Making Priscilla (8 page)

As he left the hotel earlier in the evening, he took the precaution of explaining to the receptionist that he was going out for the night to research a role and that, consequently he may return wearing a dress. ‘Yeah,’ she said with a dismissive shrug, ‘that’s what they all say.’

The second assistant director has measles. In sequence, these are among the six most dreaded words a producer can hear on the eve of a film shoot.

Although we have immediately found a replacement, her scheduling duties have required her to mix with all the cast and crew. Those who have had contact with her at the most contagious stage a few days earlier — contact is defined as being within a two-foot radius of the infected person, so this means practically everybody — have been recommended a couple of preventative gamma globulin shots, which are administered in a tent in the base camp we have set up in a small car park close to the location. For the first three days, we are filming in a Sydney bar and the adjacent streets.

In what has been an unfortunate weekend generally, the art-department runner’s vehicle was broken into, and the camera truck was involved in two accidents: one in which the driver misjudged the truck’s height and ran into an awning, the other in which he misjudged its width and sideswiped a parked car.

Michael Hamlyn has arrived in Sydney and now realises, in a way I have been unable to convey to him on the phone, the
extent of our difficulties in finalising song clearances through PolyGram in London. One of the obstacles is Abba, and for various reasons connected with the renegotiation of their contract, PolyGram are now suggesting that we approach them ourselves, or come up with somebody else. I have explained that because the three main characters make a living out of miming to other people’s records, the production and costume design have to reflect the kind of repertoire that they favour, and that Stephan has storyboarded and rehearsed the main musical numbers around this. Because of these problems, the rather lugubrious Abba song with which we were going to open the film has by now been superseded, to my undisguised delight, by Charlene’s ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’, but the staging of the final number ‘Mamma Mia’ is scheduled for the second day and simply cannot be substituted at this stage. As we already have Abba costumes, Abba wigs, Abba choreography and Abba running jokes in the script, it follows that it
must
be Abba.

We require dull skies for our first day and they materialise. We are filming the arrival of the bus Priscilla (soon to be referred to on the daily call-sheets, with no definite article, as ‘Bus Priscilla’), its champagne christening and subsequent departure from Sydney. Rebel Penfold-Russell plays a departing sponsored marathon runner Logo woman (a mutation of the Logoman we encountered on the location survey, and literally a running joke) amid as many partying extras as we can find. After dark, we begin the scene in which Tick walks through the rain to call Bernadette. The intention is to convey the impression of a punishing city they would want to leave, and the conditions certainly make those of us behind the camera want to leave it. Although we have a rain machine to control the volume of water, when it is switched off it keeps raining anyway.

On the second day we shoot the first and last scenes in the movie. Hugo Weaving’s myth-making Charlene will provide the main titles sequence, his performance shot from angles which will allow the relevant names to be superimposed over both strategically empty spaces and particular objects, such as a mirrorball and a pool table. As we do a semi-circular track around him in close-up, Hugo’s lip-synching is perfect, his concentration complete. Moving on, we induce an afternoon crowd of a hundred or so to be rowdily demonstrative during a performance of ‘Mamma Mia’, with Hugo done up as Frida from Abba in her perm phase and Guy as Agnetha. It is an awkward few hours — spotlights keep failing and a tracking shot through the crowd is time-consuming to orchestrate — but the song never fails to exhilarate. As we are finishing, Hugo’s breasts start falling down, and he remarks on this. Stephan has kept the camera rolling and orders him to smile, which provides us with the freeze-frame that leads into the end titles. We work two hours’ overtime, in doing so completing some of the most important footage in the film, which will eventually represent over six minutes of screen time.

Three days of interiors later, I am, as they say, ready for my close-up. After a show-stopping appearance as an insurance executive in
Frauds,
Stephan has asked me to play the minister at the burial of Bernadette’s young lover Trumpet. For my first clerical cameo, I bring along the twenty-third psalm and a pair of sunglasses, requiring only a cassock from the wardrobe department to complete my authentically ecclesiastical persona.

