Original subtitles

What's up, boss?

Priscilla.

An inspiring movie about drag conquering the world.

Could we have it again, please, Terrence?

Priscilla. An inspiring film about drag conquering the world.

It came from a crazy idea one night after

Mardi Gras.

It's four o 'clock in the morning, Oxford Street is just pumping, and

some trashy drag queen stumbling up the street. Big plume of feathers break off,

wind picks it up, rolls down Oxford Street, and there you had a feather boa

was a tumbleweed from a Sergio Leone western.

And that singular moment, I got it. Drag queen's in the outback.

Bill.

frocks and feathers hid the battle scars of decades of repression, fear, and

violence.

Their

journey

would inspire a modern -day fable.

At the heart of the film was the simple question, what were we so afraid of?

The boundaries of Australian masculinity were kind of stretched or thrown out

the window or there was a light shone on what it was to be a man.

Priscilla, who'd have thought you'd take us so far?

Every now and then a movie comes up.

that kind of changes the whole trajectory of your career and your work.

And Priscilla was one of those.

I never dreamt I could do it. I was frightened to do it.

But in the doing of it, I overcame my fear.

So did Australia.

We changed.

We grew.

We learned.

It was about time.

So...

Let's begin, shall we?

Sydney in the 1970s.

Life in the suburbs had never been better. Each driveway throbbed with a V8

and a man in a body shirt.

It was a culture built on family and ruled by the great Australian male.

If this was the life you wanted, It was paradise.

If you dreamed of something different, it was prison.

There was no room to be gay here.

Well, if I was talking to a queer, it might be pretty queer.

To be homosexual was not only to be an outcast, it was also a crime.

Sex between men had a penalty of 14 years and a whipping, which was greater

the penalty for rape.

But in a world that punished difference, everyone in this film dared to deviate.

I was kind of raised in that perfect Australian upper middle class world. I

mean, it was...

white picket fence personified.

Divorce happened pretty popularly then in the 70s.

Divorce came at exactly the right time for me.

The white picket fence fell down when I was about 13.

The curtain lifted then. I started to question everything.

The year was 1979 and I was 21.

And I was a man for a short time. And as soon as that word was, you are a man,

I thought, well, not for long. I think I'll become a woman very, very soon. And

six months later, I was frocking up in Sydney and having an absolute ball.

Cindy Pastel would become the inspiration behind Hugo Weaving's

Priscilla, Mitzi.

The actor and his muse arrived in Sydney around the same time.

Well, I came out as a sort of West Country English boy at age 16, thinking

really cool.

And I was quite struck by a sort of aggressive...

masculine frameworks.

And I thought, in order to be a bloke here, in order to be a man in Australia,

you have to be a certain sort of rough and ready character who doesn't talk

about certain things and jokes his way through stuff.

There were a lot of comments at school, you know, kids that poofed her and this,

that and the other, and you'd think, wow, you wouldn't want to be gay, would

you? You know, growing up, wow, I reckon it'd be pretty...

Very tough.

A desert holiday, let's pack the drag away.

Guy Pearce's character, Felicia, would be one of the many young queens lured by

the bright lights beyond suburbia.

Just like Priscilla's creator, Stefan Elliott.

I went to Sydney Grammar School, which is snack bang in the middle of Oxford

Street, basically.

At the end of that road, there was this weird twinkling, a little bit of

glitter, and this kind of weird world that was kind of...

Winking at me.

The inner city was a beacon for the refugees of the suburbs.

A flame that drew exotic creatures into the light.

The girls had been bewitching audiences since the early 60s.

A theatre restaurant with some unusual meat on the menu.

Leaving ladies like Carlotta would provide the model for my character of

Priscilla, Bernadette.

I think, and I think you think, I look more like a woman than a man.

Les Girls probably, simply because it was a place where men cross -dressed as

women, it had a reputation.

Early on, gay people might have gone there, but very soon it just became a

-thighed -out place. I mean, there were so many more interesting places to go

to.

By the mid -70s, a new kind of drag was emerging in clandestine venues along

Oxford Street.

It was the hub of a growing gay underworld and a rite of initiation for

arrivals on the scene.

I remember being taken when I was quite young,

I guess still in school, by a friend to Capriccio's for the first time.

But you ascended these quite steep stairs with a lot of anxiety because

were doing was sort of illegal.

