Stephan Elliott and Al Clark reflect on The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
30 years after its release, writer and director Stephan Elliott and producer Al Clark revisit the making of the iconic road trip musical and share other adventures of Priscilla.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this article contains images and names of people who have passed.
Image credit: Elise Lockwood. Image courtesy of Latent Image Productions.
Drag queens in the Outback.
It was in the aftermath of Mardi Gras one year that writer and director Stephan Elliott conceived the epic vision that became The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - a plume of feathers rolling up Oxford Street, Sydney, like “an old tumbleweed from a Sergio Leone western.”
The story stuck with Elliott for years – marinated, he says via Zoom from outside Paris.
Conceived as a movie musical, he couldn’t get the concept over the line. The industry told Elliott there was no market for musicals as people “don’t just burst into song without a reason”. But one night watching a drag show, the filmmaker says it clicked. “I found a gimmick, I got a way in,” he says. “And then it kind of caught people.”
A sequinned fish out of water tale, Priscilla stars Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce as drag performers Bernadette, Tick and Adam as they traverse Outback Australia in the 'budget Barbie camper' affectionately christened Priscilla.
With a six week shoot and a $3.6 million budget, it was a small film with big aspirations that became one of the top twenty highest-grossing Australian films at the domestic box office. It was the surprise hit of the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, won both BAFTA and Academy Awards for Best Costume Design, and was praised globally for its depiction of queer characters and gay lifestyles, ranking 13th in Time Out’s list of The Best LGBTQ+ Movies of All Time – as well as featuring in the 2000 Summer Olympics Closing Ceremony in Sydney.
Speaking with Elliott and producer Al Clark about the 30th anniversary of the Australian cult classic, the spirit of drag informs the story and creation of Priscilla. Here, they look back at its journey to the big screen and share their memories and anecdotes from set.
Stephan Elliott and Al Clark on location. Image courtesy of Al Clark.
Elliott had worked with producer Andrena Finlay on his debut feature Frauds the year before and it was Finlay who introduced him to her husband, producer Clark. Clark recalls going to drag clubs with the pair in the early development of Priscilla. This close collaboration meant that when Finlay left the project, Clark was already familiar with the pink bus and the challenges ahead.
“It was a tiny film at the time in terms of what was possible to raise, and of course, difficult to cast because not every actor can be a convincing drag queen,” he says. “The jigsaw of putting the film together is, as you know, labyrinthine sometimes.”
A fortuitous partnership with PolyGram Film Entertainment and production funding from the then-Australian Film Finance Corporation got Priscilla on the road. With Polygram on board came their formidable music catalogue, with Aussie-favourite ABBA at the top of that list.
“Talk about a gift when somebody gives you the ABBA catalogue,” says Elliott.
A pivotal research trip from Broken Hill to Adelaide and Alice Springs with Director of Photography Brian J. Breheny helped the team source locations and create a cohesive vision. For Elliott, the journey inspired unique set pieces and characters. In Broken Hill, he discovered what he considers Priscilla’s heart – the hand-painted icon Mario’s Palace. “We drove past this bloody great monster in the middle of town,” he says. “As we walked in and just looked up and around, and Bernadette’s line is you’ve got to be joking. That was literally my line.”
The long drives led to long conversations about comedy devices, scene transitions, set pieces and casting ideas. Somewhere outside Alice Springs, the three found themselves in drag.
“We ended up with this fabulous photo that I could then take to Cannes, and immediately put to the test the curiosity of potential financiers,” Clark says. “Somehow reading the script became simpler for them because they had that image.” The photo now lives framed in Clark’s office.
With only a small crew for the trek through the outback, Clark’s priority was to hire experienced department heads to act, as Clark puts it, “as a magnet” in keeping their departments on course and could pivot with ease to the challenges the isolated locations posed.