It is a cloudless spring day of rising heat, a climate not consonant with my outfit and, particularly, with those of the mourners, a small group of Sydney’s most illustrious drag queens. Stephan and Tim Chappel have been up for most of the night negotiating this coup, concluding at a place called the Taxi
Club where they offered a number of drag queens a hundred dollars each for showing up later that morning in a graveyard in Newtown dressed in black. In the middle of the scene it becomes too overwhelming for one called Mogadonna. So she lifts up her veil, excuses herself and discharges her breakfast all over a gravestone.

In the cemetery, at least there are no snakes. There are many at West Head — part of a national park at the northern end of Sydney — where we are filming the first scenes after they leave the city on board Bus Priscilla, still travelling through lush countryside. We are warned about the presence of a variety of highly toxic ones — the death adder, the tiger snake, the brown snake, the red-bellied black snake — and the detailed first-aid instructions are a testament to the proximity not only of snakes but of Australia’s oldest killer, the funnel-web spider.

Nobody is thinking much about snakes or spiders because two rigs — invented by a coalition of the camera, electrical and art departments — whose success will in many respects determine the practicability of the shoot, are being used for the first time as the bus drives repeatedly up and down the road. One is an interior tracking rig for the bus, which will allow the camera to be moved inside the vehicle without the need for hand-held photography. The other is a lighting rig positioned on scaffolding outside the bus in order to light the interior. The erection and disassembly of this, according to whether or not the exterior of the bus is in shot, will become a feature of the scheduling. To our relief, both work.

One of the extras from the cemetery scene, a renowned Sydney disciplinarian called Madam Lash who sported a rubber dress on the day, has turned up at the location just before the dinner break, when it is impossible to escape her. She intends — she announces to me and to anybody who cares to listen — to paint Terence Stamp in drag in the outback, and she will not accept rejection easily. Her timing is far from perfect. My only interest is in building the kind of momentum which constantly overcomes obstacles, and I see any distraction — in the form of press, photographers or portrait painters — as the enemy of that objective. As well as being an intrusion, which will lead to a closed set from now on, this is also not the right evening to approach Terence. He has seen some rushes on film — although we are transferring to tape for editing, we print selected takes whenever we are concerned about lighting or focus — and he is not pleased with his appearance. Brian would light him a little more flatteringly, glamorously even, but Stephan keeps whispering in his ear that he wants to see every wrinkle.

After an interval of nearly nineteen years, I am about to become a father again. I decide that while the cast and crew travel to Broken Hill on Thursday — and for those driving the trucks, part of Friday — I will miss the Friday afternoon and Saturday filming and, if the baby has not made an appearance by Monday, take the morning plane to Broken Hill. The airline timetable in both directions does not leave any latitude for impulsive travel, but it will become even more difficult to return from Coober Pedy, the next town along the route, so I will fly back to Sydney the following weekend.

I call the office in Broken Hill on Friday afternoon. Everybody has arrived, although the people who flew found that most of their luggage was removed from the plane, to be sent on later through Adelaide, and those who drove Bus Priscilla and the make-up truck both had to stop to change tyres. The latter vehicle broke down as well, arriving late when it needed to be early to do the ‘girls” make-up for the walk around town.

At the final birth class in a series which Andrena and I have been attending, the instructor does a demonstration on what
resembles a small hot water bottle sheathed in a child’s cardigan. She refers to it as ‘a knitted uterus’, an object so absurd I consider how effective it might look hanging from Bus Priscilla’s rear view mirror like a pair of furry dice.

It is my responsibility to ensure that every aspect of the film works at its optimum, and to engender a support structure around Stephan that permits him to concentrate on getting the best results. I express my point of view when I have one, and sometimes we will argue, but it is understood that he can take it or leave it. Although I am not above pulling the plug at the natural end of a working day, a director should feel completely secure during a film shoot, and while I do not delude myself that I am useful all the time, part of taking responsibility is to be present, so on set is where I like to be.

