Making Priscilla (7 page)

When they return, Lizzy and Tim are also instrumental in persuading Stephan that Guy Pearce is the perfect Adam. His screen test is outstanding, but there is something in Stephan that worries about the role lapsing into caricature, to which he feels a ‘straight’ actor will eventually resort in order to sustain a role of such queeny flamboyance. I disagree entirely, feeling that what all the parts need are good actors, regardless of sexuality. We are not making a documentary.

Although he is becoming more confident as each stage is completed, Stephan is still going through occasional moments of terror. One night he drives over to our apartment to say he is no longer sure he can make the film. I tell him that it is not the kind of project on which anyone is staking their professional lives. It is a small, diversionary, one-of-a-kind movie that will restore a sense of adventure to everyone involved. If it is not funny, it will simply evaporate, and after falling off his horse with
Frauds
he should — to stretch the equine metaphor to breaking point — get back in the saddle again for a low-stakes race. Citing one of our favourite films by a man who never directed another, I remind him that he is not Charles Laughton and this is not
Night
of
the
Hunter.

A week before the start of pre-production, I arrange a Saturday morning meeting at the Latent Image offices so that the
heads of departments can be briefed by Stephan in a way which may be informative for everybody. A few of the group know him well, more have a passing familiarity, a few have never met him at all. I have been warned by Grant earlier in the morning that, for various personal reasons, Stephan is not feeling well and may not show up at all. But he is persuaded, and he does.

From experience and reputation, these people think of Stephan as a buoyant, iconoclastic, amusement arcade of a personality, so when this bleary, unshaven, clearly upset man walks into the room they are confused. He certainly does not resemble the writer-director of a funny road movie. Perhaps we have gathered them to reveal that the dates are the same but the project has changed: that we are instead remaking Tarkovsky’s
The
Sacrifice
in the outback.

A bus has arrived outside to audition for the role of Priscilla, so the moment is not permitted to develop past the first few minutes of what shows perturbing signs of developing into a group therapy session. By the time we return — after surveying the vehicle from all angles and with every technical consideration in mind — the mood has lightened considerably, and a sense of purpose is restored. It is Stephan’s last moment of irresolution. From now on, his sense of mission becomes unswerving. Having come close to losing it, he has decided to find it, and this time to keep it.

When we move into our pre-production premises at the Sydney Showground, everything begins to accelerate.

Lizzy and Tim have already begun making costumes in a glass garret above my office, designing to a background of likely soundtrack songs. Hugo will wear Tim’s own silver-sequined knitted dress for the film’s solo opening number, and
they have also decided that Hugo’s frock for the drag queens’ walkabout in Broken Hill will be made entirely out of credit cards. As none of the credit card companies will give us clearance, and since nobody owns the copyright on the use of thongs, Lizzy and Tim come up with an even better idea: a thong dress, with tiny thongs for earrings and Chanel straps on a thong handbag. Without a dollar to waste, they call Tim’s mother who works in the shoe department at the Warringah Mall branch of K-Mart and, through her, receive a fifteen-percent staff discount on several dozen pink and orange thongs.

Lizzy’s boyfriend, the television director Andrew Saw, is in the office one evening and I tell him of the difficulty we are having in finding a place striking enough to stand in for Ayers Rock, in the likely event that we continue to be refused filming permission. He suggests we try somewhere called Kings Canyon, north-east of Uluru and west of Alice Springs. It is spectacular-looking, he says, and well disposed to filming, with nearby hotel and backpacker accommodation. He encourages us to include it on our imminent location surveys, which we are doing in the aberrant way that everything on this movie seems to demand. Stephan, Grant and Colin Gibson will fly to Alice Springs and Kings Canyon, scanning locations in both places, then rent a car and drive to Coober Pedy and Broken Hill, where they will do likewise. When they arrive in Broken Hill, they will meet up with Sue Seeary, Stuart Freeman and the location and unit manager Rick Kornaat who, after they have been briefed, will take the same vehicle back in the opposite direction, confirming the places along the way that Stephan has approved and ensuring that they are practical. As the link between the two groups of explorers, Grant travels both ways.