Elliott collaborated with longtime friend and wardrobe assistant Lizzy Gardner and invited drag costumer Tim Chappel to enhance the film’s aesthetic. A drag performer himself, Chappell fully embraced the mock-de-crock spirit Elliott aspired to. Mock-de-crock described making something from nothing, a style of DIY popular in the drag scene, and Elliott credits Chappell with embodying the heart of the extremism for production, such as the famous La Traviata sequence.
“I’m looking at the Rolls Royce emblem on the top of a Rolls and I said, what if we did that times one hundred? […] so Tim went out the night before, and borrowed as much silver lamé as he could. And they spent all night sewing it into something.”
The pressures of the schedule led to tough decisions, including nearly cutting La Traviata. “I just needed one mega spectacle moment to take us somewhere. [And] the more people said it was wrong for the film, the more I dug my heels in.”
He managed to secure a last-minute shot, but in the true spirit of production, a lack of wind nearly undid the shoot and Elliott was forced to cut the centrepiece of the costume – the metres long silver lame train.
As Elliott remembers it, “Tim picks up the scissors up and put them on the lame. And the goddess was with it. Out of nowhere, this bloody great wind just hit the desert and blew it out of his hands. To which my only words at that point are ROLL CAMERAS.”
Culminating in the iconic image of a glittering Guy Peace singing atop the bus trailed by yards of silver lamé, a moment that became synonymous with the film.
Juggling the schedule in the pre-digital age in the middle of Australia was no mean feat. Clark stocked up on walkie-talkies to maintain communications across units.
As Elliott says, “You wait for something to breakdown, you’re in trouble. It got to a point where we’d get to a Kmart in the middle of nowhere and just buy as much crap [as] we possibly could, because when we went deep, we knew there was absolutely no chance of supplies.”
Most of the film was shot chronologically, but vehicle damage and extreme weather caused schedule changes. “[It felt] less like Lawrence of Arabia, more like Apocalypse Now,” Clark describes. Yet, the spirit on set remained positive, with cast and crew bonding with locals at the pub and having sing-alongs. “I think one of the reasons that we all cherished the experience was simply that we knew even as we were having it, that we could never again have it,” he says.
One of Elliot’s favourite memories from set is racing against dawn to capture the musical number I Will Survive, where the trio performed in full drag around a campfire with the local Indigenous community led by Wiradjuri yirdaki player Alan Dargin. With fading dark, some 30 extras, and 57 setups – with elaborate costume changes – Elliott describes the night shoot as manic, “but at the end of that, those kids were all up there having the best time, and it’s caught on film. […] We caught that magic.”
Priscilla had its World Premiere in a coveted midnight screening at Cannes Film Festival in May 1994, and after a disappointing experience the previous year, Elliott felt apprehensive. “I thought we were dead in the water. [But] then the film ended and the audience went absolutely ballistic.”
“It was a little crazy,” Clark adds. “It was a fantastic response from an audience that is so invariably unpredictable. It told us that the film communicated to people other than Australians.”
Beyond the sequins and feathers, the disco beats and sweeping landscapes, Elliot sees Priscilla as a story of a gay man coming out to his son. “That really is the backbone of the entire film.”
When discussing the film’s success, Clark credits the “fraternity of people who just tried to make the world work for each other.” He emphasises that inspiration often eclipsed procedure, and they chose collaborators who knew how to adapt. Most importantly, he believes Elliott’s vision was key to the film’s success: “[Priscilla] is one of the occasional films in which almost supernaturally the right thing to do is self-evident.”
Priscilla has inspired a drag festival (Broken Heel Festival in – you guessed it – Broken Hill), an exhibition, a documentary (or two), a musical adaptation, and multiple revivals, including a potential sequel. Elliott reflects on the film’s global impact, noting that the success of other filmmakers from that era – like PJ Hogan, Jane Campion, and George Miller – was possible through embracing their authentic selves.
“We didn't back down from the Australian-ness of it; we said, ‘This is us. Take us or leave us.’ And the world chose to take it.”
“Here we are 30 years later, and she's unstoppable.”
Image courtesy of Latent Image Productions.
Find Where to Watch The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, anywhere in the world, using the Screen Guide.
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