Making Priscilla (9 page)

The extremes of weather are affecting not only people’s nerves but the practical aspects of filming. A sudden ferocious wind tears the ‘blacks’ which block out the light into the bar, and it takes half an hour to secure them again. Later, there is a generator breakdown, which forces a hundred already uncomfortable extras to be disagreeably confined with nothing to do except get drunk. More uncomfortable than any of them is Terence. This is the day on which a fundamentally serious movie actor has been obliged to come to terms with the fact that he is standing on the counter of an Australian bar, dressed in one of Lizzy’s and Tim’s most absurd creations, being leered at by miners as he tries — repeatedly, and for much of the day — to lip-synch, dance in heels and tear off his pigtails to a forgotten disco song. (Terence will later identify this as the moment when he went through the fear barrier and capitulated to the absurdity of the film. It was certainly a long way from William Wyler and
The
Collector.
)

We finish late, to a fanfare of torrential rain. When I fly out of Broken Hill the following afternoon, floods have closed many roads, confining us to interiors, and the plane goes through an electrical storm of an intensity which prompts me to wonder if I will survive to witness the birth of my child.

The baby, unconcerned with
Priscilla
’s schedule, is not quite ready to emerge. Andrena goes for a swim, hopeful that exercise may help to engender some movement, perhaps even symbolically break the waters, but nothing happens. Somebody tells me that vodka martinis are a little known but highly effective labour inducer, so I call a bar renowned for the potency of its cocktails and ask if they would be prepared to make four ‘to go’ and pour them into an empty vodka bottle. I collect them in the rain which has followed the flight all the way from Broken Hill and take them home. Laughter might also help, and as I am running a little short of it, we watch Stanley Kubrick’s distressingly hilarious
Dr
Strangelove,
whose concluding explosion might set off a few internal associations. So, the checklist is complete: exercise, vodka martinis, film comedy. And an audio tape from Stephan, as he likes the idea of his future godchild being born to a succession of cheesy pop songs and nauseating show tunes.

It works. Thirty-two hours later, Rachel Maria Priscilla Clark makes her first appearance about thirty minutes after the mother and midwife have duetted to Helen Reddy’s uniquely awful ‘I Am Woman’.

The infatuation with my baby daughter is such that I do not call Broken Hill until the following day, just before everybody drives to Coober Pedy. The sun has come out; Bingo the homicidal dog of Stephens Creek has gone over the edge (there is a picture of him pressed up against a car window, straining to kill someone, the flash revealing a canine Hannibal Lecter); a service station in which we were going to film has been replaced because the Christian fundamentalist owners of the land did not want a bus with the graffiti ‘AIDS FUCKERS GO HOME’ in its courtyard; and a unit assistant has had a shattering experience with a glass partition. A convivial group of crew members with acoustic guitars were relaxing over an after-work sing-along of ‘Here Comes The Sun’ when he suddenly came crashing through from next door, shards of glass hanging from every part of him. In an appearance fraught with the danger of
severed arteries, he has escaped with a few cuts. Stryker, whom we have taken on full-time in the make-up department, was particularly impressed. ‘Now
that’s
a drag queen entrance,’ he exclaimed approvingly, as people cleared the room.

In Coober Pedy they will be joined by the original second assistant director, who has finally recovered in time for the twentieth day of the shoot. By not arriving until the twenty-first day — in a tiny plane from Adelaide blown around in the sky like a tin can — I miss the filming of Felicia on top of the bus, her silver train billowing across the Moon Plain. The scene was shot by Brian — who is the camera operator as well as the director of photography — in a twenty-knot gale on a tracking vehicle with a crane, but he is caught up in the excitement of the movement and the moment. It is only when he climbs a scaffolding tower for the long shot that he begins to feel queasy.