I make a final attempt to secure an Uluru filming permit and receive a response from the Australian Conservation
Agency. I am not sure what connection they have with the other organisations we have already encountered, but the message is clearer than ever: to portray the rock as we intend, even if the film is a comedy, would be ‘offensive to the traditional owners’. The not-so-traditional owners of the resort village, who have been considering allowing us to film a long shot, decide to reinforce the decision and also decline.

The single most dominant characteristic of film pre-production is the remarkable amount of overlapping activity. Movies are passed around: Terence Stamp pictures, musicals, cross-dressing films. Stephan is just off a plane from Alice Springs, with a favourable report on Kings Canyon, when he takes another one to Melbourne to rehearse Hugo and Guy — whose schedule on the TV series
The
Man
From
Snowy
River
prevents travel to Sydney — together. The wardrobe fittings are a great success: Hugo runs around the hotel in a white wedding dress, which he refuses to take off. A 42-page fax arrives from a choreographer looking for a job. Our office machine does not include a cutting facility, so it emerges as a single, continuous piece of paper, stretching the entire length of the office. We employ somebody else.

Even with an ally at PolyGram music publishing in Sydney, and a composer friend who tracks down fifteen out-of-copyright numbers for various uses, the song clearances are still proving, at this late stage, frustratingly difficult, but I brighten when I hear that PolyGram has bought Motown Records: it may mean that we can use Charlene’s ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’ after all. There is still a great deal of procedural tedium: hair-splitting, teeth-grinding paperwork connected with the completion bond, the insurances, the frequency and amounts of the cash drawdowns, and the maximum balance permitted in our account before PolyGram will send us any
more. It seems to me pointless to have an approved cash-drawdown schedule unless we can count on the money being in the bank on the appropriate day every week.

A title search report — which one is obliged to do as part of the film’s insurance arrangements — reveals that someone once published a book called
Lady
Hester
Stanhope:
Queen
of
the
Desert
and that there is a fresh-vegetable company in the United States called Desert Queen. Neither is likely to sue, I feel. The Marx Brothers once received a letter from the legal department at Warner Bros cautioning them against including the word ‘Casablanca’ in their title
A
Night
in
Casablanca
because it infringed, claimed the lawyer, Warner’s exclusive rights to its use in a title. In his reply Groucho pointed out that the Marx Brothers had been brothers for longer than the Warner Brothers, so he could just as legitimately insist that the Warners stop using the word ‘Brothers’.

Then there is Priscilla herself. We have finally found the bus, and in a neighbouring hangar a team of demolishers and designers begin to transform her. The sound of drills, soldering irons and hammers is a distant echo for two days. On one of them, I am leaving the office late one evening when I hear a different sound: it is Tim Chappel shaping emu heads out of a block of polystyrene with a sabre saw.

Terence Stamp — in linen under a Panama hat — arrives on a Qantas flight from Honolulu early one morning eighteen days before we begin shooting. An experienced traveller, he has been resting in the sun after an American press junket for the film
The
Real
McCoy,
in which he plays another of those sullen bad guys from whom
Priscilla
will at least provide some kind of relief. He spent much of the ’70s seeing the world,
taking the occasional low-key European film role to subsidise his odyssey, before returning to the screen, memorably, as the villainous General Zod in
Superman
and
Superman
2.

He has arrived in Sydney with no body hair, or at least very little. After a body wax, each of his nipple hairs was pulled out with tweezers. He has also completed a course, intended to put him in touch with his feminine side, in which one of the challenges was to do something you feared in front of the others. His was to sing in public, so he did it, a kind of karaoke for the psyche. He is reading Jan Morris’s book
Conundrum,
which includes a description of a sex change operation that leaves even the most imperturbable reader gagging for air.

On his second night in town, still jet-lagged and disorientated, Terence is walking from the city-centre cinema complexes back to his hotel and realises after a while that he has no idea where he is going. Under the giant Coca-Cola sign at Kings Cross — fortuitously only five minutes from his destination — he sees a large fellow in a tuxedo standing alone, so he approaches him for directions. ‘I’m lost,’ says Terence. The big man is clearly a philosopher. ‘Aren’t we all, mate,’ he replies. ‘No,’ says Terence, ‘you don’t understand. I’m
really
lost.’ By now, there is a flicker of recognition. ‘Here,’ he asks, ‘weren’t you General Zod in
Superman
?’