And there was some sort of strange deal about, do you know what you're getting

into and all of that. And then, of course, you entered this strange world.

The music was really loud, but that's what I noticed. So you're kind of swept

along.

And the reaction to the shows by the audience was ecstatic.

And I somehow recognised that this was my tribe and

we owned this kind of show.

In the early days, it was a very underground community which was

And the people were a little bit scared.

And the drag queens seemed to be like the natural leaders.

Hi, we're the cast of Capriccio's in Oxford Street, and you're just about to

the finale of our first show.

I think we'd better take a five -minute call, Gail. All right.

In macho Australia, the bravest men wore dresses.

Priscilla would make them national icons.

For a budding young queen just

landed in Sydney, it was mesmerizing.

It was just the gayest, most wonderful thing to grow up with.

No wonder I wanted to become like them.

But not so much the glamorous part, but the bit of the wonky kind of it.

As the 80s arrived, drag dared to break out from its secret venues onto the

street and into public bars.

It was a new wave of punk drag.

Crazier, wonkier.

People were experimenting with lots of different things in the 80s. It was an

era that just opened doors for anything.

Just give it a go.

Cindy Pastel's star was rising when she moved in with a girl who worked the door

at Patch's nightclub, Karen Cahill.

I moved in and it was a freezing cold room and I...

I just couldn't stand it and I just went and jumped in the side of the bed and

hopped into bed with her.

And it was so warm and so gorgeous and it must have got really cold one night

and I must have cuddled her.

And well, there you go. The drag queen was on with the door bitch and...

They had a kid. I take all this off at the end of the night and I go home and

I've got a baby and a wife.

I think people would be pretty amazed to hear that. Do you live a straight life?

Oh, I don't know if you'd call it straight, but we're kind of straight.

Sydney was a gay bubble.

It was Hintz Cross.

moved to Oxford Street, and then subsequently to Newtown and Erskineville

A gay public.

But we didn't travel west of King Street.

It wasn't the end of the world that you could see it from there.

Stephan Elliot was working on films by day and propping up the bar of the

Hotel by night.

The Albury was the king of drag venues, and the queen in residence was Cindy

Pastel. There was Cindy Pastel on a bar, not just as a woman, dressed as the

most completely stuffed -up, retarded piece of kabuki science fiction, you

sniffing ammo and, you know, forget about the lip -syncing.

That went out the window in seconds.

What planet are we all on?

The idea for a movie about drag queens began to germinate.

But when Stefan dared to venture outside the Sydney bubble, he came face to face

with the ugly genesis of Priscilla.

With my first partner in a restaurant, two young 20 -year -old boys on our own,

and suddenly this voice says, Well, what have we got here, eh?

And we spun around and there was this kind of team of football players and

obviously one of their mothers, who was a battle axe is the best way to describe

her. And she started.

Could I please have... No!

You can't have. You can't have nothing.

We've got nothing here for people like you.

Nothing. The humiliation of sitting so far out of your comfort zone, so far

away from Oxford Street, so far away from those bars, I didn't know whether

big ugly wall of suburbia had been put up to stop us from getting out or them

from getting in.

I think that moment of the humiliation of just being attacked by this woman and

not being able to fight back, I've never felt so humiliated.

It was the story hook Stefan needed.

He wrote a draft script for Priscilla in a matter of days.

If anyone could penetrate the dark heart of Australia...

It was the drag queens with their frocks of armour and those dagger tongues.

Stefan came to see me at the Aubrey and came down to the dressing room and I'd

finished the show.

So he was like, can we have a conversation about this movie I'm

don't. Not now, I've just finished the show and I'm going out. So here's my

address, come round and see me tomorrow and we'll talk about it then. Anyway, so

I forgot he was coming and I answered the door.

with my son in my hands, my little baby son, feeding him muesli. And he's like,

who's the kid? And I was like, this is my kid, this is my son Adam.

And he said, well, look, I'm just going to stop it right here now and I'm going

to go and rewrite the script.

Mr. Burrows?

Yes?

Congratulations, it's a boy.

One of the great things about the film is that Steph sort of hit on a

point in gay subculture in Sydney, a particular time where drag had evolved

into an art form in its own right in a really kind of interesting way.

And Priscilla sort of surfed that wave.

At the Aubrey, Stephon also met designer Tim Chappell.

an escapee from fashion school who found his calling making drag costumes.

