Making Priscilla (6 page)

Stephan is being courted by representatives of the three principal American show-business agencies, CAA, ICM and William Morris. The most effective courtship is being conducted by Bobbi Thompson of the William Morris Agency, whose tenacity is tempered with a playful intelligence; the most aggressive, by various CAA operatives. A few nights earlier, a couple of them, monitoring the bars for new clients, Perriers in hand (a recent feature of Cannes: the suits stay sober, the talent get drunk), came straight to the point with him outside some squalid watering hole. What exactly, they enquired, would it take to get him to sign with them? Sensing the absurdity of the moment, and regretting not having swum out to sabotage the now-withdrawn inflatable Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stephan replied that the day he joined the agency, CAA’s potentate Mike Ovitz would have to be wearing a dress. The operatives agreed unblinkingly.

Like all good stories, it has travelled quickly and has reached a reporter from the
New
Yorker,
who is calling to verify it. So while the other lunch guests eat olives and table-hop, Stephan finds himself, phone in hand, pacing the perimeter of the pool recalling the details of a half-forgotten encounter for the benefit of a journalist he will never meet.

Other than ourselves, the guests we have brought and the host family, there are only three people present who are not employees of PolyGram. One is Mario Van Peebles, the director and star of the black western
Posse.
The others are Rupert Everett and Jason Donovan.

Jason’s style is collaborative — he talks to everyone around
him without apparent regard for their status — while Rupert’s is more conspiratorial, seeking out those whose view may carry some weight. Stephan, who is supposed to be orchestrating a conversation between them, is not doing so. Meanwhile, they do not speak to each other.

Although still exhibiting traces of yesterday’s exhilaration — a director in competition at Cannes is king for a day — he is clearly exhausted, and it becomes apparent that this vital exchange, which could determine the future of
Priscilla,
is going to occur only in the most fragmented and rudimentary way.

He takes Rupert for a stroll through the olive grove and hears what he has to say. Then he wanders off with Jason for a few minutes, and afterwards I walk him around the orchard to find out what happened with both of them. The various configurations, and their concomitant by-play, are witnessed with some amusement by the PolyGram people, who are aware that what is taking place is a highly irregular casting session. Most bewildered of all is probably Mario Van Peebles, whose elected spot for a post-prandial snooze is next to the orchard path. From this position, he would hear every possible variation on the theme.

The decision is that there is no decision. We leave Cannes as we left Sydney: without a cast.

It is the choice of foreign actor, as is so often the case, which is going to be the decisive factor in whether the film is made, and Rupert Everett has decided to do the Italian movie. So we make lists.

It plainly needs to be someone affordable — eliminating the prospect of Bernadette being played by, say, Nick Nolte, whose usual salary is well over our total budget — but it is important we remember that some stars will reduce their fee if the role activates whatever vestigial sense of daring has not been eviscerated in becoming famous, and if they know that nobody else is being paid more. Otherwise,
Kiss
of
the
Spider
Woman
might never have been made, and William Hurt would not have won an Oscar.

There are hardly any overseas contenders to play Adam, and in any case it is the kind of part in which it would be simpler and more appropriate to cast a young Australian actor. Of the few we discuss, Jaye Davidson from
The
Crying
Game
is antithetical to our casting philosophy — in two words,
against
type
— as, for the same reasons, is Julian Clary. The third British
suggestion is Prince Edward, who I decide can wait until we do
Priscilla
—
the
Panto,
with Merv Hughes as Tick and Richard Attenborough as Bernadette.

If we had been making this as a studio picture thirty years earlier, we would have offered the leading roles to people like Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin and Steve McQueen, the kind of testosterone-saturated actors who are now an endangered if not extinct species. As it is an independently financed movie in the ’90s, the American actors we consider for Tick include Kyle McLachlan, Rob Lowe and Matthew Broderick. The British prospects are Colin Firth, Rupert Graves and Cary Elwes; the Australian ones, Hugo Weaving and Sam Neill. 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 foreign actor, in whatever role he is to play, and it is when free-associating between names for Bernadette that our conversations move into a truly demented realm. Starting with some regard for reality by enumerating a few British actors, young lions of the ’60s, who might now bring a poignant dimension to an old girl in a frock (Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Albert Finney, Alan Bates), we deteriorate into cross-media madness (Cliff Richard, Clive James, Dudley Moore).

