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The adventures of Stephan Elliott >> Priscilla's director arrives in Montreal to shoot his next feature by MATTHEW HAYS
His latest project, based on his own script, is Eye of the Beholder, a film noir starring Ewan McGregor and Ashley Judd. Though Elliott doesn't want to give too much away, he says he intends to "turn the film noir on its head, putting it through a meat grinder" with the "Raymond Chandler-inspired" Beholder. And Elliott has managed to raise the $13-million budget independent of any major studios, so he could control the final cut. The shoot will begin later this month and will coincide with the release of his first post-Priscilla feature, the unbelievably dark Welcome to Woop Woop. The surreal comedy, which Elliott calls "my musical version of Deliverance," has superhot babe Johnathon Schaech (barely clothed throughout) stuck in the Aussie outback in a strange little town called Woop Woop. The townsfolk's favourite saying is, "Well fuck me dead!" and they share a collective fixation with the tunes of Rodgers & Hammerstein. If it sounds strange, it is, but that's part of Elliott's style. "I have a sense of outrage," he says, "and I like to target the politically correct." PC targets this time around include animal rights activist types. Though absolutely no animals were hurt during the filming of Woop Woop, there are depictions of cruelty to animals. Many of these representations, Elliott admits, had to be removed after members of test audiences bolted for the door during screenings of earlier cuts of the film. Woop Woop has already received some acrimonious press, particularly from Howard Feinstein, Out magazine's film critic, who despaired that the filmmaker behind the delightful Priscilla could be the same man behind the bleaker-than-bleak Woop Woop. Elliott says he isn't surprised by this response, particularly from the gay press. After the immense success of Priscilla, Elliott, who'd already had his fair share of run-ins with Hollywood studio-types during the making and marketing of his first feature, Frauds, was rushed to Tinseltown and showered with hard sells for potential scripts. "But everything was another light, fluffy musical," he recalls. "I was offered everything--which was very flattering, but at the end of the day everyone wanted me to make one thing and one thing only, and that was to keep making Priscilla. I've done that, and I wanted to make it clear that I won't do it again. Unfortunately, sometimes I have the ball and chain that is Priscilla dragging behind me." To an extent, Elliott could also understand why some would want to recreate Priscilla's chemistry. Done on a relatively low budget of under $10 million, the drag extravaganza had two transvestites and one transsexual (played amazingly by Terence Stamp) trekking across the Aussie outback, Partridge Family-style. The film took audiences by storm, raking in well over $100 million in international box office, while its delightful ABBA- and disco-filled soundtrack rose to the top of the charts. "The thing that most interested me about Priscilla was that we weren't really setting out to do anything that big. I got nominated for so many awards--Golden Globes, a World Humanitarian Award even, and on it went. It was a really strange thing--it hit at just the right time, but none of it was calculated. It was just me and my friends, with a little bit of money, and we went out and had a ball. You look at that movie and you can see how much love it was made with. The stuff they had to make costumes with was crap. Their budget was $5,000 and they won an Academy Award." Surprisingly enough, the man behind Priscilla, arguably the definitive drag-pride movie, isn't the least bit invested in being anyone's role model. "I'm really not interested in fighting anyone's causes. My sexual orientation isn't any of anyone else's business." While Elliott has been in a relationship with another man for 10 years (they divide their time between homes in London, Sydney and Malta), he says he's not interested in making films about gays or drag queens a career. "I could see myself making a homophobic movie if I wanted to. I'd have no problem with that. It's every person's right to look stupid and be a bigot if they want to be one." But has Elliott ever had to deal with homophobia in the film business himself? "No. My personality's too big anyway." Welcome to Woop Woop opens in Canada later this year
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"This is a fucking great city," Stephan Elliott said when he was location-scouting last fall. Unsure of which major Canadian city he'd shoot his next feature in, Elliott, the strapping young Aussie filmmaker behind the sublime 1994 sensation The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, found himself taken with Montreal. After checking out Toronto and Vancouver--who knew?--he chose our burg. Then Elliott had the good luck of arriving during the ice storm to settle in and find some digs for the next few months of production.