Making Priscilla by Al Clark

consonance. We find our first assistant director in Stuart Freeman, who began his film career as a third assistant in England with the Boulting Brothers in 1956, seven years before Stephan was born. His work as an assistant director, location manager, second-unit director and production manager spans all the ’60s and ’70s, and I deduce from his resume that he travelled to New Zealand as the assistant director of Mike Newell’s Bad Blood in 1981 and has stayed in the antipodes ever since. He has worked on movies in all our planned locations, but his current employment in Western Australia will prevent him from joining us until two weeks into pre-production. It is a risk we will have to take. We persuade Owen Paterson — the production designer of Bliss, who has forsaken films for commercials in recent years — to work with Colin Gibson in the minimal art department. And Sue Seeary, whom I assumed was contentedly developing her own material while producing a documentary, turns out to be available and interested in production-managing the picture. It is turning out exactly the way we wanted: a combination of accomplished professionals doing or returning favours, and inexperienced but skilled newcomers with a desire to prove themselves.
    Some of them are already working, even as we walk the tightrope that determines if the film will exist. The costume designers Lizzy Gardiner and Tim Chappel have been in New York, shopping for wardrobe at a drag supermarket called Peggy’s Mardi Gras. It is the kind of place where they have tolet you in. You ring the bell next to a forbidding steel door, somebody upstairs presses a buzzer and you go up in an elevator. The supermarket itself is bright and busy, with muzak and cheery lighting, and three transsexuals in aqua tracksuits as store assistants. Their purchases include silicone breasts at eight hundred dollars a pair, foam buttocks resembling pitta bread to build up Bernadette’s hips, and the black dress she wears in the funeral scene. A number of languidly absorbed men in suits, ties and wedding rings are feeling up the shoes.
    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 theheads 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