We approach Colin Firth, who was outstanding opposite Rupert Everett in
Another
Country.
Firth is acceptable casting to PolyGram, and although I am wearying of these protracted and unconsummated serial courtships, Stephan has an encouraging lunch with him which ends with a declaration of mutual interest in doing the movie together.

For reasons to do with the end of June also being the end of the Australian financial year, we have a very short time in which
to sign the financing agreements with the various parties. And as Colin Firth’s name will need to be included as a preapproved and contracted ‘essential element’, we have no time for the time-consuming two-steps of the negotiating dance floor. It seems that the imminence of an offer to appear in
Priscilla
prompts actors’ agents in London to leave their offices and put themselves out of contact for several days. Firth’s is no exception. Meanwhile, Stephan’s now likely American agents William Morris send us their own lists, on which all the casting suggestions for the transsexual Bernadette — Julie Andrews, Ann-Margret, Lily Tomlin and others — are
already
women. This at least brings a completely new perspective to resolving our problem.

Stephan’s feet have barely touched Sydney ground again when we hear that Colin Firth has changed his mind. There is a personal difficulty to which he must attend, and a corresponding reluctance to make himself available for the two months in which we require him for rehearsals and filming. It is not the only crisis we have, but it is the one which aggravates all the other ones.

With nine days to go until the execution deadline of the various agreements, I am feverishly trying to co-ordinate them all, and to provide the information required to satisfy everyone concerned. Although I have made the situation clear to them, I am not sure PolyGram fully understand that if the contracts are not signed during the last week of June, the FFC will withdraw. This is not the kind of spurious threat favoured by brinkmanship negotiators; it is an irrevocable fact. Cash flow must have begun by the end of the financial year for the rest of the funding to be implemented and, of course, the cash flow cannot begin until the contracts have been signed.

The acceleration towards the chequered flag begins. In the
course of a single day I speak to six lawyers representing different interests and attempt to mobilise a collective effort. Then they all speak to each other. We have secured an increase in the final budget, which allows us to spend a greater proportion of time on the road, to build four days of travel into the schedule, and to enable a small increment in the salaries of the crew, many of whom have still not been found. Although we are offering a rare combination of adventure and profit points as compensation for low wages, several people we respect pay lip service to the principle then walk away.

But there will be no film at all without an approved cast, and no chance of finding one if we do not keep moving forward. Everybody is too far down the track to want to pull out, so we agree to sign subject to casting being approved prior to investor cash flow. There is still one month before the start of pre-production, and Latent Image will spend its own money until then. The contracts are executed — and the signature pages circulated by fax — fifteen minutes before the close of business on the day of the deadline.

On the flight to Los Angeles — from where he will continue directly to London — Stephan encounters Paul Mercurio again. As the star of a successful movie on his way to see
Pretty
Woman
director Garry Marshall about a leading role in Marshall’s next picture
Exit
to
Eden,
Mercurio is travelling at the front of the plane. As the director of a low-budget comedy with no cast in place and no money in the bank, Stephan is travelling at the back. Undeterred by the gulf between their circumstances, and aware that they are trapped in the air together, Stephan has a final, purposeful shot. All Mercurio can do to avoid the issue is to run behind the first-class curtain and
call a member of the cabin staff to provide security. However alluring it may seem to work with an American director on a studio picture, Stephan tells him,
Priscilla
will be the film to stretch him as an actor and, more importantly, will be much more fun to make. Mercurio says he is still interested, and will consider his options after meeting Marshall.

By the time Stephan has landed in London, more names are flying around: the American actors John Cusack and Eric Stoltz for Tick and — a brilliant and deranged piece of lateral thinking — either Superman (Christopher Reeve) or Captain Kirk (William Shatner) as Bernadette.

