IT wasn’t the humidity, it was the heat, the wind and the dirt.
And it wasn’t Operation Iraqi Freedom – it was the set of “Holes,” the movie based on Louis Sachar’s Newbery Medal-winning book that’s coming to the big screen Friday.
The cast and crew had to contend with the Mojave Desert’s 120-degree temperatures, blinding sandstorms and the pounding sonic booms from Air Force planes at nearby bases to make the film.
It’s the tale of a kid with a family curse due to his “no-good-dirty-rotton-pig-stealing-great-great grandfather” back in Latvia.
The boy winds up incarcerated for stealing a pair of seakers (which he didn’t do) and forced to dig holes in a dried-up lake – to build character, he’s told. (The camp warden is really using them to find something, but don’t tell anybody.)
To play the kids stuck at Camp Green Lake – which functions as a kind of reform school for delinquents – star Shia LaBeouf and the other kids went through 2 ½ weeks of boot camp to get in shape.
They climbed ropes, spent 1 ½ hours a day digging and went on 4-mile hikes.
“It was insanely hot,” recalls 16-year-old Shia (it’s pronounced shy-a), who plays Stanley Yelnats, the boy whose name is the same backward and forward.
During filming, in the heat, “We could only stay in the holes for 20 minutes at a time,” Shia says.
Although the filmmakers drilled some 450 5-foot deep, 5-foot wide holes with a coring machine, the boys still had to get down and dirty, digging, for as many as 50 takes at a time.
“[Director] Andy Davis would always make us do it again and again and again,” Shia says. “He knew the more we did it, the more we would hate it – and the better takes we would get.”
And then there were the lizards – about 15 Australian bearded dragons painted with spots to play the poisonous yellow lizards in the story.
In one tense scene down in a hole, Shia and Khleo Thomas – who plays Zero, a fellow “camper” who tries to escape – were covered in them.
“These trained lizards were amazing,” Shia says. “And they really liked Khleo. He’s got this curly hair and they’d grab onto it. One time he had six lizards literally swinging from his hair.”
Jon Voight, who nearly steals the show playing tough-talking warden’s assistant Mr. Sir, had his own challenges to contend with: he had to wear a wig and a padded belly.
“I thought this Mr. Sir could look like [country singer] Waylon Jennings on a bad day,” says Voight.
When Sigourney Weaver, the “Aliens” star who plays the warden in charge of Green Lake saw his tummy, she wailed, “That’s disgusting!” So Voight took off a little padding.
Onions play a big role in “Holes” – Stanley and Zero eat them to survive after fleeing the camp – but they didn’t have to munch on the real thing. Good thing, since Shia hates ’em.
“They were really apples with a gelatin coating,” he reveals.
During last summer’s 10-week shoot, the cast got a little goofy.
Voight got in on the fun, swiping Weaver’s umbrella, which she used to shade herself from the sun, and dancing with it.
The kids, meanwhile, imitated Voight and his bowlegged Mr. Sir walk.
Basically, though, everyone who made “Holes” dug one another.
Or, as Shia put it, “We became a family.”
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