Muriel's Wedding [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Muriel's Wedding was written in desperation. For over eight years I struggled to get my first feature film made and I'd come close a number of times. I directed a telemovie in the mid-eighties which I'd hoped would lead to more films. It didn't. I was removed from the production and it was reçut and remixed. It turned up four years later on television in non-ratings period. Then there was the script that made it as far as pre-production. The crew was hired and I was in the middle of casting, when suddenly the money wasn't there any more. Our mysterious Greek shipping tycoons never did sign the appropriate contracts and probably never planned to. This left me with an empty bank account (Do first-time directors every get paid?), a lot of disappointed actors and the feehng that perhaps I should be thinking about a career change. A change to what I didn't know. I decided to take one last shot at it and write about something I by now knew intimately: failure. I'd sit in a coffee shop that made great cheap cappuccino and report into a notebook the details of my Ufe of poverty. I hoped that one day a story or a character would emerge from these random jottings, somehow giving it all meaning. Across the road from the coffee shop was a bridalwear store called -1 swear - Cinderellas. I would watch the young girls enter the store looking non-descript in their everyday clothes and then see them appear in the front window transformed into brides. Every hour I watched somebody's dream come true. I was aware that though Cinderellas looked open to all young girls, it wasn't. It was a club meant for the engaged only. I started to plot a way for one of the unchosen to invade the world of the privileged few. Why shouldn't every woman have the opportunity to Uve out the fantasy that she has been tempted with since childhood? Why should she be denied the princess experience just because the prince was late in coming? The idea was born of a girl who invades this world going from store to store in a city trying on bridal gowns, inventing