Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (18 page)

Milk puckering under cling film, indescribably obscene
. Soon after that I heard the flutter and crunch of her Vauxhall Corsa pulling out of the drive. It was a minor part for Blethyn, and, as I made myself a bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, I wondered
why she’d taken it on at all – I’d offered to send her a cheque or cash up front, and then she could’ve left the key under the mat for me.

At 2.00 a.m. I began my preparations, naked in the bathroom, working the special forces camouflage stain into my skin from the hairline down – face, neck, arms, hands, cock and balls – but by the time I reached my ankles the gunk had run out and it looked as if a bear had been shitting incontinently in the bath.
Of the life of man the duration is but a point, its substance streaming away
.

I tiptoed through the sleeping dormitory town, not moving freely until I had crossed the M25 by a footbridge and was heading north on a wooded path beside the Colne brook. The predawn sky draped over Iver Heath, the clouds a peignoir, the stars jewels gelid against its blue-black skin. It must have been freezing up there, because a plane taking off from Heathrow unzipped a distrail with its passionate heat. The cumulus gaped, the night moaned, and I streamed away through the long grass, leaving a long swathe of misplaited blades behind me that pointed the way to Iver, a hamlet that had had been ravished so many times by the camera, all the specificity had been sucked out of it.

Beyond the houses, across Pinewood Road, the birches of Black Park were doubly silvered in the sidereal light. Over fifty films had been shot among these dense thickets and drives choked with fallen boughs. Black Park had been a wood in Wisconsin, a forest in Slovenia, the Siberian taiga – it was a hack woodland actor, ever ready to put on its pine-needle overcoat and make a multiplex believe. It was perfect cover – they’d never look for me here, where millions had already looked, unseeing.

There was a fence of course: savage tridents and coiled razor wire; in among its loops Hal’s touring company dreamt on their poles, rapid-eye movements laying down the beat for their lullaby, ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer doooo ...’ I dug down quickly into the leaf mould and earth – then I was in, loping from one shadow to the next. I’d cased the joint thoroughly and wasn’t anticipating security – they were tucked up in their kennels, watching reruns of
Baywatch
with their comedy dogs.

Even in the starlight I could see the faded lettering –
Clennam & Sons: Importers of Fine Fabrics and Silks
– and the floral-pattern wallpaper exposed by the wrenching out of the carious house next door – except that there never had been one. With its stacked windows – dormer, upon bow upon bow – and steeply pitched roof, the set for the BBC’s latest TV adaptation of
Little Dorrit
was as familiar to me as my own childhood home – and so the perfect place to hide until dawn, when I could mingle with the techies, chippies and sparks. After all, no one ever looks upon the classics with fresh eyes, especially tired security men on minimum wage.

Inside there was silence, half a room and no staircase,
the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapour
. I waited in the fake Victorian business premises until day came, pink and dewy, and with it a red and sweaty security man, played by Ray Winstone, who, led by an Alsatian, barrelled straight towards me from the direction of the sound stages. An extra would’ve been one thing; an actor like Winstone was quite another. Self-preservation took over: I scrambled out the back of the set, ran ducked down behind the half-hovels, then sprinted across the open lot.

Would, I wondered, Ernõ Goldfinger, the architect of Trellick Tower, have been amused by this: a sign reading ‘Goldfinger Avenue’ slapped on the side of a Brutalist hangar? A reference not to him directly but to the Bond villain named after him – by which he had not been amused. I pelted down the avenue and, spotting an open side door into E Stage, shot through it and found myself inside a replica of the mausoleum at Chatsworth – a rotunda, surrounded by pillars, which was familiar to me from many happy visits to the estate as a guest of the Devonshires.

I pushed on into the depths of the Stage, passing through bedrooms, dressing rooms, halls and a solarium – all of which belonged to Chatsworth but had been disarticulated to suit the logistics of shooting the interiors for
The Wolfman
, which began summarily in a blaze of lights that sent me diving behind some velvet drapes. When I peeked out the body doubles for its three stars – Anthony Hopkins, Benicio del Toro and Emily Blunt – were drinking coffee and chatting about last night’s television.

