Read Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis for Free Online Page B

costume.
     
    “What’s this for?” I asked.
     
    “Warwick, how would you like to go to America?”
     
    The picture was for a passport photo; six Ewok actors had been chosen to fly to America to film the final phase of Revenge of the Jedi . We would be joining forty or so American little people who were also playing Ewoks. This was done for the sake of continuity, so that the audience would recognize key characters within the two distinct groups of Ewoks and they would appear to be part of the same tribe.
     
    The sail barge scene in the Tatooine desert (where Luke rescues a recently defrosted Han Solo and Princess Leia kills Jabba the Hutt) and the Endor exteriors were the only scenes shot in the United States. In those good old days the British film industry was in rude health and the UK had a wealth of technicians who were able to make great movies for less money than Hollywood.
     
    To me this was utterly mind-blowing. I’d been filming with my screen heroes for five weeks, with no school to speak of, and now I was going to get on a plane for the first time in my life, and fly to Disneyland (that’s what I thought America was) to fight Stormtroopers for eight weeks.
     
    I flew with Mum, Dad, and my sister, along with five other families, including Nicky’s. The plane seemed to me to be as big as the Albert Hall. This was still a time when transatlantic travel was the preserve of the rich and famous, so the plane was almost empty.
     
    The in-flight entertainment was decidedly dodgy – they tried to project a 16mm film onto a screen in the middle of the cabin but the film kept falling off the spool every time we hit a spot of turbulence. So Nicky and I played hide and seek for about five hours, never running out of hiding places.
     
    And then suddenly, there I was, in California, standing under redwood trees about three hundred feet tall, where I was introduced to Ray, our schoolteacher.
     
    “Hang on a minute,” I said. “Schoolteacher? Nobody told me about this.”
     
    The law said I was only allowed to work for four hours a day as an actor but I had to do six hours of schooling. I was ready to cry “Mutiny!” But that was before I got to know Ray.
     
    Ray didn’t look like your average teacher. He had long blond hair, wore Ray-Bans, and was tanned a golden brown. Imagine a younger Owen Wilson but with a slightly less impressive nose.
     
    The first thing he taught us was how to hatch and raise chickens and to identify poisonous plants. There was not so much as a sniff of algebra.
     
    “What are you gonna need algebra for?” Ray asked with a smile. “Now, who wants to know how to start a fire without using matches?”
     
    Where did they find this guy? I loved Ray and school became almost as much fun as fighting Stormtroopers. One moment I was out battling the Empire alongside Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, and the next I was running back to the trailer, desperate to check that George the chicken was still happily eating his daily seed ration.
     

     
    The cast and crew immediately made me feel like a member of the Lucasfilm family. I think they warmed to me in part because I had no inhibitions. I still had absolutely no idea how I ought to behave on a movie set. I was just a little kid having fun and I didn’t quite realize just how important or significant the people around me were. Including the man himself.
     
    It was David Tomblin who plucked me from out of the crowd and brought me to the attention of George Lucas.
     
    “Warwick, this is George Lucas,” David said. If David had told me that George played a Stormtrooper, then I would’ve been impressed, but all I could tell at that point was that George was a man with big hair, glasses, and a beard.
     
    “Oh, right,” I said without any enthusiasm whatsoever.
     
    Thus started a lifelong friendship.
     

     
    There was much falling over of Ewoks in the redwood forest set. The undergrowth was always dealing us funny little