Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis by Warwick Davis

tragedies. Jack was paralyzed after his car rolled backward and crushed him (he died six years later), while David, struggling with depression, killed himself in 1990.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    Skating for Spielberg
     
    CDS productions hard at work.
     
     
    Showing off our cinematic awards (although I could only manage third place in the BBC’s Screen Test Young Filmmaker of the Year, the Oscars for young people – a travesty!).
     
     
    We made a camera dolly out of a pram. I don’t know why we were filming a radiator, though.
     
     
    The (very) odd couple: Daniel was into Metallica while I was into Jean Michel Jarre – but we were united by our love for all things Star Wars .
     
     
    My first major cinematic effort, The Outing , starring Mum’s 2CV, my sister, and friend Stuart, was inspired by BBC’s Rentaghost . It involved lots of disappearing things, including Mum’s car.
     
     
    Me, overacting while goose-stepping, from my short film Russian Guard .
     
     
    Video Nasty , in which a man is eaten alive by his videocassette recorder (VCRs were about the size of mechanical diggers in those days).
     
     
    “And all because the lady hated Milk Tray.”
     
     
    Act I, Scene I, from Nightmare : Just another average day, fourteen-year-olds drinking beer and playing poker – but it’s about to be disrupted by a possessed statue (which will later cause me to explode).
     
     
    A selection of outfits from the Warwick Davis wardrobe. I don’t know why I did this, I just thought it was a good idea at the time – can you guess what decade this was?
     
     
    The careers officer came to give us advice. He took one look at me and raised his hands skyward in exasperation.
     
    “Not the fire brigade?” I asked. “I could get in all those hard to reach places.” a
     

     
    While I still hadn’t realized that acting could actually be my career, I thought that filmmaking made sense. Mum and Dad agreed; after all, I now had lots of connections in the biz and so I ended up doing my schoolwork experience back at Elstree as a runner on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
     
    Yes, that’s right, a runner. I thought runners were very cool. They used walkie-talkies and their main job seemed to be screaming at everyone to shut up before the filming of a scene started, something I knew I’d be very good at.
     
    I was more than a little outraged when I discovered that “running” was actually an important part of the job. I had to dash back and forth carrying scripts, papers, coffees, props, and anything else they could think of between Robert Zemeckis, Bob Hoskins, Steven Spielberg, and the entire production team. I was also given the most boring job in the world, photocopying and stamping every single page of every single script with a unique number, so if anyone sold a script to a journalist then the film company would know whom to sack and sue.
     
    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