Feeling Sexy

MAKING A FILM WITH DAVIDA ALLEN
by Glenys Rowe

I met Davida Allen by chance ten years ago. By a strange series of events, I walked into her house in South East rural Queensland, 50 minutes from Brisbane, seemingly light years from civilisation -and there before me on the walls of a huge grey besser brick farmhouse was the most extraordinary storyboard I had ever seen. They were Davida's painting of course, fabulously rich images, with great black scrawls of text carved into the canvas. I'd never seen anything so Eisensteinian.
Each image revealed a concept, then the scrawled text on that image spelled out a counterpoint concept to that image, and then just like in Eisenstein's theory of montage, the culmination of both was a third concept produced in the mind of the viewer, me. I was dazzled by the power of them, and within a few minutes dazzled by the dynamism of Davida. "I want to make a movie," she said.
"About all this" she said waving her hands around the walls. All this, in glorious, lurid tones, was the battle between the creative and the domestic, sex and love in married life, children and having the very life sucked out of you - all very elemental stuff and peculiarly, because I had never seen such narrative paintings, all immediately graspable in the pictures on the wall.
I asked "Have you got a script?"
She said "What's a script?"
We spent the next eight years working on it.
The first version of the script, an impossible mini series length, metamorphosed into a novel and was published by Simon and Schuster, under the title "The Autobiography of Vicki Myers". So it wasn't a fruitless eight years. Nothing that Davida does is. She is a 'winner' in every sense of the word. She paints a picture and wins the Archibald. She writes a novel and it gets published. She writes a film script and SBS buy it.
In the eight years that we worked on Feeling Sexy, Davida had three sell-out exhibitions, her mother died, she was the receptionist and cleaner in her husbands medical practice, she looked after four daughters and her mentally retarded brother, had three sell out exhibitions and still managed to exhaust not one but two script editors! She is a powerhouse of energy, and has all the tenacity, bull headedness and stamina that I have observed in other successful directors. Working with her has been the most rewarding relationship of my professional life.
We started preproduction in Brisbane working out of the old Peters Ice Cream Factory in West End, a marvelous old industrial site that provided rehearsal areas, production office space, art department studios and we even shot some pick up scenes there after one location was pulled down before we finished shooting! (now there's a challenge for the art department!)
The shoot lasted five weeks, most of which was spent in the home of a Brisbane housepainter and his wife who rather too casually perhaps, agreed to move to a hotel for the duration of our shoot. Coincidentally our DOP had lived in the same house when he was a uni student in Brisbane some fifteen years earlier. Davida painted the walls of the 'blue room' herself, one lunchtime during the shoot. She couldn't bear for anyone else to do it!
And in the tradition of all low budget movies, Davida's daughters, brother in law and friends helped out as extras in the film, the voices of the Producer, the Executive Producer and Associate Producer can all be heard on the soundtrack and the sexy Art School student, John Donatiu, was 'discovered' working in Le Scoops ice cream parlour by the Third Assistant Director!
We used twin babies and toddlers to play the parts of Vicki's children in the film.
W.C. Fields was right, and I think it was with a measure of relief that Davida has decided that her next film will be about living with teenagers. They will at least take directions sometimes and you don't have to stop to breastfeed them in the middle of a shot!
Postproduction happened in Sydney with the first release print coming out of the lab on January 15 1998.

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