The Princess Bride is the epitome of a comfort movie. Probably because it was designed as such. It’s a movie you watch when you’re sad, sick, lonely, and everything in between. The first time I watched it, I had just had eye surgery for my strabismus and had been so worried I would wake up and not be able to see again. It was fourteen-year-old me crying a lot and my brother wasn’t going to be there when I had it. So he told my mom to put on The Princess Bride for me, and thus, a small tradition was made between us.
If one of us had to get surgery or do something that made us very sick, we would tell whoever was around to put on the movie for them. It wasn’t groundbreaking; the film is literally set around a small boy who is home sick from school, so his grandfather is reading him the story of Princess Buttercup and Westley to make him feel better.
All this to say that The Princess Bride means a lot to us all who grew up loving it. It’s a movie that we turn to when we need something comforting and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon (given how that movie is passed down generation to generation). So when Inigo Montoya himself, Mandy Patinkin, recently took to social media to share his thoughts on the movie 35 years later, it’s no surprise that he feelings mirrored many of our own.
“The greatest moment in memory was when all was said and done and we’d gotten all the angles and we’d shot the fight from a million different angles, and Rob was happy and we’re done and we thought we were finished, did the last moments, he said ‘Hey, listen guys, are you okay if we put some cameras, two cameras, up in the ceiling and you run the whole fight all in one?'” Patinkin recounts. “‘Not pieces but the whole thing all together?’ and we were like two little kids going ‘yeah!!! we’re okay’ and up go the cameras and he says action. And we started doing it. And it just flew and then at the end of it, he goes ‘cut’ and he said those horrible words for me which was ‘print.’ Which meant that we got it and meant that we wouldn’t do it again.”
Patinkin gets emotional as he says that he misses it and that, to me, is why this movie is so special to fans.
The love that went into making it
There are movies that we love that we know were hellish to make. Casts fight and hate each other but the end product is so good, we cherish it anyway. The Princess Bride is not one of those movies. Everyone talks about their time making this movie with love and appreciation. We know that the cast enjoyed it and I think that’s one of the reasons why this movie is so special to us.
We can see that love for what they were doing. We can feel the story come to life with their excitement and it makes us love it all that much more. I can’t wait to one day show my future kids this movie. I get excited thinking about how my niece gets to watch it for the first time. The joy this movie brings me (and other fans of it) knows no bounds and that’s thanks to this cast and creatives like Patinkin.
(featured image: 20th Century Fox)
