greatest sword fighter,” and I figured, that’s what I’ve got to learn how to do. So I immediately got in touch with Henry Harutunian, who was the Yale fencing coach, and we worked together for two months. He taught me the basics of fencing. I was a righty, and he taught me first how to fence with my left hand; we worked the left before the right, and I actually became a better left-handed fencer than a right-handed fencer.
He sort of frowned a little—in much the same way that Inigo Montoya might have done—and said, “Not really.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Neither have I, really. Just a little at acting school. But I don’t remember any of it,” I told him.
I figured we’d be going in raw, the two of us. It was only later on that I discovered that he had been training for two months in the US and was thus already way ahead of me in the process.
Looking back, I do believe he was sizing me up from the moment we shook hands, trying to determine if I was someone he could “beat.” That’s the funny thing about acting: it can be collegial and collaborative, but it can also be intensely competitive. A healthy competition between actors is never a bad thing. As actors you work together, but you also try
to push each other . . . bring out the best in each other. I knew I would not only have to bring my A-game as an actor on this film but I also had to be on my toes in the duel with this guy. We would, after all, be using swords on the day, not the protected rapiers we would be practicing with.
ROB REINER
I’m sure there was a sense of competition between Cary and Mandy, and I think that was probably healthy. This is a duel to the death, supposedly, and so it is a competition. I think that was there, for sure.
MANDY PATINKIN
It was 1986. My father died in 1972. I read that script and I wanted to play Inigo because my mind immediately went, If I can get that six-fingered man, then I’ll have my father back, in my imaginary world. He’ll be alive in my imagination. So that was it for me. It was like, I’ll become the greatest sword fighter, and my reward will not be to be in this movie that ended up being what it’s become to all these people; my reward will be that my father will come back.
Having gotten to know Mandy a bit, I can safely say with some assurance that Inigo Montoya was indeed the perfect role for him; he was born to play it. Like Inigo, Mandy was passionate and ambitious, if not a little competitive. Even today, when you watch him perform, you can tell that here is an actor who still has splinters in his feet from all the years treading the boards on Broadway. That is where he honed his confidence and professionalism—from performing live on a stage literally thousands of times. And there’s no question that some of the best actors have honed their skills in the theater. Mandy certainly fell into that category.
By the time I met him, he’d already been established as a uniquely
versatile performer, having starred not only in
Ragtime
but also in
Yentl
(for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe). He had also received a Tony Award for his role as Che Guevara in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Evita
in 1979. You don’t build a body of work like that without a significant degree of talent and ambition. Mandy had both in abundance. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing Inigo Montoya. He seized the role and made it his own, embracing it with a zeal and intensity that would have made the Montoya family proud.
ROB REINER
Mandy is a great actor, but you know, every actor is insecure. I didn’t see Cary’s insecurity but he obviously had it. I don’t know any actor that isn’t insecure. With Mandy, though, at that time he would carry his insecurities on his sleeve. It would be out there. He had done
Evita
and
Sunday in the Park with George,
he had won a Tony, and he’s a brilliant actor, extremely talented. But he’d worked on
Heartburn,
and they replaced him with Jack Nicholson and he was all worried that he wasn’t going to do well in
The Princess Bride
. He wanted it to be perfect, and after one of the first days of shooting, I went into the trailer with him and I said, “Mandy, you don’t have to do anything. You are so talented you don’t have to try; just get out of your own way. You’ve got great words to say, you’re a brilliant actor, and you just let them come out and you’re going to be great.” And from then on he was cool.
So I had a formidable foe in Inigo. That much was obvious the moment we began training for the dueling sequence, which for us began almost immediately. The very next morning after the table reading, I got a very early call from one of the trainers.
“Good morning, Cary. This is Peter Diamond,” came the voice on the other end. “Are you ready to do some sword fighting?”
“Absolutely,” I said enthusiastically, if a little groggily.
“I have to ask before we start . . . have you had any training?”
I shared once again about my amateur skills honed at acting school.
“Do you remember any of it?”
“Um . . . no. Not really.”
“Right. That’s no problem. Probably better, actually,” came the response.
MANDY PATINKIN
I remember Rob saying to me that these guys, meaning the characters in the film, are holding poker hands, but they just kind of hide it. Then he held up an imaginary hand of cards at the table, and sort of turned his hand around as though he was hiding the cards in his pocket, and he said, “Every now and then, one of these guys shows his cards.” And I remember that image of hiding your hand, and letting one of the cards peek out every now and then, meaning a smile, or something that you were hiding. The sense of humor about it, a little bit of tongue-in-cheek-ness.
“What do I need to bring?” I inquired.
“Sweats, sneakers, and a T-shirt,” he said.
“That’s it? Nothing else?”
“No, just be ready to work. We’ll break for a quick lunch, but basically we’re going to be training from nine to five, five days a week.”
I thought about that for a moment. Eight hours a day? That meant forty hours a week.
“Seriously?” I asked half jokingly.
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
“Oh, yes, Cary. We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he replied in a no-nonsense manner. “We start tomorrow bright and early. Nine a.m. sharp.”
He then gave me the details of where to meet. I jotted it down on a notepad, we said our good-byes, and I hung up the phone. I had no idea what to expect. I still hadn’t figured out that he and Bob Anderson were not merely stuntmen but the finest sword-trainers available. Nor had I
fully grasped the concept of a forty-hour workweek devoted entirely to becoming proficient in an athletic endeavor. To put it mildly, it was a little more than I had bargained for.
