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Extracts
from Al Clark's book Making Priscilla. All text © Al
Clark. |
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All
Frocks, No Cast
Increasingly,
Hugo Weaving feels like the right choice. Often
cast as anally retentive adults, he is really a naughty boy
, a performer of tremendous range and sensitivity who also understands
Stephan's spirit perfectly. But we have to cast around the [nationality
of] the foreign actor, in whatever role he is to play…
The
people [Elliot] has really come to see are Rupert Graves for Tick and Tim
Curry for Bernadette. I am not in favour of Graves, still preferring Hugo
Weaving both as an actor and a grounding agent for Stephan when he is trying
to direct the actors ~ covered in flies, with their make-up running ~ in
the middle of nowhere…
With
Terence [Stamp] on board, we can start the engines. We will cast Hugo Weaving
as Tick if he can find a way of attending our rehearsals as well as fulfilling
his contract with the Melbourne Theatre Company to appear in Much Ado
About Nothing. |
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Trannie
Training Bootcamp: 1
Hugo
will wear Tim [Chappel's] own silver-sequined dress for the film's solo
opening number, and they have 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…they come up with
the even better idea: a thong [flip-flop beach shoes] dress…
The
wardrobe fittings are a great success: Hugo runs around the hotel in a
white wedding dress, which he refuses to take off…
Hugo
is flying up from Melbourne [to Sydney] every day for rehearsals in frocks,
and going back on the afternoon plane to do Shakespeare in tights. |
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Trannie
Training Bootcamp: 2
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 (Bob), who has brought a friend
along to help 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 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 on cinemas and trains ~ finally connects with
the glass top, as if the force of gravity were 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 100 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…Hugo
makes his way back hanging out of Stephan's car, vomiting into the night
wind. |
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The
Shoot
Onthe
second day we shoot the first and last scenes of the movie. Hugo Weaving's
myth-making Charlene will provide the main titles sequence…as we do a semi-circular
track around him in close-up, Hugo's lip-synching is perfect, his concentration
complete.
Moving on, we introduce 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 [in character: it can be heard
as an ad-lib in the film]. Stephan has kept the camera rolling and orders
him to smile, which provides us with
the freeze-frame that leads into the end titles. |
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Deliverance:
Outback-Style
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 bus is a wonderful sight, but what really triggers
the primal memory of what made me want to 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…
After dark we are working on the campfire scene in which the four travellers
talk before Bernadette is left alone with Bob…although there appears to
be no people or traffic in the area, we can hear noise…at the other end
of the creek there is a trio of rowdy locals with a utility [vehicle] full
of beer shit and guns: the shit they collect in country areas with no plumbing;
the beer is to help them become even more drunk; and the guns make them
dangerous. They are also very large ~ dwarfing even the biggest of our
platoon ~ and, in the case of one, completely naked.
They have no idea that a couple of hundred yards away are a cross-dressed
man playing a cross-gendered one (Stamp), an Australian National Treasure
(Bill Hunter) being romanced by him, and a lavender bus full of frocks.
But they can see lights and the nude one starts to lurch towards them before
being brought down by a rugby tackle. The explanation that we need quiet
because we are shooting a film only confuses him more because it makes
him think of the guns he has in his vehicle, which is stuck in the sand.
At one point he decides he wants to have sex with our quietly spoken bus
driver and starts to charge him rectally. For
a while, it is like Carry on Deliverance. |
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