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nearby Menindee, and we are shown around an impressive variety of bar interiors — which prompts us to think that we may be able to shoot all the film’s pub scenes in the same town — the only place we come across as unique in its eccentricity as Mario’s isStephens Creek, not far out of town on the road to Tibooburra. Approaching it, we see an eagle struggle across the road dragging a dead rabbit so large that the eagle is pecking away at it, trying to reduce enough of its bulk to be able to fly off with the rest. Several times the eagle tries, and fails, to get airborne. ‘Big bird, bigger bunny,’ says Stephan.
    Stephens Creek is two buildings — a disused petrol pump with adjacent dwelling and a combined art gallery, tea room and owl barn which houses ‘a collection of crafted owls’, as well as numerous second-hand dolls and a ‘trash and treasure’ table. It is owned and run by a couple called Mitch and Val, who live there with a selection of century-old rock-cakes, dozens of flies, a pile of laundry and their dog Bingo, who is so lethal he is kept locked up during our visit, all the while straining to escape his confinement so that he can jump at our throats and tear off our heads.
    The fact that the characters in the film are so mismatched with the landscape means that we can also subvert familiar locations like the Pinnacles, Silverton and the look-out at Mundi Mundi Plain, the view from which — stretching to a horizon which seems so far away as to be on the other side of the world — will be the ideal place for our trio to realise the enormousness of what they are about to travel through.
    We rent a four-wheel drive and head west.
    At its best, a location survey is more than a matter of aesthetics and logistics: it can make a film come to life in the imagination. There are so many hours of driving, so much concentrated time spent together, that ideas can spring out of word association alone. We decide we will shoot in Scope and really utilise the widescreen format, not concentrate the action in the centre of the frame in capitulation to the tyranny of video and television. We discuss comedy devices and decide that wipesand irises are the whoopee cushions of visual comedy. If we use wipes, Stephan concludes, it should be a giant pair of eyelashes blinking over the screen. We talk about road signs as punctuation marks and linking devices, with all the animals whose proximity such signs advertise — cows, camels, kangaroos, horses, wombats and so on — wearing dresses. And we amuse ourselves thinking up different titles for the film.
    The full title — The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert — still feels right because it captures the oblique comic-strip feel of the movie. It may even translate well, although the wordplay on ‘queen’ will be lost in other languages. Perhaps the only remaining detail that powerful actors and directors are unable to control is the title their film goes out under in foreign territories. Housesitter, for example, was called A Blonde In My Soup in Greece and Lies Have Beautiful Legs in Switzerland. Home Alone was released in France as Mother, I Missed the Plane and its sequel, accordingly, as Mother, I Missed the Plane Again. The More Idiotic the Better was the Brazilian title of Wayne’s World and — best of all — White Men Can ’ t Jump appeared in Spain as White Men Don’t Know How to Stick It In. In Spain, where I grew up, they never use a thumb tack if there is a nail and a sledgehammer around.
    Then there are the running jokes. We decide that Mario — who says goodbye on roadside billboards for nearly an hour out of Broken Hill — is an early Bond villain in the avuncular style of Joseph Wiseman in Dr No or Gert Frobe in Goldfinger, and that the reason he had an eagle in his fridge is that it was being implanted with a transmitter device broadcasting through the Telecom towers which punctuate the rolling outback.
    Apart from the Widelux camera he