Wigs, shoes and costume fittings, make-up tests, dance rehearsals: we are in overdrive now. Hugo is flying up from Melbourne every day for rehearsals in frocks, and going back on the afternoon plane to do Shakespeare in tights. Guy is on horseback in moleskins in the Victorian mountains one moment, and mincing around in heels in the Sydney Showground the next. I feel that Terence is a little shocked by his ‘show’ costumes, which are a universe away from the natural fibres and Holly Golightly elegance he probably had in mind. Lizzy
emerges from the wardrobe department one afternoon, tears of laughter running down her face, and asks Stephan to approve a costume. He enters to find Terence looking like a very glum emu indeed, although he is extremely fetching in the blonde wig on which he insisted — Stephan wanted it brunette — and he is enjoying the special coaching in walking and deportment he is receiving from a ‘tranny trainer’.

We meet the tranny trainer one night at a hotel in Newtown, where the cabaret includes three members of the crowd baring their buttocks on stage through a toilet-seat-shaped hole in a screen. Afterwards one has to match the blokes with the bottoms. Then there is a Polly Waffle-sucking competition, which involves six men and three sticks of chocolate-coated candy. We hope that nobody will try to force us up on to the stage. But this is nothing. There is still a very special outing to come before the cameras turn.

By the time I arrive at the club called ‘DCM’, the night is well under way.

The movement order for the three actors has been precision tuned. Meet at Hugo Weaving’s house, where the make-up department will prepare them for the wardrobe department, who will dress them. Go to a bar called ‘Gilligan’s’ for a few loosening drinks with Bill Hunter, who has brought a friend along to protect the ‘girls’ from any unwelcome harassment. Walk down the street to DCM, the club to which a few days earlier we brought Terence and Hugo to meet a couple of drag queens. Now they
are
a couple of drag queens.

The third one, Guy Pearce, is nowhere to be seen. It turns out that he is on the other side of the room, abusing everyone and demanding that drinks be bought for him as a reward for
his unpleasantness. It is striking what an effect the disguise of drag is having on their personalities. It makes Guy flirtatious, combative and loud. It makes Terence withdrawn and watchful (‘Hello sailor,’ he greets me warily with his back to the wall, looking like a fallen woman in a ’50s melodrama.) It makes Hugo extraordinarily trashy. Wearing an ash-blonde wig which always looks as if it may be dislodged by his succession of strange postures, he behaves like some drunken trollop in a country-and-western bar; the kind that gets more maudlin as the night progresses and tries to drape herself around the wrong kind of strangers. Right now he is draping himself around most of the table as his head — which has been wobbling forward in the manner of those people who fall asleep in a sitting position in cinemas and trains — finally connects with the glass top, as if the force of gravity had increased to the point where he is unable to raise it again. There are few signs of life other than a tapping index finger which would be keeping time to the music if it were about a hundred beats-per-minute slower. Eventually he is taking up so much room that we move him to the floor under the table, where we leave him inert as Guy becomes more obnoxious and Terence more austerely ladylike. They are working out their characters in the course of the night, defining in public their predominant characteristics in the movie.

Eventually it is time to leave. I escort Terence, in his black cocktail dress and high heels, down the steep staircase to the street. He is still finding his drag legs, and there is some relief as he tears off his shoes as we stand on the pavement. ‘These heels are fucking
killing
me,’ he says with exasperation, for a moment looking and sounding like some unholy coalescence of Mamie Van Doren and Reggie Kray. The taxi driver takes us back to Hugo’s house, where I ask him to wait. When we emerge ten minutes later, the driver’s face falls. Having dropped
off a man and a woman, he is now picking up two men, one of whom left his cab as a woman. While Hugo makes his way back hanging out of Stephan’s car vomiting into the night wind, I drop Terence off at the Sebel Townhouse.