Sue Seeary and the production co-ordinator Esther Rodewald — both friends of Stephan’s for some years who understand his whims without surrendering to them — are running a remarkable two-person production office. In a strange echo of our first impression earlier in the year, Broken Hill is hosting its first golf tournament that weekend. Consequently, apart from the crew located at Mario’s Motel — a functional rooming house behind his baroque Palace where we will be filming — everybody is engaged in a perpetual shuffle of hotels, and the production office is leading the way by changing almost daily. It will not be the last accommodation crisis.

On arrival, I watch the footage which was shot in my absence. Although the drag walkabout in Broken Hill will cut together well, and Hugo’s long confessional around the campfire has been beautifully performed in a single set-up with only one cutaway, the film’s first real piece of wide-open-spaces
bravura — and therefore, in terms of moments achieved so far, the highlight — is an extended shot of the trio at dusk, rising up on the crane towards the sunset over the Mundi Mundi Plain. A 25mm lens makes the three figures look as if they are taking their first steps towards falling off the edge of the world.

All filming during the ‘magic hour’ at sunset by its very nature involves a race against the fading light, and we accelerate towards Menindee Lake to maximise the time available. However prepared one is, those last few minutes before dark are always over too quickly. In this scene the three principals and Bob, who is by now travelling with them, run into a lake they have found, to their astonishment, in the middle of nowhere. There will be a flash of Terence’s wet emerging torso, so while the water-filled condoms he usually wears make an acceptably busty contour in clothing, for this shot we require the real breasts of a Scandinavian backpacker body double — one of six women who auditioned their bosoms for Stephan in the production office.

We finish just as the light goes and drive back to Broken Hill to our next engagement. Stephan, Guntis Sics the sound recordist and I have a date with a local pianist in his loungeroom to record a version of ‘I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine’ that can be played through most of the following day’s bar scene.

It is the first of two successive days beset with difficulties in Broken Hill bars. At Mario’s — where we shoot the sequence in which our hero(in)es have a confrontation with a tough outback woman Shirl whom Bernadette goes on to beat in a drinking contest — extras keep looking at the camera, sabotaging otherwise good takes, and the smoke keeps dispersing through an open door nobody can locate. June Marie Bennett, who plays Shirl, was the star of the Broken Hill stage production of
Hello
Dolly
and, while she does not much like her outfit of singlet and bra, her particular difficulty is remembering her lines, which Terence writes on a piece of paper, pointing to each one with his fingernail as she delivers it. Stephan and the first assistant director Stuart Freeman are well on their way to a showdown. As a former assistant director, Stephan is rigorously exacting and more splenetic than most if he considers the job is not being done to his satisfaction. In turn, Stuart has worked on more films than the rest of the crew combined and does not relish displays of impatience bordering on public admonitions from an exasperated young director, however talented. They are not getting the best out of each other, and by now are finding it difficult to communicate. Although the customary procedure under these circumstances is to dismiss the less essential person, I will not fire Stuart Freeman. While he works at a slower pace than Stephan would like — and Stephan is invariably ahead of most crew members — he is a seasoned professional whose experience will, I feel, help to navigate us through the difficult days ahead. But the problem needs to be worked through, and I sympathise with both of them. I talk to Stuart after we have finished shooting for the evening, and tell him the areas in which we need to see a change of approach. I am confident we can make it work. We
have
to
.

The following day a hot northerly wind blows up a whirlwind of mineral dust around the All Nations Hotel, and everybody is edgy. The ‘girls’ are inside a trailer being fitted with ridiculous cheerleader outfits of crystal organza and polyester, which will keep falling down as the day goes on. They are to perform a brief routine on the bar-top to Peaches ’n’ Herb’s ‘Shake Your Groove Thing’, interrupted by the arrival of Bob’s Filipino wife Cynthia who, after a few drinks, tends to show up in the pub wearing a catsuit with a zip strategically positioned
to permit the firing of ping-pong balls out of her vagina. Julia Cortez, the actress who plays Cynthia so outstandingly, has brought her own costume, a garment so awesome Lizzy and Tim would have had difficulty in eclipsing it.