HIS 'BRIDE' & JOY
Cary Elwes dishes on the making of the classic comic fantasy
Remember that scene in “The Princess Bride” when the “mostly dead” hero Westley is trying to be revived by a joketelling wizard played by Billy Crystal? It’s not Cary Elwes lying there. It’s aplastic dummy. The prosthetic quasi- corpse was necessary because Crystal kept cracking everyone up — including Elwes, whose character is supposed to be completely motionless. “Billy was doing medieval
standup comedy,” says Elwes, sharing a story from “As You Wish,” his new memoir of the making of the 1987 classic film. “Some of it got blue. I
was laughing so hard, I was banished from the set.” So they replaced Elwes
with a rubber dummy. Co-star Mandy Patinkin, who plays Inigo Montoya,
was less lucky. “Rob (Reiner, the director)
had told Billy to just ad-lib, and he
was hilarious. Mandy bruised a rib.”
Some of Crystal’s lines — like the one about his nephew and the sheep —can’t be reprinted here, but they’re in Elwes’ delightful remembrance
of making the unsung movie that
became a family classic.
“This film became the gift that keeps on giving,” Elwes,
52, tells the Daily News. “People always come up and tell me how they watch
it with their children and then their grandchildren.”
Elwes has acted continuously since his breakthrough role,
so he didn’t need to do
a memoir. “But people are always asking
e about how much fun it must hav been to be on that set with Billy, Mandy, Andre (the Giant)
and Rob — so I decided to write the story before the memories disappear,”
he says. Want to hear some? As Elwes’ character would say,
as you wish: On working with
Wallace Shawn: On being slugged by the villainous Christopher Guest: “There’s a scene after Buttercup and I survived the fire swamp when he’s supposed to knock me out with the butt of his sword,” Elwes says. “But because of the angle, we couldn’t sell a fake blow well enough for
the camera, so I told him to just hit me hard.
And this was no prop sword.
So he bashed me on the head. And that’s the last thing I remember. I woke up in the hospital.”
“Wally was terribly afraid of heights,” Elwes says. “They used a dummy in the long shots on the
Cliffs of Insanity, but for the close ups,
Wally had to be pulled up
a 30-foot wall. He was terrified. Andre offered
him a sip from his omni present hipfl
ask, but Wally said he didn’t want
to be drunk and petrified.
But that’s when Andre said in that deep voice,‘
Don’t worry, Wally, I got you.’
That’s what got him through it.”
On filming the “Greatest Swordfightin Modern Times”:
Both Elwes and Patinkin trained with two legendary Hollywood sword fighters for eight hours a day, five days a week for three weeks to pull off the movie’s critical scene — described as “the greatest swordfight” in William Goldman’s book and screenplay.
On getting hot and bothered with Robin Wright:
Stunt doubles were not used as the Rodents of Unusual
Size closed in on Elwes and co-
star Wright in the fire
swamp. Wright’s dress really does catch fire,
and Elwes extinguishes it with his han
ds. Also, Elwes changed the script
so his character would
heroically jump head first into quicksand
to save Buttercup — though producers balked.
“We were scared Cary was going to die,” producer Andy
Scheinman writes in one of the book’s many sidebars. “That would have been a disaster.”
Cary Elwes will read from“As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales From the Making of ‘The Princess Bride’ ” at New York Comic Con, Jacob Javits Center, Sunday, 11 a.m. and 5:15 p.m.; and at Barnes&Noble Union Square, 33 E. 17th St., Monday, 7 p.m.