Bride and GloomJacqui TaffelNovember 6, 2006On the set of Stepfather of the Bride, it's a cold, grey, blowy day. The wedding is being shot in the garden of a Sylvania Waters mansion but gusts and showers are making it difficult. "Sorry, guys - aborting. Run inside!" shouts the assistant director during a take. The cast and wedding-party extras crowd into the house, where bridesmaids rug up in fleecy dressing gowns and the hair and make-up woman runs around in damage-control mode.
Garry McDonald, who plays the father of the bride, is reliving his own daughter's wedding. "It was shocking weather," he says. "Kate had a string quartet come to play and there were big gusts of wind. The cello fell over and smashed; the woman was distraught."
Everyone, it seems, has a wedding story. William McInnes, playing the title role of stepfather, "sort of eloped" with his wife, filmmaker Sarah Watt, who nearly choked on some confetti at their wedding. McInnes also claims his sister once went to a wedding dressed as a big rabbit, with her boyfriend as a gorilla, thinking it was fancy dress, only to find they'd been misinformed. "It was the groom's idea of a joke," McInnes says, though the whole story could be his idea of a joke - the actor is renowned for his pranks and tall stories.
Huddled in a tent that does little to shelter the crew, writer Geoffrey Atherden describes a posh nuptial event he attended in London, where waiters passed around hors d'oeuvres served on top of goldfish bowls on small antique chairs. It's a bizarre image, defying numerous laws, including physics, logic and taste, but he swears it's true.
Sadly, it was too over-the-top to include in his screenplay about tying the knot in Sydney. Nevertheless, the ABC telemovie was inspired by his own experiences and observations.
"There are people mortgaging their houses to pay for weddings and spending $20,000 just on the video," he says, "which seems extraordinary to me but that's certainly what's happening."
Then there's the issue of modern social complexity. "It's not just the parents of the bride and groom. It's the exes and step-parents and former and current lovers. It's that complicated family structure that makes it really hard to work out who to invite and who to sit where."
Atherden should know, being the stepfather of his second wife's daughter, who got married in their garden. "Not that this script is about my daughter's wedding or our family," he says, but it made him aware of his slightly odd position. "I found it difficult at times because I'm there with the mother of the bride but I'm not in the same position as the father of the bride, and to all those relatives, I'm an outsider."
So he created another family with its own outsider. "I think that little bit of distance is one of the keys in this story for William McInnes's character."
McInnes plays Daniel, married to his second wife, Sophie (Noni Hazlehurst), whose daughter Skye (Lucy Taylor) is marrying Lachlan (Leon Ford). Also in the mix are Daniel's son, Jack (Alex Dimitriades), Sophie's sister, Catriona (Georgie Parker), Skye's father, Ari (McDonald), and his third wife, Pamela (Ally Fowler), plus Lachlan's divorced parents and their respective partners.
As the narrator, it's Daniel's task to introduce all these people, which he does with the aid of animated drawings and lots of arrows. Using animation in live-action films seems to have become a popular technique. Atherden mentions Run Lola Run, and animation was used to great effect in Look Both Ways, a film written and directed by Watt, who survived the confetti-choking incident.
For Atherden, animation was a helpful storytelling tool. "Rather than having to write scenes from the past, flashbacks, it's a very easy way to sum people up, who they are and what their relationship is."
Atherden's first big success writing for television was the darkly hilarious Mother and Son. Then there was Grass Roots, the sharply observed series about a local council. Stepfather of the Bride is a more gentle comic drama that covers three generations of marriage, as Atherden explains: "The grandparents who have stuck it out to the bitter end, their children who have married and divorced and married and divorced, and their children who are determined they're not going to make the mistake of either of those generations."
The telemovie was commissioned by Sue Masters for Channel Ten but was still in a queue for production (always the bridesmaid, never the bride) when Scott Meek, then head of drama at the ABC, expressed interest. Atherden had the delicate task of asking Ten to let go, despite its investment. "I didn't have a definite from Scott," he says. "He just said once it was free he would talk to Sandra Levy, who was still at the ABC at that point. I thought it was a risk worth taking." He salutes Masters for agreeing. "I think she's generous in that her ambition is to see something made rather than possess it."
As the wedding shoot continues at Sylvania Waters, everyone's patience and endurance is tested. However, it is amusing to watch male cast members, including Ford, McInnes and Dimitriades, cope with what is usually a female concern - their skirts blowing up in the wind. The groom is Scottish, so they're all wearing kilts. "What you need is a good, heavy sporran," Atherden comments from the sidelines.
Hazlehurst, who looks elegant as the bride's mother despite the breeze, says one of Atherden's talents as a writer is recognising life's absurdity. "He understands that something tragic one minute can be funny the next, so his comedy is very natural, not forced."
Hazlehurst's character, Sophie, takes one of the subtlest journeys of the story. Some people might wonder what she's worried about, living in a nice house, wearing nice clothes and married to a nice bloke who happens to look like McInnes. In fact, Hazlehurst asked for some small script changes, which the writer was happy to accommodate.
"I think you have to be very careful when you're playing someone middle class and reasonably well-off and yet not happy," she says. "I wanted it to be clear that she was really at a crossroads in her life. She had never been anything but a mother or a daughter or a wife ... and she just wonders whether there's something she might have missed that could be important to her as a person."
The actress, who has been married three times (including "the full white catastrophe" at 21), says she doesn't play characters she can't relate to personally.
"I did relate to her need to redefine herself in some way because I think we all go through that in various stages of our lives," she says. "And I think a lot of women in their 50s do feel, 'Is that all there is? Am I never going to have that wild abandon again or that fluttering feeling of love?' "
She also feels for the relationship between mother and daughter, wanting to provide the dream wedding despite reservations. "I personally think the whole wedding industry is ridiculous but I understand the need to be princess for a day."
The rain finally holds off long enough to film the fictional wedding, though the wind still whips the bride's veil and blasts rose petal confetti horizontally. Then, just like the real thing, the guests gather for a group photo, jockeying for position. Snap! Another wedding story is ready to be told.
Stepfather of the Bride airs on the ABC on Sunday at 8.30pm