We have travelled from floods to hot desert winds, which are blowing across the Breakaways as I drive up. We are filming the bus-breakdown scenes in which the realisation that they are stranded prompts very different responses from the characters: Bernadette walks off to find rescue, Tick rehearses a new number and Adam paints the bus lavender. By doing so, he turns it into bus number four. There have been various versions of the bus: the one Adam buys; the one in which they leave Sydney, with the shoe and the drag interior; the same bus with added graffiti; and the lavender edition, which is the fourth. At one stage, there is a fifth — half lavender, half silver — which the second unit shoots. The bus is a wonderful sight, but what really triggers the primal memory of what made me produce the film is finally seeing Hugo in his lime-green dress working up a dance routine for ‘I Will Survive’ in perfect isolation on top of the salt-and-pepper hills.

It has been a long Saturday after what has been, for many
reasons, an unusually eventful week. When we finish, Marike the caterer prepares dinner for everyone in one of the hotel kitchens and we eat it in the shadow of the big wide-screen television we install wherever we go to watch the tape transfers of our negative, sent back by the laboratory. Everybody drinks too much and misbehaves in the knowledge that they have no obligations the next day. I make an early evening date with Stephan and Brian to show them two sections of Sergio Leone’s
Once
Upon
A
Time
in
The
West
on video: the very long, nearly mute, famously inventive first scene; and the shooting of the rancher by Henry Fonda and his raincoat-clad henchman, with its wonderful transitions from foreboding to awareness to sudden death. Stephan and Brian have enough ideas of their own to make several movies out of
Priscilla,
but I want them to see this to remind them of the power of extreme close-ups in widescreen movies, which by favouring the panoramic view often exclude those supercharged, pore-examining shots of eyes and noses above perspiring upper lips.

We have been told about a film called
To
Wong Foo,
Thanks
For
Everything,
Julie
Newmar,
whose title is exactly as long as ours and several times as ridiculous. It is being made by Amblin Entertainment, the production company owned by Steven Spielberg, and for a moment we are troubled to hear that it is about three drag queens driving across America. When we read the script, it is evident that we have nothing to worry about. The tone of
To
Wong Foo
is quite different from ours, its characters Pollyannas in dresses who straddle the main demographics of the United States: a white, a black, a Latino. With star casting it may be more successful than ours commercially, although on a cost-to-return ratio I doubt it: our entire costume budget would probably buy one of their stars’ evening gowns. More importantly, it is still some time away from shooting.

There are flies everywhere. They make the flies at William Creek, which nearly choked me to death on the location survey, seem benign. And there is the sensitive question of the art director Colin Gibson’s underwear, or rather the absence of it. Several of the crew, referring to him as ‘sausage pants’, request he wear some layer of camouflage so that as he scurries about the set the outline of his member is not so protuberantly in their eyeline, as it were. It appears that even under the most primitive conditions, decorum prevails. Characteristically, Colin disregards this, preoccupied only with what he is doing at the time: invariably several things, all of them accomplished.

The second-unit camera has been damaged after falling off a shelf in a moving truck, and the replacement camera arrives from Sydney missing a door. At this distance, in this isolation, it is impossible to obtain equipment quickly, which means we do not have the second camera we need on the twenty-fourth day of the shoot, when we are scheduled to spend the entire night filming the scene around the Aboriginal campfire. So we hastily replace it with the night scene at the drive-in where Felicia shows up on drugs and in drag, and the ensuing chase sequence through the street to a wreckers’ yard where a group of miners are about to do some damage to him. There are two immediate consequences of the change: the Aboriginal actor Alan Dargin, who is contracted to appear in Tasmania two nights later, will need a chartered flight to take him to Adelaide to make the connection after the following night’s campfire shoot, and the hilarious soft-core porn film we have shot, with several friends and a large dog, for background use in the drive-in scene has not yet arrived. (In any event, the 16mm projector’s ‘throw’ is inadequate, the drive-in’s original 35mm projector having fallen into disrepair.)

Michael Hamlyn’s assistant Clare Wise has gone around
Coober Pedy and found as many Aboriginal extras as are prepared to spend what promises to be a cold night outside with us in a dip just off the track to William Creek, a location found at the eleventh hour. It is closer to town than the Breakaways, which we are unable to use, yet provides seamless continuity.

Although they will be surpassed when we do the climb in Kings Canyon, and again during the dance number in Alice Springs, the costumes look extraordinary, prodigious ingenuity once more compensating for the absence of money. Inspired by the TV cartoon character Gumby — who looks like a long eraser that has been split in half — the costumes are body-fitted stretch jumpsuits topped with illuminated headdresses of fruit and flowers. They flare down from the knee to accommodate footwear that suggests, in outline under the material, skis made out of foam rubber.