It was a natural fit.

Well, there's this great Polari phrase called moctocroc, and moctocroc means to

be able to make something from nothing.

And moctocroc is the way most drag is made.

It's about being able to put it together from an air freshener, a bit of tinsel,

and... bit of aluminium foil and sticking it together with a hot glue

Well, Cindy Pastel sometimes did it with stapler.

Priscilla was mocked a crock. It was the true definition of mocked a crock.

When Stephen first started speaking about Priscilla, I thought, why not? And

that point, it had been turned down for funding from every film body in

Australia. My favourite one was when it came back stamped, deeply shallow.

It was completely racist.

It was completely sexist. It was completely chauvinistic.

I mean, we were going to dress an Aboriginal up in drag. I mean, no, that

going to happen.

We're going to have, you know, an Asian stripper firing ping pong balls out of

certain bodily parts. We couldn't do that.

But, you know, and even the script I'd first given to the Mardi Gras

organisation because we needed to borrow costumes, they said, no way in the

world, this is horrible.

In what were sensitive times, to some it seemed a juvenile film, making light of

a serious world.

Let's not forget, while Stefan was pitching Priscilla, gay sex was still

in some parts of Australia.

And the stigma of the 70s, when homosexuality was branded a mental

still lingered.

The main options those days were either going to a psychiatrist or undergoing

aversion therapy.

Aversion therapy, they would attach some electrical equipment to you. They'd

show you images of naked men, and if you responded, you'd get a shock.

The worst cases, of course, were the lobotomies, where they would actually

lobotomise you, cut part of your brain. This would seriously stop you from

basically being a functioning human being, though.

Why do we want this? Why do we want this?

No wonder so many gay people in the 70s lived undercover in the backroom bars

and drag clubs.

For those who chose to walk the streets in protest, there were serious risks.

You could lose your job, you could lose your house, you could lose your friends,

your family could erupt on you, and worse things could happen. In fact,

could be violence.

In San Francisco, the counterculture was exploring new ways to protest.

And it looked like fun.

There was something going on in America at the time.

They were having parades, gay parades. And I thought, well, why don't we have a

party, you know, a street party?

Sydney's first Mardi Gras began with a ragtag group of 100 or so following a

truck down Oxford Street.

The mood at the time was joyous and we were hoping, really hoping, that we

get the people out of the bars and into the street. That was sort of like the

big slogan at the time, out of the bars, into the street.

When a guy passed me, he came out of patches and he came out and he said, I'm

out now and I'm going all the way.

Flouting the march's permit...

Police tried to shut down the party, but defiantly the parade continued onwards.

When we got to the Alamein Fountain, it was very dark there. There were police

all around.

We were cornered and the police were coming in, and I mean in numbers, many,

many numbers.

Paddy wagons, we were lambs to the slaughter.

Once there was like a physical confrontation in the middle of King's

the middle of the night with police who had a very bad reputation for their

conduct, I mean, everyone started getting involved.

It's very unfortunate these sort of things happen. I think it's unfortunate

a couple of policemen had to receive hospital attention.

Let them go!

Let them go! Let them go! Let them go!

Fifty -three people were arrested that night.

But something had shifted.

The gay underground had surfaced and found new allies in the street.

Mardi Gras had been born.

And there would be no stopping it now.

Mardi Gras was conceived by me as a celebration.

But there's no way on earth it couldn't be political.

And it has to be.

Politics in drag.

I had a dream.

Against a mountain of naysayers, Stefan Elliott and executive producer Rebel

Penfold Russell sought to raise $2 million for Priscilla.

Very difficult sell, you know, two drag queens and a transsexual on a road movie

across Australia by someone you've never heard of.

The more no's we got, the more obstacles we got put in front of us, the higher

the toy went on the shelf and the more determined we were to actually make it.

The whole idea of three drag queens travelling to Ayers Rock in a bus, I

that bit and I thought, they'd end up, they'd shake themselves by the time they

got to...

and Redford, you know, if you're so bored shitless and sitting on a bus, for

God's sake, no, this will never work.

It was funny and ingenious.

The phrase at the time was fish out of water.

I saw it more as the collision between

forces that did not understand each other.

Well, we did it.

So what now?

I think I want to go home.

By 1993, they'd begged, borrowed, and emptied their own pockets, just enough

make the film.

