Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

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.