My hand discovered a spirit level, and shouldering this I stepped out from my concealment and into a replica of the main hallway of the house. At the head of the marble staircase, between two stone lions, a dog handler stood with two Dobermanns on leashes, while an assistant swung a flail, provoking them to rear up and bark. I ducked behind a Grecian urn, although I needn’t have worried: only the dogs were in the shot being framed by an assistant director.

I was beginning to enjoy my stay at fake Chatsworth, which was like any house party but without the tedium of having to make conversation. Then Winstone blundered in and ruined it all. His paunch advanced, there were sweaty patches at his
armpits – his Alsatian dragged him on. He caught sight of me behind the urn and bellowed, ‘Oi! You slag!’

‘Cut! Cut!’ the AD cried, then Winstone’s dog slipped its collar and flew at the Dobermanns. A maelstrom of fur and flob ensued, into which I lunged – how to explain
all things of the body are as a river?
I had noted that one of the antagonized Dobermanns had hands rather than paws – four of them; I grabbed one and while the others were distracted pulled him from the mêlée. So we escaped from
The Wolfman
set, out through another side door, across the lot and into the cover provided by the Winnebagos, ambulances and fire engines that were assembled around the famed 007 set on this, the penultimate day of shooting for
Quantum of Solace
.

Blue screen is always a comfortable experience for an idealist. As soon as Scooby and I were alone, I realized that’s what was happening – because this was no flesh and sinew Dobermann but a cartoonish hound who stood on hind legs puckering his muzzle to bow-wow-wow the near-discernible words ‘Ruffankyourufferrymuch.’ It followed, of course, that if Scooby were being projected after the fact of my own performance, then so too was all of this: the hive of activity around the wardrobe trailer, where extras were getting kitted out in army uniforms to play the part of a corrupt Bolivian general’s entourage.

As in life we strike attitudes on a bare stage, responding to phantoms we cannot see with lines scripted for us, so now I joined in idle chatter, hidden safely in the simple past. ‘Basically,’ said a plump chap with a sporran of keys dangling from his belt, ‘they’ve reached the point in the schedule where there’s nothing left to do but trash the sets – burn ’em and blow ’em up.’

He spoke the truth: ranged across the lot were the toasted slices of bogus buildings – a Haitian tenement, a Siena palazzo, a Bogotá slum. I suppose I should have been overwhelmed by this, the wide Sargasso of the narrow and destructive imagination of commercial imperatives – but I was filled only with my love for Scooby, who reared up on his hind legs so I could help him into his camos. He licked me in gratitude, his tongue curling right round my tired face. ‘Scherlupp!’

‘Nice work, boy,’ I told him. ‘I needed to lose the stain.’

The voices of two rehearsing actors floated through the open window of a trailer: ‘Was there any trouble securing the hotel?’

‘No, none.’

‘It’s just the fuel cells. The whole compound runs on them.’

‘Pain in the ass really.’

‘Sounds highly flammable.’

It was beyond wooden dialogue, rewritten so many times that it had the ugly believability of multi-density fibre. Still, it sounded to me like something worth filing away for future use – from the extras I’d gathered what the morning’s shooting would entail: the Götterdämmerung of the lovingly constructed interior of a Chilean desert resort hotel.

I could hear the low rubba-rubba-rubba of the generators, the whine of a truck’s power steering as it turned in the lot, the tick-tick-tick of metal expanding in the sun – my system was, I realized, flooded with adrenalin, hence this dreamy state, this sense of hours to kill that invariably preceded deadly action. Still on his hind legs, Scooby wrapped his foreleg tightly in my arm and we walked to the enormous 007 sound stage, picking our way between the loops and coils of fire hose that linked bowsers to engines.

The PR was waiting for us at a picnic table underneath a sunshade; her eyes tracked from mine to Scooby’s, then dropped to his bare paws. ‘Old mate of mine,’ I explained. ‘Turns out he’s doing a bit of extra work – Rex, this is Karen.’

‘Grrullo Grrrraren,’ growled Scooby.

‘Er, hullo,’ said the PR, not wholly convinced.