Time to find a cast.

First up, Mitzi.

Steph and I were doing Frauds, his first film, and he said, look, my next film

is three drag queens going out into the desert. And I said, oh, Steph,

I'll do anything in it. Hugo came first because I had a good relationship with

Hugo. Hugo trusted me and, you know, there was nothing as more wonderful.

as our first day of costume trials where we put Hugo in a dress in a hotel room

in Melbourne. And he just ran up and down the corridor screaming.

And he was like a kid in a toy shop. And I just knew Hugo was fine.

Next came Felicia.

One of the agents at the agency said, we don't know if you should do this. I

don't know if it would be a good move. I'm not even having this conversation.

I really, really want to do it.

Life's never boring, is it?

And I don't know why I got given the role, but I know that part of it is

I think Stefan liked the idea of taking somebody that had been in Neighbours and

putting them in a dress, you know. And I think part of what it was for Guy, it

was a chance to shed that skin.

He knew that he would absolutely take Mike from Neighbours out and kill him.

Lastly, Bernadette, which proved a little tricky.

There was this wealth of realistic actors that we went through. It went

Curry to Colin Firth to Clive James to Rupert Everett.

Stephan himself went into a kind of casting delirium where one moment he

William Shatner to play Bernadette. Then there was Tony Curtis who went, I am

your Bernadette. But of course the new Mrs Curtis went, oh, I don't think so.

Stamp had been on the cards for quite some time, and we just thought he'd

do it. We don't have a hope in hell. And, you know, the planets aligned.

He had decided that week to give up acting.

His career had been reduced to playing American villains in big -budget movies.

And he'd given in, and he walked into his agent and said, I'm done.

Let's call it off.

And his agent said, OK, how about this, and just put it in front of him.

Wait a minute, Sunshine.

Let me put you straight on that.

I'll tell you how it happened, right?

I was given this script to read about, like, drag queens in Australia, and I

thought, this is the last thing in the world I want to be doing.

And then a few weeks later, my friend Caroline Bliss came round, and while we

were talking, the phone rang, and it was my agent, and she said, oh, darling,

what did you think of that sort of drag queen script we sent you?

And I said, well, you know.

It was a bit sort of predictable, wasn't it? And she said, oh, we all rather

liked it.

And I said, did you?

And suddenly my friend Caroline said, just say yes and hang up. What are you

talking about?

And she said, love, your fear of this project is out of all proportion to what

possibly could happen.

Just keep saying yes and maybe it will go away.

So I was bullied into taking the role.

But I would only do it on one condition.

Tell me about you.

Can't complain.

Bill Hunter must be my boyfriend.

Spent 30 years wandering around the world.

Bill loved Terrence. He admired him so much. And for them to actually have the

opportunity of working together again and reacquainting it with each other was

one of, I think, the big reasons why he wanted to do Priscilla.

And with that...

The wheels on the Priscilla bus were rolling.

I didn't know it then, but we needn't have gone to the outback to find the

of homophobia.

Sydney's homosexual community has been promised top -level help in tackling

it describes as a growing wave of hate bashings. A report out today shows a

percentage of gays and lesbians are victims of gang attacks, less than half

which are reported to the police.

Used to be the term, the term poof to bashing. Yeah.

That was basically a gang sport of the early 80s. Go out. The early 80s. What

are we going to do tonight?

We go and roll some poofs.

In the late 80s, rumours flew like the winds around the cliffs of Bondi Beach.

The coastal track alongside Marks Park was a popular gay beat and the place to

prove yourself for Sydney homophobes.

One of the things that I saw happening quite clearly was that because you had

young people going, well, society hates gays, the cops hate gays, it's OK for us

to do whatever and we're never going to even get into trouble for it.

Sometimes it was a bit of a right of initiation, you know, to go poof to

bashing.

John Russell was preparing to leave Bondi and build a house on the family

It was the weekend that he was going to be moving up to the farm. Dad was coming

down on a Saturday morning to pick him up.

And Thursday night he went out.

Anyway, it wasn't uncommon for him not to come home, you know.

It depends how your night went, I suppose, whether or not you come home or

Christ, how are we going to find it?

Let's see. Come down here further.

Let's come down here.

This is the block where John was going to build a house. We were going to fence

it off so that it takes in the waterfront and all that.

I was at work the next day and two police officers walked in and said,

know, we think we've found your brother.

