Making Priscilla by Al Clark

Author:Al Clark [Clark, Al]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760301804
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2016-03-10T08:00:00+00:00

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.

On the second day, we film the preceding montage: the climb itself.

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