Nevertheless, she gave us security wristbands and led us into the hangar. The narrow defile between the outer wall and the reconstruction of the hotel was cluttered with scaffolding and snaked with high-tension cables; techies and firemen bustled about in the confined space. We stepped
between the flats and found ourselves in the central hallway beneath a lattice of steel walkways connected by stairways. Charred extras playing corpses lay about underneath
DANGER OF CRUSHING
signs.

‘This is the twenty-second film of the franchise,’ Karen explained as she led us on past the open doors to the suites; then came the rest of the spiel: the six independent crews, the millions of dollars, the thousands employed, the hundreds of plane flights encircling the globe like warped meridians – then there had been the near-fatal accidents, and the bust-ups in Haiti, and all of it, I thought, in the service of convincing the ticket-buying public for a few minutes – or seconds – that the man who stood by the curved panoramic window, looking out on to a desert counterfeited with hundredweight bags of sand, was an ultraviolent assassin retained by Her Majesty’s Government to eliminate its former friends.

He turned to greet us. ‘David, good to see you – and this is?’

Phew! I was Thewlis – to have been Postlethwaite would’ve been humiliating.

‘Dan, this is Rex, old mate of mine – I understand you’ll be shooting him later.’

Craig laughed. ‘I love dogs,’ he said, and shook Scooby’s paw. ‘So,’ he continued, as the three of us sat down at a circular glass table beside an ornamental pit full of multicoloured stone balls, ‘why’d you want to come on set?’

The PR was a few yards off talking to an ex-public schoolboy in a sleeveless anorak (or gilet), so I took a deep breath and explained how cinema had been found – neck snapped, throat slashed, eyes gouged out – in a back alley behind a cinema in a small town that no one had ever heard of.

Craig laughed again. ‘I suppose you’re gonna tell me I bear some responsibility for that – but let’s get real here, I’m not the guy who did
Dinotopia
.’
^*

Whatever chagrin I felt, I hastened to reassure him that there was nothing personal: ‘It’s just, given your own career trajectory, from playing tortured and sensitive types, to torturing sensitive types, presumably you have a view?’

Craig was looking at me with mounting scepticism. When I’d picked up Scooby’s camos from wardrobe I’d also selected a costume of my own: black dress trousers, black leather windcheater, white shirt and product-placement sunglasses – and this outfit seemed to be bothering the Bond star.

‘Why’re you dressed like me?’ he snarled.

Then it hit me, and I snarled back: ‘Why’re you dressed like Daniel Craig when he’s meant to be dressed like James Bond?’

How could I have been so naive? Quite suddenly the stunt double’s stuffing an empty Evian bottle in my mouth as I lie back in a pile of snapping, crackling and popping empties. Scooby leaps at the PR’s throat – I try to shout, but all that emerges is a pre-orgasmic ‘Gnnnn!’ and now the Craig doppelgänger’s pummelling me in the face with blows of a chronometric precision: ‘Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff!’ So hard that these bones are pulverized in this order: 1. glabella
2. nasal bone 3. supraorbital margin 4. superior orbital fissure 5. lacrimal bone 6. zygomatic bone 7. inferior orbital fissure.

I have to act fast, and jerk my knee up into his crotch so hard his testes are mashed into his pelvic bone, which in turn ruptures his bladder. The assassinalike barely flinches, merely shifts the locus of his blows lower, so that ‘Paff! Paff! Paff!’ The maxilla, mandible and mental protuberance are all shattered. My face is a blood-filled sponge of traumatized tissue and bone fragments, but scrabbling among the Evian bottles my hand discovers a hammer left there by a careless chippie; I swing this again and again at my attacker’s spine, popping his atlas, his axis and his cervical vertebrae (1–7 inclusive) like ... popcorn.

Instant paralysis should rightfully ensue, not this marvellous bit of choreography: the two of us leaping away from one another, so that upright we circle the pit, searching for secure purchase in the slag heap of plastic, then ‘Whack!’ as a steelcapped leather shoe lashes out, breaking my sternum so cleanly that a shard spears my superior vena cava. Despite the plume of blood jetting from my ruptured chest, I drop back on to one leg and whip my own foot round at shoulder height in an expert taekwondo that propels his humerus – like a battering ram – into his scapula, a blow so devastating that the tendons snap with the resonant ‘pings’ of piano wires breaking.