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king of the desert
From Soho to Sydney. Producer Al Clark talks to Quentin Falk about film-making Down Under
Al Clark is far too modest to claim he actually ‘discov- ered’ Russell Crowe and Eric Bana, who have both gone on to become Hollywood A-list stars.
But as producer, or executive producer, of their first starring roles in Australia – in respectively, The Crossing (1990) and Chopper (2000) – he naturally retains a faintly proprietorial interest in their talent.
Guy Pearce was, as we long- time Neighbours fans know, already a TV soap opera hunk when, under Clark’s producing aegis, he then brilliantly trans- formed himself into sharp- tongued Felicia, a pouting trans- vestite in The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert.
The film not only set Pearce on a whole new international career path in films like LA Confidential, Memento and The Time Machine but also helped cement Clark’s own credentials Down Under.
It’s a sign of just how iconic Priscilla has become that there’s a newly-released DVD of the film in Australia to mark the 10th Anniversary not of its release but actually, to Clark’s obvious pleas- ure, its start-of-shooting.
Now Pearce and Clark are re- united for the first time since those heady cross-country days of The Lavender Bus (as Clark’s own Making-of-Priscilla book was titled) on writer-director Scott Roberts’ enjoyable black come- dy-thriller, The Hard Word, current- ly doing the rounds in the UK.
Oz has, of course, proved to be a sort of second coming for Clark who had already been in the mid-eighties a pillar of the British film industry. After some years at Virgin as first its record company publicity director, then founder editor of the late lament- ed Film Yearbook, Clark eventual- ly became head of production for the fledgling film division.
Then in what seemed to be the blinking of an eye, Clark chucked in his job, an apparently cosy life, family and friends in England for a new wife and no immediate prospects in Australia. “An emotional whim? I thought of myself more as a mail order hus-
band who was ordered up by an Aussie ‘sheila’ from the cata- logue,” Clark chuckles.
“I arrived in Sydney to find that my bride [fellow producer Andrena Finlay] of only three weeks away hadn’t even sent out the invitations yet... but that’s another story. For a year or so I felt the kind of dislocation that people must feel when, for exam- ple, they have religious conver- sions. Okay, you think, what hap- pens next?
“What happened next was that I did get a job which was to do with developing and produc- ing films for a company called Beyond. The first film I got going was The Crossing which has also enjoyed some retrospective fame because Russell’s now-wife, Danielle Spencer, was in it too.”
It also helped having the odd pal at court, as it were. “Although I only knew two or three people in Sydney, one of them was Philip Adams who was then chairman of the Australian Film Commission. He welcomed me to Oz, was a great friend and ally, and liked the idea of having somebody with familiarity of, and practice of, film somewhere else, to con- tribute to the AFC board.”
The conclusion of his three year appointment to the AFC pretty much coincided with the end of his useful time at Beyond and so Clark struck out on his own. At the suggestion of his wife who had produced Stephan Elliott’s previous film, Frauds, and the director, Clark was hired to produce Priscilla.
Intriguingly, after 15 years together, Clark and Finlay have only just worked together for the first time on Thunderstruck, about some die-hard AC/DC fans, which he describes, cryptically, as “a cross between Last Orders for the under-30s and a hetero- sexual Priscilla.”
Envious of what he perceives as the abundance of financial riches on offer to British filmmak- ers, yet wisely noting that often the end result might tend to sug- gest that “abundance in itself is far from everything,” Clark
reflects on the state of play in his adopted land.
“There was a comedy that worked very well last year in Australia called Crackerjack. It was the highest grossing film of the year there, making much more than, say, Rabbit-Proof Fence which was widely per- ceived to have been the most successful film.
“The consequence of it has been to open the floodgates to whole bunch of local comedies; let’s call them ‘multiplex come- dies’, I don’t want to ‘brow’ them. The majority of the ones I’ve seen feel targeted to an audience that’s capricious any- way and by the time you’ve decided who they are they’ve moved on. Many of them have never sold to any other country
which I think has helped stultify filmmaking of late.”
Does that make it more diffi- cult for him as an independent producer? “I think making films should be difficult,” Clark asserts. “They are so expensive you should really strive to make them happen. As soon as I finish a film and start another, I always feel as if I’m starting all over again. There’s never a sense of going to the same people all the time. It somehow never seems to work out that way.”
Photo main: Producer Al Clark; inset l-r: Rachel Griffiths and Guy Pearce star in The Hard Word
arts and crafts
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