Making Priscilla (3 page)

There is a screening of
Frauds
in a San Fernando Valley mixing theatre large enough to accommodate a football game, attended by Phil Collins and associates, the sales agents J&M and the two investors from Live Entertainment. One of them dislikes the film so much by now that he slips out a third of the way into the picture and comes back in time for the end. The other one comments that the strange aquatic sound effects, which Stephan has added because of their unsettling quality, just made her want to go to the toilet. Everybody has had enough.

Everybody, that is, but Stephan, who stays on for a few days to supervise the final details. He is dauntingly hyperactive, and when I meet him for a drink to hand over his Christmas
present — a biography of the cross-dressing director Edward Wood — before catching the plane to Sydney, I wish that he were coming with me so that he could break the cycle. The next time I see him he will look quite different.

It is the evening of Christmas Day. Stephan’s flight has arrived that morning, but uncharacteristically he has not called. We are at the annual ‘orphans’ Christmas’, which is usually held in whatever house he is living each Christmas for friends who have no parents, or whose parents live somewhere else, or who simply do not like their parents much. As many of these friends have at some time worked in the catering business, the food is always delicious and prepared without fuss, the standard of banter reliably high.

Tonight, however, the host is missing. He is upstairs in bed, and he is not in good shape. The year of continuous pressure he has been under, exacerbated by all the conflicts of defending
Frauds
against potential damage, has resulted in his arrival at the chequered flag in a state of some dislocation. His tension is such that at times he is unable to breathe, bringing on an anxiety attack which in turn makes it even more difficult for him to breathe. He is worried about going into pre-production on
Priscilla
in this kind of state. It is a concern that I share. I tell him he should take a holiday and not worry about the movie. If he does not do so, there will be no picture anyway. So he goes skiing in Europe with Grant. I revise the schedule, allowing for his absence until mid-February.

I am told that the NSWFTO, in addition to their script development function, have recently announced funds to invest in production, so we apply for some to supplement our pitiful budget. We have learned that Apocalypse is unable to provide
certain sound services as part of a facilities investment — which means we need more cash to pay for them — and the amount we have allocated to the cast is quite risible.

The NSWFTO’s initial response is a curious, disturbingly American one: they send me coverage. Although their assessment is not as crucifying as one made by the Australian Film Commission when it was rejected by them after Cannes 1991 (citing stereotyped characters, political incorrectness and the view that Stephan’s short films were ‘deeply shallow’), it is quite scornful. Remembering my own maxim about coverage being a kind of trading currency, I find the reader’s report sent to us by the ICM agency in Los Angeles and decide that the only pertinent reply is to make a comparison between them, if for no other reason than to illustrate how difficult it is to deal with these completely conflicting views. Are we to believe that it is ‘almost perfect’ (ICM), or that it is ‘a one-joke story, in need of considerable and major re-working’ (NSWFTO)?

As I conclude our application, I emphasise that, when we have completed a location survey, we will make the dialogue sharper, the outback detail more authentic, and some of the jokes more inventive, but what we cannot do is change the
nature
of the film, which is a piece of gaudy, mischievous entertainment about three people in collision with a sometimes hostile, always bewildering environment. The application is approved.

I continue to interview crew members, but I feel that we are
losing momentum. Months after they have agreed to finance the film, PolyGram seem in no hurry to respond to the investment agreement, and my own impatience is augmented by that of their Australian co-financiers the FFC. There is no need for anything to take long or be complicated on a film like this, as PolyGram’s film president Michael Kuhn emphasised at the time of their initial offer letter. ‘If negotiations become too time consuming or bureaucratic,’ he wrote, ‘the whole thing is not worthwhile.’

To accommodate the delays prompted by Stephan’s nervous exhaustion, by Paul Mercurio’s restricted ‘window’ of availability, by Michael Hutchence’s absence in Capri at an INXS summit conference about the group’s future, and by the fact that if we have not started shooting by late April we must wait until the end of August before the daylight hours become appreciably longer again, I draw up another revised schedule. There is no point in informing anyone of this until Stephan is back, Mercurio and Hutchence are signed and the financing contract is underway with PolyGram. News of postponement is a certain way of slowing down any process which requires acceleration.

The director is having a crisis of confidence. The two prospective leading actors are having crises of career direction. One of the financiers is having a crisis of indecision. The producer wishes he could have a crisis of anything but feels that all the best crises are taken.