The people he has really come to see, however, 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 as 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. But Curry, who is in Vienna playing Cardinal Richelieu in
The
Three
Musketeers,
is an interesting choice. We know each other from having studied drama together at university, although I have only seen him a few times since
The
Rocky
Horror
Show
and its consequent movie version made him a celebrity. The fact that he has never eclipsed the transvestite role which launched his career makes him approach
Priscilla
with equal measures of curiosity and caution.

Then it happens. It is not quite Paul on the road to Damascus, and I am unable to recall which one of us first brings up the name, but it is an indication of how congested our minds have become that we have neglected the perfect actor to play Bernadette: Terence Stamp.

He fits all our criteria. Although for the past sixteen years — punctuated by the occasional idiosyncratic detour with directors
like Peter Brook, Stephen Frears and Pilar Miro — he has been playing supporting roles, usually villains, in big-budget studio pictures, he has retained his star aura, his looks and his heterosexual charge, which will make his transformation into a transsexual all the more startling. Adding resonance to this, and blurring the lines in a way that will make them more interesting, is the sexually ambiguous air he carried in some of his ’60s roles, notably in Ustinov’s
Billy
Budd
(which earned him an Oscar nomination in his first film) and Pasolini’s
Theorem.

While aware of the need for a change of gear in his life, Stamp’s first response to reading the script is a wary one. He has never appeared in a comedy, unless one counts his star-billed but essentially supporting turn in Joseph Losey’s ill-fated
Modesty
Blaise.
He has never been in a musical. And he has never played a woman. On the other hand, he
has
been to Australia — accompanying Jean Shrimpton to the Melbourne Cup in 1965 — and he did not enjoy it, to the extent that he has left a standing instruction to his agent over the years not to consider film offers from there. But his agent is also Michael Hamlyn’s assistant’s brother’s agent, so this one has slipped through the net. Michael himself is on holiday in the south of France, and is spending so much time on the phone to London he may as well have stayed behind.

Stephan calls after his meeting with Stamp, who has impressed him. ‘He fills up the room as soon as he walks into it,’ says Stephan, ‘then he starts leaving you space.’ Stamp is naturally anxious about his hair, make-up and wardrobe if he is to succeed in a role so hazardous that failure, he feels sure, will lead to ridicule. He is also concerned about his co-star. Not about the two other leading actors with whom he will spend the majority of his screen time, but about who will play Bob,
the outback garage mechanic who develops an attachment to Bernadette, and with whom he ends up, as the script so poetically calls it, ‘playing hide-the-sausage’.

Aware that the other actors have to be Australian, Stamp suggests Bill Hunter, with whom he appeared in Stephen Frears’
The
Hit
nine years earlier. They have barely seen each other since then, but Stamp remembers him with fondness and feels that an existing rapport between himself and the person playing Bob will bring a vital conviction to their scenes together. I call Bill Hunter’s agent and inform her that Terence Stamp has specifically requested him as his ‘love interest’ in the film. When she speaks to him, Hunter laughs in disbelief and says he will accept the part without even reading the script.

By the end of the following day, Stamp has agreed to travel to a country he dislikes, Australia, to play a role that unnerves him, a woman, in a genre he has never attempted, the comedy-musical.

The faxes from Terence Stamp begin to arrive the day after Stephan’s return. Several of them are about his feet, which fortunately have not become cold. First an enquiry about what kind of shoes he will be wearing in the film, as he is going to have a practice pair made by Anello and Davide. Then his tailor’s measurements, with illustrations in the style of a vintage men’s-wear catalogue. Finally, immaculately detailed drawings of his right foot, then his left — each faxed foot transmitted at a different time — revealing one bottom instep marginally smaller than the other.

With 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
in Melbourne and Hobart. Stephan travels to Melbourne to screen test Guy Pearce — a young actor best known for his long residency in the Australian soap opera
Neighbours
— for the role of Adam. As we are unable to afford a rehearsal room in which to film, it is done in the local offices of the FFC.

The crew is coming together in 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 to
let 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.