So they drove me over to Gloob Coroner's Court where I identified him.

This is where he is.

You know, when the old man turned up at the door, he said, well, good day, mate,

how you going? I said, you better come inside, mate, I've got something to tell

you.

And the nightmare transpired from there.

John Alan Russell.

It's been a while.

Please dismiss John's death as a suicide or accident.

It's how a lot of gay hate murders were brushed under the carpet in those days.

He was actually found holding someone's hair in his hand, which was not his own

hair. So you had clear evidence it was a murder. There's no other reason why he

would have been holding that hair.

And, you know, back in 1989, police just overlooked that. And in fact, you know,

that crucial piece of DNA evidence even went missing.

Tragic.

There was a certain amount of evidence there, but anything of any DNA value was

not present. They'd lost that. They'd lost all that.

When I flew into Australia to start the movie, I looked down and

I saw those wonderful cliffs of Bondi Beach, completely unaware of, like,

terrible secret.

At the time, I was obviously...

totally preoccupied with, like, how I was going to play Bernadette, you know,

like a woman born into a man's body.

My task as an actor was no less than to become a woman, and I had no clue

where to begin.

He did struggle with it, I reckon, generally. I remember that he wouldn't

tuck.

Interesting, considering he was the one who had the operation.

But I think...

You know, you've got to leave your sexuality at the door. You've got to

all sorts of things at the door when you play any kind of role, really.

And your masculinity, on some level, is going to be left at the door when you

take on roles like this. And I reckon there was a little part of Terrence that

hung on to that. Stamp didn't know who he wanted to be and he had this image in

his head of being half Brooke Shields and half Jacqueline Bessette. And he

brought Jacqueline along for a couple of meetings and was studying her and

watching her and, you know.

You know, he's no Jacqueline Bissett, I'll say that.

And you're no Cecil B. DeMille, darling.

But you did have at least one good idea.

You realised I needed a tranny trainer.

Enter Robin Lee.

I thought, Terence, I remember when I was young and I loved him.

So that was very exciting for me, just the fact that I was going to meet him,

let alone work with him.

And I thought, what will I wear?

He had to learn mannerisms. Like when we sat together, I'd say, pick up a glass.

And he'd pick up a glass with his hole in it like that. And I said, no.

I said, this is how you do it.

And he'd pick you up.

Just little things. And then I'd go like that with my hair.

And he just used to sit there. Like we'd be talking.

But he'd just watch everything I did.

And he said, it's very fascinating.

The one thing we had to do was ultimately the litmus test, which is to

out there, take them out onto Oxford Street, and in character, let them see

experience, let them go through what drag feels like. So we spent a full

getting them all done, getting them all ready, and took the three of them out to

a nightclub.

in Sydney with Bill Hunter as bodyguard.

So we were all made up and in a frock. It was like a multicoloured sequined

of... I had a blonde wig.

And Guy and Terence and I were all going to meet at my house. So I went home in

my full regalia, got back. My little boy, who was four at the time, screamed

ran away from me and...

And I said, no, it's all right, darling, it's OK.

I said, it's Daddy.

He said, take the wig off, take the wig off. I took my wig off and he said, put

it on again, put it on again. So I put it back on.

But Terence and Guy arrived and then I think we walked from there, Billy

chaperoning us all the way, got to DCM and proceeded to get very, very drunk.

One of the things that was actually really fun about it was that I wasn't

recognised.

I was in disguise.

Aside from practising drag, I was actually in disguise.

I was like, wow, this is incredibly liberating.

Guy was very hand -flapping about, running about, having a great time and

getting adored by everybody and letting them touch his abs.

Terrence was so ladylike.

He was lovely.

Sitting up in there, so mean, like he was a secret.

I was watching everything.

And I said, where's Hugo?

And Terrence went... And I looked down and there was Hugo

passed out under the table.

And me, like in the movie, going, come on, darling, come on, time to go now.

I remember other drag queen looking at it and kind of going, who are these

girls? I've seen these girls before.

My mascara was running when they took me down the steps at the end and my

heel was broken and my wig was askew and I was a very sick boy and ended up

vomiting out of Steph's car on the way home.

So it was a fabulous night.

We had a ball.

But sadly, like Cinderella, I awoke the next morning to find nothing had

changed.

I was still terrified.

