Looking back on the making of Muriel’s Wedding
With next Sunday marking 25 years since the release of Muriel’s Wedding, Rachel Griffiths takes us inside the movie that put her and Toni Collette on the map.
Stellar
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Rhonda Epinstalk was my first film role — and while, on one hand, I’d say I was the best person to play her, that doesn’t necessarily mean I knew I could pull her off. The whole thing was kind of an accident.
I’d been offered a new role on The Flying Doctors, and decided not to take it in favour of continuing to do regional community theatre, which mystified everyone from my agent to the Nine Network. You just didn’t do that.
But among casting agents, I was suddenly quite hot and unconventional, because I’d passed on this quite conventional opportunity.
Yet I kept reading these parts that were all about squeezing into pencil skirts and heels, and taking your clothes off with Jeremy Sims at 7.30pm on TV.
I didn’t think there was a place for my kookiness. Then this script came along, and I truly felt I was meant to rescue Muriel from a fate worse than death.
Toni was still a baby when we met in 1994.
She was five years my junior, and I was so astounded by her confidence. This girl left NIDA. Nobody leaves NIDA! We were sharing a very particular baptism, and the way she handled it was such a mystery to me.
I had no view, at the time, to the broader context of what we were making. All I could do was trust that if [director] P.J. Hogan laughed, it meant that something had landed.
There were a couple of days where I knew I didn’t nail it — in fact, I just worked with assistant director Johnny Martin on my new ABC series Total Control.
He also worked on Muriel, and he told me I was known on set as the girl who nailed it in rehearsals... and never managed to capture it again on film.
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We rehearsed the sh*t out of the ‘Waterloo’ number, and filming that was truly one of the best days of my life. It must be like when you’re in a musical and you know the joy is landing. Toni and I loved it — it’s peak hamming.
The night Toni and I sang ‘Fernando’ to each other was another one of my greatest days at the office, so to speak.
Rhonda is so intensely loyal, and a key delicacy of that character is that she also intensely refuses to “own” Muriel. Rhonda operates outside the way that girls tend to organise themselves; I think Rhonda could be friends with somebody on the spectrum and it wouldn’t even occur to her that other people might think they’re weird.
She’d bring the overweight mute home and say, “Mum, isn’t she great?”
Muriel isn’t a pet project to Rhonda; that’s not how she rolls. And in one scene, she says, “You’re not nothing, you’re amazing.” It’s bewildering to her that anyone could see Muriel in any other way. When I went to see the musical version of Muriel’s Wedding and this scene played out, I had tears rolling down my face.
I’m in, like, row F and realise that everyone in front of me has turned around to watch me as I’m bawling. It was very embarrassing — and very surreal.
P.J. set this movie during its time — in the ’90s — but really, he was remembering his childhood in the ’70s and ’80s. And there was a really dark kind of threat implicit in that ’70s bikini culture — whether it existed in a fictional place like Porpoise Spit or in real-life Australian towns.
Puberty Blues had the same kind of coarseness about it. Or I could tell you it was just Queensland, and I say that as a native, by the way!
But I do think P.J. was hugely ahead of his time with this movie. The girls in this story aren’t objectified in any way.
They have full hearts, lives and ambitions, and that’s surely kept this film more relevant than most from its period. You know, a Pretty In Pink or a John Waters movie might hold up similarly.
It’s not surprising he’s married to Jocelyn Moorhouse. He’s a guy who truly loves and understands women — and not only if they’re skinny or perfect or passive, or if they have an appetite for him or other men. He loves women who aren’t defined by that.
And the stuff around mental health in this movie, all of that emotional family abuse... that plays even louder in the musical adaptation today.
When I saw the show in Melbourne, you could hear a pin drop in the room. Back when we were making the movie, I don’t even think the phrase “emotional abuse” existed as a thing, where we would say, “He’s emotionally abusing her.”
Yes, we understood it intrinsically, that it was sad and that Muriel’s mum was tragic. But we see it so differently now, the incredible loneliness of this woman not being able to talk or even give words to her own state of being. Now we look at it and say, “Oh my god, he’s totally gaslighting you.”
And that makes it all the more exquisitely painful to watch, in a way.
When I started pulling together a team to work on my new Michelle Payne biopic Ride Like A Girl, I very consciously chose Martin McGrath, who was the cinematographer on Muriel’s Wedding.
Because I knew he could work in that very warm, colourful way — he could shift tone, get the comedy and also take the audience someplace else with comfort.
This was my first time in the director’s chair, and it was wildly ambitious — I bit off a lot, I had to chew hard. It’s huge and it’s selfish and it requires absolutely everything of you.
I loved the challenge, even if I’m not sure I imagined what the weight of it would be.
But I made sure to have a playful attitude, which was something else I learnt on the set of Muriel’s Wedding.
When the director truly behaves like your audience, it’s great. To hear them laugh after they say “cut!”, or simply when you’ve f*cked up, to see them affected by choices you’ve made, to have them not make such a big deal out of every little thing... all of my best work has been with directors that have that quality.
That said, going back to being an actor with my name on a door and turning up to set now sounds like the easiest job in the world.