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046 AUGUST 2015 JB Hi-Fi
visit FEATURE DVD&BD
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
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.
“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
hen viewers will finally be able to
appreciate his original vision?
“The rights will revert in
about four or five years, and
at that point I will begin the
reconstruction,” he says. Susie Porter and Jonathan Schaech
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”.
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