First day of shoot, he was frightened and we knew it. So we made a decision

right there and then. No mirrors.

He couldn't look at the dailies. He couldn't look at any footage.

Let's just keep Bernadette away from him.

And for two or three weeks he had this, basically this shadow hanging over him

of what it was he was doing. And he was frightened. He couldn't get the voice

right. He couldn't find himself.

It's true.

I was fine on the gay golden mile of Oxford Street.

But once we left the safety of Sydney, it was a different story.

Lex Watson, I think, went to do a debate about gay rights in Mount Isa.

Tonight from Mount Isa, Monday conference, debate homosexual rights and

And that was incredibly brave, to go to, like, a very masculine and very outback

and very socially conservative place.

Yes. Mate, why are you a poof?

What? Why are you a poof?

Oh, God.

Why don't you call yourself a straight -out pofter and pervert?

And why are perverts allowed to run the street and rape and murder and kill

little babies like you?

The boot is on the other foot, my friend.

We don't go around murdering kids.

We don't go around murdering heterosexuals. But the revert is done to

That he was attacked and had shit

thrown on him and stuff was...

You know, one of those iconic moments, I guess, in, you know, the conflict

between a sort of visible urban gay scene and the great vastness of

Oh, Felicia, where the fuck are we?

The mining town of Broken Hill.

was the first place we filmed outside of Sydney.

We were to perform on a bar in front of extras who were real -life local miners.

I was consumed with fear.

Waiting in the wings, looking like some drag abomination of a cabbage patch

doll, I found myself wondering, what am I doing here?

I'm a matinee idol. I'm a serious actor.

I'm the best drag man in Britain.

What am I doing here? And then... Action!

Shake it, shake it.

Shake it, shake it.

Pure adrenaline.

One take.

I'd broken the bound.

After that...

I was flying.

And afterwards, it was a different person. And I said, are you all right,

thinking my career's over?

And he said, I just crossed the barrier.

He said, I'm not frightened anymore.

I'm not frightened of anything.

If we'd been in Sydney, I would have marched in the parade.

One of the icons of Mardi Gras in the early 90s was Vanessa Wagner, part of a

new wave of drag queens with a political edge and a taste for anarchy known,

defrocked, as Tobin Saunders.

In 1991 for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, I can remember thinking, I'm

sick of all these parade entrants that are obeying and marching up the street,

let's get a bunch of...

dolled out drag queens with shopping trolleys smashing into the audience and

causing mayhem. Thank God for the new wig.

So we were going to do like a gorilla entry and I was just so sick and I was

like, oh, this is a really bad flu and my friends were like, no, you can do it,

you can do it, we can get up and do it and shoving speed up my nostrils and

trying to get me out and I was just the crookest I'd ever been. It felt like

someone had stuck a needle in me and fucked the life out of me. Bang, bang.

When HIV came to Australia, it was seen as a gay disease simply because the

first statistics were of, oh my, gay men.

Prejudice emerged.

I mean, there were terrible newspaper reports. People who you thought might be

your friends turned against you.

And so the whole movement which we had felt was gradually occurring towards

liberating homosexual life stopped.

It took a terrible step backwards.

AIDS would be the ultimate ordeal the gay community would live and die

There's people dealing with an enormous amount of fear and grief.

And there's people sick, sick in ways that no one's ever seen before.

I just photographed my friends.

And perhaps that's the power of my photographs of AIDS, is that

people let me into their lives, really, and

into the dying process.

And I think that they felt that they were making some contribution

by allowing their story to be told.

Each of the thousands of candles carried in Sydney is a lost lover or friend,

brother, son, daughter.

Ken Madison.

Doug Mason Harper.

Ron Osborne.

Andrew Roberts.

With their sequined armor and fervor weaponry, it was the drag queens who

rallied the troops.

The drag queens seem to be like the natural leaders.

And I think that's partly because when you become a drag queen, you

have an alter ego, you have another self, which is...

different from your normal self.

It's like you can be everything that your normal self isn't.

I often used to say, you know, I'm here now to, you know, the Andrew sisters

went to war to entertain the troops.

Well, I didn't go.

to war to entertain the troops. I stayed here to entertain my brothers and

sisters that have lost other brothers and sisters due to AIDS.

I just felt like every time we'd lose somebody, a part of them would come in

a part of them to give me strength to be this performing puppet for them.