Stephan returns, refreshed but not yet restored, and begins a regime of swimming, meditation, breathing exercises and general relaxation. These days we have so many methods of dealing with demons, so many incantations with which to keep rage, fear and loss at bay.

Although the picture is finally ‘green lit’ — at least, sufficiently
to begin contract negotiations — we decide not to film at Sydney’s annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, an event which, among other things, has helped to redefine drag. This gives Stephan the opportunity of attending as a participant instead. Dressed as a dog, at some moment well into the night he meets one of the investors’ executives wearing a dress, so he drops down on all fours and starts barking at him.

The crew begins to converge. We need people of broad skills and tireless energy, and we are finding them. Colin Gibson and another art director, with one assistant, will be the entire art department, from finding a bus and redesigning it completely to decorating a country pub in the middle of the night before a shooting day. A confident and well-spoken drag queen called Strykermeyer offers to help create the drag make-up for each character, so we offer him two weeks’ work and the title Executive Drag Consultant.

We are not, however, making any progress with the casting. As Hutchence and Mercurio recede into the oblivion of wishful thinking, we ask Bryan Brown, finding irresistible the prospect of one of Australia’s quintessential ‘blokes’ in a frock, but he quickly turns down the offer. Stephan has a long conversation in Melbourne with the young actor Aden Young, who has a terrific screen presence but no apparent appetite or aptitude for comedy. A casting session for real drag queens results in such a notable number of no-shows that we call it off after a short time.

At this point we decide that finding the landscapes will help to prompt new ideas about who could most effectively drive a bus through them. So we go to look for them.

As Brian Breheny, Stephan and I approach the tiny aircraft  which will fly us to Broken Hill, they are changing a tyre not much larger than that of a toy. It is an unpropitious start to a location survey which, with a few detours, will follow the route of the drag queens in the film. As well as giving us a measure of what is practicable, it will also benefit Stephan, who has written his outback epic without ever having travelled west of the last vineyard in New South Wales.

Broken Hill is an outback mining town just over eleven hundred kilometres (687 miles) from Sydney. From the air it looks like an extended village of tin houses grouped around moribund silver, lead and zinc mines, but one of the reasons it has proved to be such a popular base for films over the past fifteen years — playing host to, among others, George Miller’s
Mad
Max
2
(The
Road
Warrior)
and Russell Mulcahy’s
Razorback
— is the great diversity of landscapes within driving distance. There are some signs of encroaching gentrification — art galleries, craft centres, a bad-pun hairdressing salon (Curl Up and Dye), a restaurant of the kind that lists mixed seafood dishes under titles like Neptune’s Catch — but it remains mainly a good-natured, down-to-earth
border town, the last stop in western New South Wales before it gives way to the untamed heartland. Right now, after weeks of heavy summer rains, the surrounding countryside resembles a giant golf course, a rolling green Axminster carpet where there was once parched red earth.

Initially the Broken Hill Tourist Association, who provide transport and a succession of helpful guides, are the only people who know that the main characters in our movie are drag queens. With everybody else we confine ourselves to explaining that we are researching a film, and from the looks that Stephan’s shorts attract in one of the first pubs we enter, it is probably just as well.

I also hint at the ambiguous sexuality of our protagonists to Mario, the Italian owner of the town’s most extravagantly baroque hotel, Mario’s Palace, a marvellous, hallucinatory, three-storey collision of kitsch which we want to use as a location. When I tell him that in the movie ‘the wrong people wear the dresses’ and that his hotel is ‘drag queen heaven,’ he smiles omnisciently, giving a persuasive impersonation of a man who has seen it all.

Mario is not popular in the town — it is said that his seventieth birthday party attracted very few guests — but we take to him immediately, and this is reinforced when we hear that the local health inspector has fined him for keeping a dead eagle in his fridge. His appeal that it was merely awaiting stuffing did not carry much weight after its proximity to the bacon rashers had been established.

While we find the perfect inland lake we need at nearby Menindee, and we are shown around an impressive variety of bar interiors — which prompts us to think that we may be able to shoot all the film’s pub scenes in the same town — the only place we come across as unique in its eccentricity as Mario’s is
Stephens Creek, not far out of town on the road to Tibooburra. Approaching it, we see an eagle struggle across the road dragging a dead rabbit so large that the eagle is pecking away at it, trying to reduce enough of its bulk to be able to fly off with the rest. Several times the eagle tries, and fails, to get airborne. ‘Big bird, bigger bunny,’ says Stephan.

