STACK #130 Aug 2016

DVD & BD

FEATURE

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Writer-director Stephan Elliott will forever be identified with The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert , one of the most popular, successful and enduring Australian films ever made. However, few remember his follow-up feature in 1997, Welcome to Woop Woop , which can be described as Priscilla’s ugly and unpopular cousin. Or as Elliott puts it, “Fellini crossed with JohnWaters”. WELCOME BACK TO WOOP WOOP

“It was a disaster,” Elliott says candidly. “It’s a film that was never finished.” Selected for Cannes while still in the editing process, Elliott was eventually convinced by the festival’s head to screen the work-in-progress copy. “He said, ‘Well, Coppola screened Apocalypse Now as a cutting copy and won the Palme d'Or’, so we stupidly went ahead with a film that was only one third cooked. And that was the death knell of the film – a terrible reception in Cannes and a disastrous edit of a film that was never finished. It was an incredibly difficult experience for me because we never had the time to see it through [to completion]. It’s a version that was put out to see how it fared, and I do believe there’s a much better movie in there. You can see the bare bones of that movie in there.” So how would Elliott’s original vision have differed from the compromised and incomplete version that was released? “The point was lost,” he says. “It was talking about a dying ember of Australiana – that’s why Barry Humphries is in the film. At that time in the ‘90s when we were making the film, everybody had become cappuccino-heavy, there was new money, John Howard was incoming, the Republic debate was in full swing… we were blocking out an awful lot about our past, and like it or not, people didn’t want to hear it. It’s funny that we’ve come full circle almost 20 years later; we are a racist, bigoted, homophobic, sexist country, like every other country on earth. That comes with the package. It’s happening again now and for the first time people are noticing it – we do have some problems. The point of the film, and a couple of pivotal scenes, say, ‘You can’t just rub our history off the map and start again’. It was very well spelt out, but it’s not there. It’s topical; at the time what I was trying to say was a hot potato. But I think now, people will see what I was trying to say.” Welcome to Woop Woop was indeed a film ahead of its time, and after spending almost two decades in limbo following its video release in the late ‘90s, viewers will finally have the opportunity to get the point. A widescreen DVD release is due out on August 5 from Umbrella Entertainment, featuring an illuminating and frequently hilarious audio commentary from Elliott that’s alone worth the price of the disc. “It never had a theatrical life and went on to a terrible airline version, which is all we ever had. To look at it again in widescreen – man, those locations look fabulous,” Elliott says. “I got out to places I don’t think any film crew had ever been to.” Given the incomplete nature of the version released, does the director foresee a time when viewers will finally be able to appreciate his original vision? “The rights will revert in

pretending this isn’t happening?’" Set in an isolated outback community of larrikins and misfits who worship Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals and to whom the term ‘political correctness’ is an alien concept, Welcome to Woop Woop is a fish-out-of water tale that drops an American con-artist (Jonathan Schaech) into an Australiana from hell. Offering a blackly humorous subversion of backwoods horror tropes mixed with high camp, bad taste, and a heavy ‘ocker’ sensibility, the film has all the makings of a homegrown cult classic, but ultimately failed to find an audience.

I n high demand following the success of Priscilla , Elliott recalls the enormous pressure he faced to follow up the film with something similar. “I had a gun to my head over how I was going to trump myself,” he says, “so I lied and cheated a bit and said, ‘I’ll give you another Priscilla ’, but I was making anti- Priscilla , and I copped it double-barreled for that. “ Priscilla was all fluffy and light and pretty, except for one dark scene. Making Priscilla , I saw a really tough and mean side of Australia that I actually thought was priceless. And I thought, ‘we have some problems. Why are we

• Welcome to Woop Woop is out on Aug 5

about four or five years, and at that point I will begin the reconstruction,” he says.

Susie Porter and Jonathan Schaech

AUGUST 2015 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.com.au

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