David Holmes Instagram – In 2008, between the Potter movies, I worked on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
Both myself and Marc Mailley were brought in to double for the kids, with Marc being the stunt double for young Dastan and myself the double for his childhood friend in the film. My job was to be jumping around rooftops performing parkour, evading capture. Marc actually performed the biggest gags and I was to do a few.
Mike Newell was directing – he had also directed Potter 4, so knew me well. He’s a lovely man and actually visited me in hospital after my accident.
Our job started with flying out to Morocco, a couple of nights in Marrakesh, and then a scenic drive over the Atlas Mountains to the town of Ouarzazate, a known filming town at the top of the Sahara desert, previously used as a location for the movies Gladiator, Lawrence of Arabia, and Kingdom of Heaven. Gladiator 2 has just finished filming there. Upon arriving in town, I instantly realise the whole place is just set up for making movies. There are old pieces of film sets just sitting in the desert everywhere. Not far from the town there are mud buildings dating to thousands of years old which we used for filming.
Filming stunts in the scorching heat presented its own problems, but you just get on with it and between set ups we just chased shade wherever we could find it and drank a camel’s portion of water.
The best part of the whole job was the Morocco wrap party where I got myself nicely inebriated and started doing flips off the hotel roof into to pool and proceeded to leave an impression on Jake Gyllenhaal, who was dong impressions of my cockney accent for weeks afterwards. It was such a great film to work on, and one of my fondest movie-making memories from my career. | Posted on 11/Apr/2024 23:02:40