Stephens Creek is two buildings — a disused petrol pump with adjacent dwelling and a combined art gallery, tea room and owl barn which houses ‘a collection of crafted owls’, as well as numerous second-hand dolls and a ‘trash and treasure’ table. It is owned and run by a couple called Mitch and Val, who live there with a selection of century-old rock-cakes, dozens of flies, a pile of laundry and their dog Bingo, who is so lethal he is kept locked up during our visit, all the while straining to escape his confinement so that he can jump at our throats and tear off our heads.

The fact that the characters in the film are so mismatched with the landscape means that we can also subvert familiar locations like the Pinnacles, Silverton and the look-out at Mundi Mundi Plain, the view from which — stretching to a horizon which seems so far away as to be on the other side of the world — will be the ideal place for our trio to realise the enormousness of what they are about to travel through.

We rent a four-wheel drive and head west.

At its best, a location survey is more than a matter of aesthetics and logistics: it can make a film come to life in the imagination. There are so many hours of driving, so much concentrated time spent together, that ideas can spring out of word association alone. We decide we will shoot in Scope and really utilise the widescreen format, not concentrate the action in the centre of the frame in capitulation to the tyranny of video and television. We discuss comedy devices and decide that wipes
and irises are the whoopee cushions of visual comedy. If we use wipes, Stephan concludes, it should be a giant pair of eyelashes blinking over the screen. We talk about road signs as punctuation marks and linking devices, with all the animals whose proximity such signs advertise — cows, camels, kangaroos, horses, wombats and so on — wearing dresses. And we amuse ourselves thinking up different titles for the film.

The full title —
The
Adventures
of Priscilla,
Queen
of
the
Desert
— still feels right because it captures the oblique comic-strip feel of the movie. It may even translate well, although the wordplay on ‘queen’ will be lost in other languages. Perhaps the only remaining detail that powerful actors and directors are unable to control is the title their film goes out under in foreign territories.
Housesitter,
for example, was called
A
Blonde
In
My
Soup
in Greece and
Lies
Have
Beautiful
Legs
in Switzerland.
Home
Alone
was released in France as
Mother,
I
Missed
the
Plane
and its sequel, accordingly, as
Mother,
I
Missed
the
Plane
Again.
The
More
Idiotic
the
Better
was the Brazilian title of
Wayne’s
World
and — best of all —
White
Men
Can
’
t Jump
appeared in Spain as
White
Men
Don’t
Know
How
to
Stick
It
In.
In Spain, where I grew up, they never use a thumb tack if there is a nail and a sledgehammer around.

Then there are the running jokes. We decide that Mario — who says goodbye on roadside billboards for nearly an hour out of Broken Hill — is an early Bond villain in the avuncular style of Joseph Wiseman in
Dr No
or Gert Frobe in
Goldfinger,
and that the reason he had an eagle in his fridge is that it was being implanted with a transmitter device broadcasting through the Telecom towers which punctuate the rolling outback.

Apart from the Widelux camera he has brought with him so that the stills we take reflect the aspect ratio we will see in the movie, Brian has two special loves: the tracking road and the
lucky shop. Whenever we see a good stretch of road on which to shoot an exterior of the bus, he automatically checks to see if there is a corresponding dirt track on which he can take a tracking vehicle. The lucky shop is his name for anywhere with betting facilities or slot machines, and it is his first port of call in each town we visit.

Hawker, in South Australia — to which we have driven along a track so extraordinary in its changes of landscape that we have been changing countries, from Switzerland to Scotland, every hour — does not have a lucky shop open on a Friday night, but it has a hotel with a pool table. Consistent with custom, Brian places some small change on the corner of the table, signifying his place in the queue to play. A gang of locals arrive and take over the table in a kind of group commando action, leaving him without a game. For a moment, he is prepared to take them all on in what would probably be a hideously bloody confrontation involving the entire bar, but Stephan dissuades him. Hawker, they decide, may be the home of the six-fingered washing-up glove.

I hear about this the following morning. I have missed the showdown by returning to my room to attempt to track down Tony Curtis, a casting idea we have had over dinner, at which Stephan has treated us to an account of a holiday visit made by him and his sister as children to their Uncle Adrian’s hog farm. One night they are woken by their mother and told to come and witness the miracle of birth. In their slippers and dressing gowns, they are taken to the resting place of a large sow and watch in wonderment as she gives birth to piglets. As the last one pops out, Uncle Adrian examines them. ‘Shit,’ he says, ‘they’re all runts.’ Then he picks up the tiny piglets by their trotters and smashes them against a wall, to the horror of two screaming, traumatised youngsters. This, we agree, may have been his turning point.