There was a real fabulous, fatalistic kind of frenzy, if you like, if I could

alliterate. And I can remember thinking, OK, well, fuck that.

If I'm going to die, I might as well die in a colourful street.

It was defiant exultation that had brought the gay community this far and

now burn more brightly than ever. We had this city that was just on fire.

So much was happening in Sydney. It was breaking almost every rule in the book.

I mean, Sydney suddenly got sick of being frightened.

And it erupted.

From agony to ecstasy.

It was the wildest time.

There was just this sense of happiness and rebellion, and it just all came

together. And once I stepped my foot into that world, then everything

I'm pretty sure the general straight community were like, wow, those people

really know how to throw a shit -hot party and have a good time. We want a

of that.

At last, the tribes had been united in a spirit of pure abandon.

The same spirit would inspire the most iconic image in Priscilla.

The thing about making a film is that...

A single image has to linger in your imagination.

It starts quite early on, and it's the one that keeps you going, that keeps you

aspiring to realise the film.

Stefan liked to name sections of the script, and this one was called The

of Ecstasy.

And he was inspired by the ornaments on the front of the Rolls Royce. You know,

the lady, he's flapping.

And I was like, oh, that's great. And I was like, oh, let's build the dress into

sales. Tim went away and came back with four -foot wings.

I went completely ballistic and said, come on, this is this moment.

Tim's mum worked for Tajay or something, and she got 20 % discount.

Imagine! So Tim went and bought every piece of lame he could find.

And I think it added up to being about 180 metres of lame.

I had one day to get it ready to go on the bus, and so I just spent the next 24

hours sewing, cutting, sewing, cutting, sewing, cutting.

The next morning, we get to set.

It's beautiful dawn.

It's like a magical picture. The bus is ready.

I lay the lame out along the road and attach it to the bus, and there's no

at all, and the bus starts off, and it's just dragging along the ground.

Flapping, flapping, flapping. It was very sad. It was a very sad moment.

And then the stunt supervisor said to me, Tim, it's really dangerous for the

performer. You're going to have to go over there and cut it off.

So I went over to the bus and I picked up the lame with my scissors.

And as I picked the scissors to the lame, this huge gust of air picked the

thing out of my arms and she's off and away and Priscilla is born.

It's the one image everyone remembers.

A banner of change driven into the Australian psyche on an old bus.

Decades later, its brilliance hasn't faded.

After years of neglect, institutions which had once ostracized the gay world

now treating it with dignity.

Fifteen years on, John Russell's case was reopened by police and a coronial

inquest began.

You can't just...

write someone off and say, well, they're not a legitimate victim.

They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They lived a reckless

Because they live that way, they don't deserve the same amount of care and the

same amount of discernment from an investigative authority.

I don't think that's right. I think we've got to do the best we can for

families because they're always left wondering.

It's a wound that will never heal for them.

Inquest found that John Russell had been thrown from the cliffs and that the

motive of gay hate had been ignored or missed in up to 80 other murders since

the 70s.

I would like to know who did it. Yeah, who it was and justice be done,

whether it was one, five or ten.

I suppose that's all everybody ever wants is justice.

They did matter. They were important.

We are prepared to learn from this.

Attitudes will change.

Their death is not in vain.

Like on Oxford Street, an unlikely group of marchers joined the Mardi Gras

parade. At the beginning of the parade route you had the police lined up at one

corner. And at the exact adjacent corner was the 1978ers who'd been backed by

the police.

And the police are standing there. The 78ers are there.

I'm just standing there watching this going, wow.

And as the parade took off and the 1978ers led the parade because it was 20

years, the police all stood there and actually saluted.

And people had tears running down their faces. The cops were crying.

The 78ers were crying. It was just like this magic moment of, you know, Social

healing.

I went along to the Magar each year and watched that become a celebration of the

city. And somehow contained within Priscilla is that whole journey of gay

culture within a short space of time from being...

where, you know, if you were gay and an activist, you were likely to be hauled

off the streets and thrown behind bars to a real celebration where you've got

police floats and politicians marching, you know. So there was a huge

transformation within a short space of time and kind of reverberated.

Beyond Sydney in a big way and with this film kind of out to the world so it did

it did catch a fantastic way We

surf that wave over the oceans to a little town called can in the

south of France Cindy pastel who'd inspired Hugo's

character came to with his son Adam

to face the music of fame and their own stories.

