That Stephan Elliott -- the Australian filmmaker who became an overnight sensation back in the mid-'90s with Priscilla, Queen of the Desert -- was able to talk to us at all is something of a miracle. After a couple post-Priscilla flops, Elliott dropped out of the game, and pursued his other passion, skiing. That led to a horrific accident that saw him tumbling off the ledge of a cliff in the French Alps. As he was air-lifted to the nearest hospital, hemorrhaging internally and the nearest life-saving transfusion simply too far away, a doctor told him to make his peace: He had ten minutes to live. He woke up five days later in a hospital.
Large sections of his shattered torso were replaced with titanium, and his devastated nervous system offered virtually no chance of walking again -- or so he was told. Eighteen months after that, out of sheer determination, he was on his feet. Now he's even skiing again. And as if to thank the trio of drag queen guardian angels fluttering over his shoulders, he's decided to get back behind the camera.
Easy Virtue, an update on the Noel Coward comedy of manners the director calls "the first Meet the Parents in modern literature," opens today. (Our review here.) He's also been busy with Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical, which he wrote the book for and oversaw; it just opened on London's West End to positive reviews, and a Broadway version is planned for sometime in 2010.
Elliott opened up to Movieline about the life-changing accident, the shadow of Priscilla, and how hard it can sometimes be to make things look Easy:
Where have you been all these years?
What a c*nt I was. Sorry, I didn't mean to say that, it just fell out. I've been...well, I pulled out. I pulled out 11 or 12 years ago. I couldn't get out from Priscilla's shadow and I got sick of it.
What did people expect from you?
They wanted another Priscilla. Priscilla was a life-changing phenomenon for a lot of people. We didn't set out to make that. We were just a bunch of guys having a good time.
Where did the idea come from for Priscilla?
A feather blew off a drag queen's headdress in Sydney Mardi Gras, and it rolled down the street like an old Sergio Leone tumbleweed, and at that moment it just went "ding!" But I could never find [a follow-up]. I spent a lot of time getting very angry and finding it very difficult. It took pulling out of the industry and having this horrendous ski accident in the French Alps. I flew off a cliff and nearly broke myself in half, everything went -- it's all titanium from there to there [he gestures from his chest to his pelvis]. And that was the wake-up call. I said to myself, it's time to get back to work. You've been given a second chance and if you can survive this, you can survive the movie industry, and you can survive Priscilla.
<span
class="pullquote">It was [Rocky Horror creator] Richard O'Brien who slapped me across the ears one day and said, 'You're lucky to have it. I've never gotten it, I'm still stuck with Rocky. But even great directors don't even find it -- that one film -- but you did. You've got so much. There's only a handful in the world. Start looking at the gift, not the curse.'
How much of Priscilla was on the page before you started shooting?
Most of it.
Did you feel you had something in your hands that couldn't go wrong?
Well, let's put it this way. I wrote Priscilla in two weeks. We co-wrote Easy Virtue in three years. Big difference.
Did you feel painted in the corner as a queer cinema director? Did people want another gay movie? I read somewhere you didn't talk openly about your sexuality until that movie broke big.
I actually never talked about my sexuality at all, and still don't. I'm openly gay but I never at any point rub it in anyone's face. It's seriously my business. There was a lot of me getting out in that movie. I didn't realize it then. There was a lot of expression going on there. Who knows where it comes from, at that moment when it came. It was a tonic for me. But there's never pleasing everybody. At the Q&A in San Francisco, there was this venom in the theater: "Why didn't you address AIDS, why weren't there men kissing?" I said, "You know what guys? Fuck off. I don't want to make that movie, I want to make this one. You do those things, you'll scare them off. I want straight people to see this movie." Half the crowd booed and the other half cheered.
But it was such a major movie for so many people. They didn't want me to make more gay stories, they wanted a life changer. "It's not Priscilla!" No, it's not! That was then, this is now! Let me off. So it's not gay cinema, it's just finding that cinema magic. We didn't try to make it. It just fell out magically on its own. That's the mistake -- trying to think too hard about how to do it again. It fell out on its own and we weren't trying.
What did you think of Milk?
Haven't seen it.
Are you avoiding it?
No! I've got the screener sitting at home. Since we finished I've been running ever since. I've seen my own movie probably 22,000 times at this point. There's still another 4 or 5 months of it. If we've got two hours, we're watching it. And you never get sick of it. You're not actually watching it, in the end you're watching the audience watching it.
The two women at odds in Easy Virtue seem, well, very much at odds. Did [stars Jessica Biel and Kristin Scott Thomas] get along?
We had no rehearsal time. The way it went, everyone got to the set late because they were working on other projects, so it was very raw. Literally the scene when the car pulls up and Jessica gets out of the car and Kristin greets her at the door, it's pretty much real time. And I just said, you know what, good. Jessica said, I'm a little frightened by it, and I said good. My direction is, "Good."
<span
class="pullquote right">Kristin is this incredibly beautiful woman, but she's getting older now, facing this younger woman -- what she used to be. That's the movie. If you look at the film, it's about two women who aren't incredibly different, they're actually quite similar. And that's the movie. Here's this woman, born a little bit too late, she's missed everything, she's missed the vote, she's missed travel. And here comes this younger, gorgeous woman who has everything -- including her son. So there's good stuff there. Really, really good natural stuff.
And I think the girls were really good, they were really respectful of each other but they did not become friends. Because when actors do become friends they become all chummy-chummy with each other, and then you turn the camera on and they have to back to acting again. So the girls among themselves were happy to keep their distance, and that worked very nicely for me. So they greeted each other every morning, and then the claws would come out, and I'd go, "Great!"
Colin Firth fans will be disappointed to learn you did your best to make him unattractive.
[Laughs.] Yeah, I was rolling him in the mud, and putting fur on his face, putting him in terrible clothes. The first time he came out of his trailer, Kirstin burst out laughing and said, "What have you done to Colin?!" It's great fun for them, to play with their personas. To sabotage themselves a little bit.
Did you tell then from the outset you had planned on doing that?
Oh, you can't tell them that! I remember when Terrence [Stamp] first came out of his hair and makeup sitting for Priscilla, he looked like a guy in a bad wig. But he magically went into character and said, "I'm seeing myself as a young Brooke Shields, a Lauren Bacall." And I said, "Great!" But I pulled the makeup guys aside and told them he could not see himself in a mirror. After the third day of shooting, he caught a glimpse of himself in the rushes, and was horrified. I said he can't come back. I said, "That was just a bad day, Terrence. We'll make you much prettier. It will be fine, fine, fine."
He wanted to be pretty.
Yeah -- and he was, in his head! But in reality he looked like Willie Shoemaker, during his long hair stage. ♦