Connie's Warwick Davis Fanpage and Leprechaun Center

Excerpts from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Filming of the Douglas Adams Classic

Excerpts from the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Filming of the Douglas Adams Classic

Edited by Robbie Stamp. Published in 2005 by Newmarket Press (New York)

This excellent book is available from Amazon.com and other sources.
 

‘You think you’ve got problems? What are you supposed to do if you are a manically depressed robot? No, don't bother to answer that, I'm fifty thousand times more intelligent than you and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level.'
Marvin, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

Marvin
'Marvin was one of the first things that we designed for the film,' Garth Jennings notes. 'The script was still being worked on so we could concentrate on the characters. He started out as a spider chart: Marvin - paranoid - weight of the world on his shoulders - brain the size of a planet - everyone looks down on him. We looked at that, and really that drew itself. He had a huge head with a permanent hard-done-by look. The book says he's made of brushed steel, but I didn't feel we had to be totally loyal to the text. The pure essence is there. The book says he has these upturned triangles for eyes, which we could use in the same way that Japanese design uses abstract elements to create a sense of character. It was funny because he was someone with a complex stuck in a cartoon-type costume. There's nothing sadder than that - he's so cute and sweet-looking, which balances out the depressed side of him.'

'When you take these iconic characters, you are never going to satisfy everyone's sense of the character they have in their mind,' Robbie Stamp points out. 'You have to design something that has such integrity and works so beautifully that maybe it isn't the Marvin that people had in their heads, but when they leave the cinema they have to admit that "that definitely was a Marvin!"'

'The design of Marvin was locked down when we came on board,' Creature Shop supervisor Jamie Courtier says. 'We took it forward into maquette stage. We then overlaid an image of a little person, which coincidentally was Warwick Davis, and to our surprise it fitted him almost like a glove.'

Assorted concept designs for Marvin

Davis originally came to the Creature Shop to discuss one of the short actors represented by his Willow Agency taking the role, but ended up playing Marvin himself. 'I thought the design was gorgeous,' he says. 'He's a piece of art that moves around.'

Although at one stage the size of the head section was made smaller, in order to make the suit more practical, the final version of Marvin is identical to the sketches that Garth took to the Creature Shop. 'In the course of the build, we had to re-expand the head size,' Courtier recalls, 'but when you expand a sphere by the small amount of 15 per cent, the weight goes up something like 60 per cent. That made it enormously hard technicalLy, because we then had to invent a weight support system which allowed Warwick to control the head using his own head, but allowed the weight of the head to be supported on his harness.'

Warwick Davis prepares to become Marvin

WORKING WITH A BIG HEAD: Getting Marvin on and off set was sometimes a problem. 'We would dress Warwick off camera, only to find he was barricaded out of the set by lighting stands and screens,' his dresser Paul Jomain recalls. 'Suddenly a forceful "Are you ready?" would come our way. It took a long while before people realized that Marvin's large head wasn't going to squeeze miraculously between the stands. It was like walking with a very large baby - my colleague Nicola and I would grab both his hands and walk him back in case he fell. Warwick's vision was via a small camera mounted in the black line around his head. That was connected to a monitor mounted inside the head, but if the camera was shooting from above we could remove his chin panel and he could see the ground!'

Marvin was created from lightweight fibreglass, neoprene, nylon webbing and aluminium for the engineering parts, and in total weighed around 56lbs, two-thirds of Warwick's 6st body weight. 'It was a very nervous moment when he put the suit on for the first time,' Creature Shop head of design Sharon Smith remembers.

'It was very demanding,' Warwick agrees. 'I've done many films and worn many different costumes throughout my career, and I thought this would be a straightforward costume that I could put on in about 20 minutes, and take off at lunchtime. But as the build went on, it dawned on me that this really wasn't going to be quite as easy as I had anticipated. I started off working in a rehearsal room with a video camera, but then I was introduced to Peter Elliott, who was an inspiration.'

