The story said that the famous
director had been in Granada, hiring members of “la raza Arriana” (Arian race)
to appear as Nazi soldiers in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”.
“I’m forty,” I grumbled. “Too old for
soldiering.”
“Chicken,” was all she said.
The next morning we drove our creaking
old Seat over the highest mountain pass in mainland Spain to the somnolent town
of Guadix, where the railway station had been transformed into Isfahan. It was
six a.m. and there was no one on the lot except a few lighting engineers and a
guard, who told me that the shoot’s headquarters was in a motel a mile away.
“Well, that’s that, then,” I told my
wife. “Pity we came all this way.”
“Drive,” was all she said.
A throng had gathered at the
motel. It was roped off with yellow tape
and patrolled by some useful-looking security men. Barbara pushed me forward to the tape, where
a guard looked at me and wagged his finger, windscreen wiper-style.
“Say you’re in the film,” Barbara
hissed behind me. I did.
“Where were you hired?” asked the
guard, I thought reasonably.
“Say Granada,” Barbara growled, finger
on my fifth vertebra. She was the ventriloquist. I was the dummy. I did, and to my astonishment,
the guard said, “You’re late. Better get to wardrobe.”
I was the last Nazi to turn up. The
other ten were all blond young Germans, already dressed in Afrikakorps uniforms and carrying rifles. I sat down in a chair in
front of a mirror, where a Hollywood makeup artist named Fiona gave me a despairing
once-over.
“How long have you had that beard,
Sweetie?” she asked.
“Twelve years,” I replied.
“You sure you want to lose it? They’re
only paying 90 quid a day for this, you know.”
In ten minutes I was clean shaven and
dressed. I had been given a sergeant’s uniform, perhaps befitting my age. My lower face, long protected from sunlight by
my beard, had to be sprayed tan. I was the last to leave. Someone shoved a submachine gun into my
hands. I went out the door and saw Barbara, who was leaning over the rope,
trying to catch a glimpse of me. I
walked over. She looked past me, and I realised that my wife of 16 years didn’t
recognise me.
I was hustled onto a bus and we headed
for the lot. There were three buses, all packed with costumed extras. Most of
these were Andalucian gypsies, wearing Iranian peasant clothes. As I got on, I felt hostile eyes following
me. A man next to an empty seat was reluctant to let me pass. I hung on as we
jolted over the rutted road, wondering why my usual good nature was letting me
down.
I found out when we were herded into
two groups at the lot. I was with the other Nazis, who were laughing and aiming
their guns at each other. Their average
age was probably 19. They spoke to each other in German. I later learned that
some of them were on holiday from Dusseldorf or somewhere, and didn’t speak
Spanish. They ignored me. The gypsies
stared rudely at us, and it began to dawn on me that Nazis would be as
unattractive to them as to Jews, because they shared the same fate in the ovens
of Dachau.
The rail station car park had been
covered with sand. Palm trees in pots
cast a little shade from the combination of Spanish sun and the magnesium lamps
on towers every few yards. Everywhere out of shot, fat cables crossed the
ground, making it easy for someone in combat boots to pratfall. Big trucks with
Lucasfilm painted on the side crowded the entrance. A wall had been built
between the station and a row of buildings next door. It was cracked and
ancient-looking. Two camels stood beside it, unmoving. No one told me what to do, so I stood as near
the shade as possible and looked official, still worried that I would be
unmasked as an imposter. A throng of onlookers stood on the other side of a
rope. One of them was Barbara, who had
made her way from the motel on foot. I smiled in her direction but she waved me
back toward the work.
Denholm Elliot and John Rhys-Davies
were on the set, huddled in folding chairs near a large van. Body doubles for
each were lounging with the lighting crew. We seemed to be waiting for
something. Then Spielberg arrived. He got out of a Land Rover he was driving
with a boy of ten or twelve. I guessed that this was his son, going to work on
Saturday with his dad. He had a ball cap on his head and sported a trimmed
beard. As he neared the actors, he glanced around the lot. His eyes rested on me for a moment. I thought my time as an extra was about to
end, but he moved on.
Things moved slowly. A harassed-looking
man with two clipboards herded us Nazis into two groups and told us to walk up
and down and peer at the gypsies, who had apparently been instructed to be a
crowd in a market. I walked up and down, peering and walking for an Oscar. The
gypsies’ expressions were more hostile still. One guy spat near my boots. I was taller than he was. An impulse to hit
him ambushed me from somewhere in my psyche.
The lunch trailer opened its awning
and we were told to break. We queued up and the gypsies broke line. They sneered at us. They took two meals each
and got back into the queue, from where they would begin to sneak upstream. By
one o’clock I was feeling like a member of the master race. I swaggered as I
walked. When a gypsy glared, I glared
back.
It took a while to realise what was
happening to me—and to them. We were
being driven into role, by the uniforms and the guns. The other Nazis were really scary; they acted
like real ones, and I wondered just how deeply all this fascism was actually
buried.
After lunch I strutted through my
role. Spielberg was buried beneath a black cloth on a camera, which I later
learned was a TV monitor synchronised to the main film cameras, so that he
could see exactly how the shot was framed. We walked up and down, peering. I didn’t know if I was being filmed or not. A
Mercedes pulled up. Sean Connery got out of the back seat and Spielberg and he
talked for a moment. I strutted as near as I could get away with, but couldn’t
hear anything. Connery drove away.
About four o’clock, six of us Nazis were
instructed to stand near a palm tree placed beside the faux wall. A tall young
German was told to pull on the tree.
When he did, a doorway opened to reveal a truck parked behind it. We did that for an hour or so until the
clipboard guy waved us away.
At five, we were herded onto the buses
again and driven back to the motel.
Relations with the gypsy/Iranians had deteriorated. Two of us Nazis sat
in the very back, radiating threat, while the gypsy/Iranians swore at us. We
turned in our uniforms and queued at a window for our pesetas. Some of the inferior race tried to collect
their wages twice. We of the master race were outraged.
As I drove us home, I heard myself
talking about the gypsies in a way that unsettled my liberal soul. Barbara scowled. By bedtime that night, I had
recovered enough to launch into a philosophical lecture about how external
things like uniforms and role play could be responsible for turning a good
person bad. She didn’t reply. I reckon she must have gone to sleep. When I
switched off the light, I was wondering whether I would go back the next
day.
Of
course I did. Ninety pounds was a month’s wages in that village.
Postscript:
Don’t look for me in the scene in Isfahan where Denholm Elliot is kidnapped, chucked
through a wall and bundled into a Nazi truck. There really is something called
the “cutting room floor”.