From there we begin our trek north into the Conradian heart of darkness of the Flinders Ranges and the Oodnadatta track, the part of the journey where human sightings will be rare and luxuries, we feel sure, will become absurd sentimental memories. We have been advised, in particular, to look out for camels, the most dangerous of all desert animals at night on the road. Hit one with your vehicle at full speed and it will be the last time you make that mistake, or indeed any mistake.

The sealed road turns to dirt track again. There are abandoned, rusting cars with no doors or wheels, and dead animals — none of them camels — by the side of the road. It is a wonder that any animals at all can survive out here, and these have done so only to collide with one of the half-dozen motor vehicles that will pass this way on any day. We travel through and past places of myth, places that are part of the dreamscape of Australia: Marree, where the people we meet are doing mining surveys in a light aircraft; Lake Eyre, an enormous salt lake which retains sufficient moisture under its crusty edges to leave our vehicle stranded in the mud for ten minutes in which we could have become a tragic outback case history; and Beresford, a complete building in ruins, a desalination tower, a flowing water-hole and more cockatoos than it is possible to imagine in a single place.

By the time we reach William Creek in the late afternoon it is like a mirage in the dust. Here the flies, which have been increasing in abundance along the way, have practically taken over. When we drive out to take photographs of the desert sunset, they are an unavoidable mass: in the eyes and ears, up the nostrils, down the throat. We cannot open our mouths to speak, and it is fatal to use vowels, which require an increased aperture. Brian and I, in defiance, are attempting a ventriloquised conversation about great cinematography of the desert and I
mention Vittorio Storaro’s work on
The
Sheltering
Sky.
I forget that the enunciation of the word ‘Sto-ra-ro’ obliges the mouth to open three times. The flies just dive in, leaving the rest of the sentence lost in an insect-congested cough.

Back at the motel, after washing off all the dead insects, we sit outside in the twilight opposite what must be the most isolated phone booth in the world. Many miles away in the fading purple and pink, a road train lit up like a spaceship approaches slowly across the plains, leaving behind it a trail of dust like a whirlwind rising up into the sky. While Stephan calls London from the solar-powered booth, we watch in amazement as the huge illuminated truck comes closer, finally grinding to a deafening halt outside this shack by the side of the road which is our lodging for the night, covering us all in dust. Inside, we eat the finest steaks and drink the best red wine any of us can remember tasting, and we are struck by our good fortune. It is a very hot night but the flies have gone to sleep. Dreaming of the Swedish backpacker-girls in the adjacent camping ground, Brian sleeps on the bonnet of the jeep, then moves to the cool of the terrace floor. This is better than making movies.

William Creek, unfortunately, is not a place where we can make this one. By now it is apparent that, to shoot over these kinds of distances in the time we have, the film will need to be based out of as few places as possible along the way: probably Broken Hill, Coober Pedy (to which we are driving), Uluru (if we can secure permission to film there) and Alice Springs. It will be a demanding schedule, but a necessary one if we are to convey a real sense of journey in the movie: the changes in the landscape are too dramatic for us to consider not travelling the whole way. We are not interested in the embalming pictorialism and cultural navel-gazing of Australian pictures of the ’70s. We want the outback to look like a lunar landscape, an alien environment to unnerve the drag queens, who will look like aliens in it. On the way to Coober Pedy, we stop at the Pink Roadhouse in Oodnadatta where a copy of the previous day’s paper is on sale. It appears that the former chief of the FBI, who made it his life’s work to investigate people’s secrets, had one of his own. The headline reads ‘J Edgar Hoover, drag queen’. Here, on the edge of the Simpson Desert, it comes with the synchronous timing of a divine message.

Halfway down a track that links Oodnadatta and the Stuart Highway, we come across the Painted Desert. Although we are now accustomed to being in a state of wonder several times a day, this place is quite phenomenal. It is a perfect spot for Bernadette to do some of her walkabout, when she sets out for help after the bus has broken down. We resolve that, however far we are from our Coober Pedy base, a skeletal crew will at some point make a detour to shoot it, with a stand-in if necessary. About an hour from Coober Pedy we break down. As the problem is connected with overheating, we look at the radiator. It is a frightful sight, a solid shield of flies and mosquitoes, a mass so densely indivisible that it prevents any liquid from circulating. We clean it sufficiently to struggle into town, where high-pressure hoses will finish the job.