It is an exacting night, yet despite constant retakes for focus and delays prompted by repairs to the fragile costumes (Terence takes a tumble at one point which is just discernible in the final dissolve of the scene in the finished film), we somehow manage 52 camera set-ups. The last five are a flurry of activity — a race against the light — as dawn spreads first across the horizon then up into the morning sky, revealing a cold grey day of gathering storm clouds. We drive Alan Dargin to the deserted runway at Coober Pedy airport, whose single building opens only when a scheduled flight is due. Awaiting the arrival of the charter, exhilaration has given way to exhaustion and we sit silently, with only the sound of the wind. Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Thirty. Phone calls are made, but the plane can only radio out: it is not possible to check its position. Eventually it arrives, delayed by the strong winds. In order to finish the scene before taking Alan to the airport, there has not been sufficient time to
remove the glitter and glue from his hair, so he climbs into the plane looking like an extra from
Superfly
who has strayed into a drag queen’s make-up bag. In this film there is glitter everywhere. In a long-shot on a 300mm lens in the middle of nowhere, Stephan still catches tiny sparkles on the actors’ faces.

By the time I get back the hotel has opened the bar for us and, as it begins to pour outside, so do we, happy that the night is over with what promises to be impressive results. Terence joins us briefly. I spent a while standing with him around the campfire discussing his 1968 western
Blue,
a time at Paramount when he simultaneously took over Robert Redford’s role and Elvis Presley’s dressing room. Now he is astonished that our first instinct is not to go to bed. It is our second, and it can come later.

The torrential rain increases our schedule by a day. Coober Pedy — a desert town with an annual rainfall so negligible it is hardly worth recording — is awash during our final days there, so we have to film when we can in the knowledge that trucks will sometimes become bogged in the mud. The Olympic Mine, where our shoot extends into the night after two successive days of rain, is full of mining shafts which we mark off with bright yellow tape, in dread of the echo of plummeting screams.

It is becoming less like
Lawrence
of
Arabia
and more like
Apocalypse
Now.
During the seven-hundred-and-fifty-kilometre (468 mile) drive from Coober Pedy to Kings Canyon — some of it along a dirt track which has been further eroded by the bad weather — we begin to feel we are on a journey up river to find Colonel Kurtz. The production office car, with Sue and Esther inside it, rolls over at some speed, leaving them
physically unhurt but severely shaken. The crane hits a stone, damaging the transmission and requiring emergency repair work. Several vehicles have tyre blow-outs including our own, which Terence has driven like a champion, even if his false nails — much admired by the ladies at the supermarket in Coober Pedy — rather inhibit the effectiveness of his tyre changing. He learned to drive on unpaved roads when he lived in Ibiza, and it is a skill which has not deserted him. While Grant sleeps in the back seat, we talk. His performance is by degrees revealing itself to be remarkable, the restraint and the flaws of movement somehow enhancing the vulnerability of the character. I admire his nerve, which he knows he might lose if he views the daily rushes.

When we awake the next day the rain, which has followed our trajectory from South Australia and across the Northern Territory border, has enveloped Kings Canyon. We shoot a couple of interiors scheduled for Alice Springs, one of them the scene in which Bob knocks on Bernadette’s door with the rescued flowers. Bob is the straight man who falls in love with a transsexual, so in many respects this is the riskiest scene in the film: it challenges the assumption that transsexuals are asexual beings, and that the Australian counterpart of the Marlboro Man could never fall for one.

We must have three sunny days in Kings Canyon if we are to complete our work there, and fortunately we get them. On the first, we shoot several scenes around the bus before it is bogged down and then, late in the afternoon after a two-and-a-half-hour make-up and wardrobe change, we do the chopper shot of the three drag queens standing on top of the canyon. It is a glorious sight: a blowing blur of feathered headdresses as they approach the helicopter, which deposits them near the edge of the highest escarpment before returning to
collect Stephan, Brian and the camera.