We had to rush to get ready to get to the opening and suddenly we're there and

we're sitting there and I've got Adam sitting next to me.

Then comes my favourite scene in Priscilla's when Hugo is

pretending to be straight.

Sorry about last night. I don't always dress up in women's clothes. I mean, you

know... don't get the wrong idea if you ask me what the film is really about

it's about a gay man coming out to his son and has spent his entire life

fighting this moment you know what i am don't you and i knew this was coming

up and i was thinking oh my god i've never had to tell adam anything

like this before

and here it is this is our life here we are watching our life thing and i

thought oh my god and i just remember reaching down and grabbing his little

and and holding it because it was like too late i couldn't tell him it was here

it was on the big screen in front of us and i remember it so distinctly that he

grabbed my hand and he squeezed it a little bit tighter as if and it was a

feeling of like It's OK, Dad.

Everything's all right.

No words had to be said.

Nothing had to be explained.

It was just life and we were just living it.

The heart of the film caught with that can crowd.

That story of a father and a son, that brought total silence to them. They

weren't laughing.

Film ended, house lights went up, then they ripped up the seats. That was the

real surprise. They went ballistic.

And they just kept clapping and roaring and clapping and roaring and roaring.

I said, when does this end? I mean, it was stunned, and I did. I got very

emotional, and then Dan said, let's go, let's quit whilst we're ahead. Now, we'd

only had 10 minutes of standing ovation.

when we could have gone on to 20, and apparently that's the gauge of Cannes.

But, you know, you never see your life changing. In a moment, your life

My life changed at that moment.

I was doing the math for Snowy River, and they wouldn't give me the time out

go to Cannes. So I had Stefan and Hugo and Terence bringing me drunk after the

screening in Cannes, and it had gone off, and everyone had loved it. You

and I'm on set going, great, great, guys.

I created the character of Bernadette by just, like, thinking about the most

beautiful women I'd ever seen and wonderful women I'd gone out with, you

So she was really going to be absolutely fabulous, and that was my whole

motivation. I believed I was creating this glamorous creature.

Of course, Stefan never allowed me to see the rushes, and I didn't understand

why until the first night in Cannes.

And the movie opened, and I looked like this old dog.

And I thought, shit, he's really taken me to the cleaners, that bastard, you

know.

But to give him his due, it really worked, because what was so touching was

character believing she was this God's gift to women, and she was this old dog.

After the film and the musical, as Priscilla hit the stage at the West End

Broadway, went to Italy, Brazil.

Recently, it opened in Korea, where apparently no one is gay.

Having conquered Australia, the Trojan horse of drag,

continued to take on the world.

It was the toughest movie I've ever done.

And the most fun.

You know, I'd made up my mind really early on, if I wanted to make that pro

film, which dealt with all the issues, AIDS and equality, and no one would have

seen that film.

I made a film about three clowns

that asked you as an audience to laugh at them.

Anybody could laugh at them. Nana could laugh at them.

The joy of the film was

it took you in on one level, It turns you in the middle of the film, and by

end of it, you are laughing.

Stefan,

you

stole fire from the heavens.

You added the drag queen to the pantheon of Australian icons.

And I'm so pleased I was part of it.

I hope another hit pops into your head.

In the meanwhile, farewell, love.

Tell us how you guys met.

In a toilet.

At the trough.

No, where did we meet? Patches?

I can't remember.

I think it was Patches, in the dressing room at Patches.

Patches was booming in those days, and I remember you coming there and doing

solitaire, if I remember it correctly.

And I thought it was one of the best things I've ever seen. And then when we

clicked, I said to you, you wouldn't happen to be a Leo, would you?

I am. And that was it. We were inseparable.

And we kind of have been for many years, but we haven't seen each other for many

years. And now we live next door to each other. Now we live next door to each

other. And it's heaven.

It's heaven.

And you've just turned 70. I have indeed.

And you still remember who I am? I do. I haven't got Alzheimer's yet. Not yet.

Or dementia.

No. We'll probably get them together and we'll be fine. We won't know what's

going on. You've got to worry the day you come out and I go, who are you? Then

you've got to worry.

Well, I'll probably just go, who are you?

We'll be fine. We'll get on fine.

Come on, dear.

Have another cup. Go on.

Go on.

Press yourself up.