Arriving with the Vogons
Descending to the organic lifeforms' level
Taking the stowaways to the bridge

Elliott encouraged Warwick to think of Marvin as a character, and to find a performance which he could then create using the suit. 'Before that I'd been operating the suit as a puppeteer might,' Warwick says. 'That wasn't right. It had to come from the emotion within me, which would come through. It looked incredibly natural, and went with the dialogue Marvin was saying.'

Marvin looked perfectly at home on the Heart of Gold, his round head mirroring the spherical shape of the ship. 'When we designed him, he was basically shouting at us that this was how the Heart of Gold should look,' Garth Jennings remembers. 'He was saying, "Look, I'm part of all this stuff!'"

From the section on the quarry shoot for the planet Vogsphere:

Everyone's overwhelming memory of the location in Wales was that it was cold. 'But there was Warwick in the huge Marvin suit almost three-quarters of his body weight, who never fumbled once, never complained or demanded to be put in the carriage,' Garth recalls. 'He was out there in the middle of a rainstorm with thunder and lightning coming down, with the wind whistling up the gaps in his little rubber suit.'

Warwick Davis on location in the quarry
 HEY, I KNOW... THWACK: Although most of the paddles that come up and smack the characters in the face whenever they have an idea were added in post-production, the cast still had to run across the quarry so they could be composited into the scene. On this occasion, Nick and Garth's assistant Lita Bleichman donned a lightweight version of the Marvin suit.

 
ALL DOWN MY LEFT SIDE: Also waiting patiently is a tall metal creature that was instantly familiar to fans of the previous screen incarnation of Hitchhikers. The Marvin robot from the 1981 television edition made a special guest cameo. The twenty-three-year-old costume was refurbished from the waist up for the moment when two generations of Marvin met.
Warwick Davis and Garth on the [Magrathea] studio set at Shepperton

The Battle for Earth

Arthur saves himself, killing the mice in the process, but the Vogons have arrived. Marvin is caught in the crossfire but still manages to save the day...

'The battle sequence at the end was one of the biggest location moments,' Robbie Stamp says. 'We had Vogons, all the main cast and an actor who's about to have a little explosion in the back of his head!'

The final confrontation between the Vogons and the Heart of Gold crew was originally scripted to take place on Magrathea. 'The end of the movie was a huge thing with battledroids, and Ford doing Matrix-style moves with his towel,' Garth recalls. 'We had a meeting with Karey to try to find a way to make the battle happen on Arthur's home turf. A big battle scene with physical ingenuity winning the day wasn't really in the spirit of Hitchhikers, and it was at that moment that we decided to give the Point of View gun to Marvin. It had been used earlier between Ford and Zaphod, but then forgotten about. We shot Marvin, and got him out of the picture, which of course no-one would be expecting, and then he turns round and "makes their day".

'Originally all the Vogons were so depressed that they shot themselves in the head. I was really excited about them committing suicide, but we realised we might have problem getting that past the censors without being given an 18 certificate because of all the Vogon brains everywhere. I'm really pleased that they just give up and lie down in typical Hitchhikers style.'

'When I read that scene in the script, I wondered what kind of comedy I could draw from it,' Marvin actor Warwick Davis says. 'But Garth wanted it played for the emotion of the moment. He shot it in slow motion. It was quite challenging - I was the one releasing the four squibs in the head, as well as staggering backwards and forwards, rotating round and making sure that I didn't fall over. When they put the big crater in the back of the head, it made it quite a few pounds heavier than it already was, so the balance was off as well. But we managed to get it in one take, and I didn't fall over until I was meant to!'

Warwick deservedly received a round of applause at the end of the take from cast and crew, and was then taken out of the costume. 'We laid the empty costume on the ground,' his dresser Paul Jomain remembers, 'and after two or three hours, one of the sparks came up to me and asked if Warwick was OK, or if he needed a break!'