Free Making Priscilla by Al Clark

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 Britishsuggestion 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 whichto 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