Tanked up and ready to shock

TANK Girl is a post-apocalyptic comic book heroine. She beats up her friends, swears, spits, smokes, wears brassieres that are too small, and has regular sex with a half-kangaroo. Created by two unemployed artists in Worthing, England, six years ago, grotty tattooed Tank Girl isn't exactly a match with politically-correct Hollywood. Or is she? Tank Girl has been made into a US$30 million motion picture spectacular, the first project rather riskily green-lighted by the new top brass at MGM/UA. Lori Petty (A League of Their Own) was cast to play the foul-mouthed desert-stormtrooper, after British actress Emily Lloyd baulked at having her head shaved. The half-kangaroo boyfriend and his mates ('Rippers', in Tank Girl vernacular) were created by Hollywood's special effects king Stan Winston (Jurassic Park). He even supplied an 'anatomically correct' specimen, for a love scene, which caused horror at the studio. 'I don't know why they cut it, because it wasn't humping and thumping and stuff,' says director Rachel Talalay. 'But there were murmurings of bestiality.' However, the studio didn't flinch at either the cost of the casting - rapper Ice T as the lead Ripper, Malcolm McDowell as the villain - or the soundtrack, with Hole's Courtney Love weighing in to arrange tracks from Bjork, Belly and The Magnificent Bastards. Why the enthusiasm? Everybody is in it because they believe Tank Girl will become the female Arnold Schwarzenegger ('A Rambo with breasts', as the movie was pitched), even though nobody in America knows who she is. Not even one single member of the cast was familiar with Tank Girl before they read the script, and Talalay admits 'I don't think Ice T really knew what he had signed on to do until we started shooting'. Tank Girl was created by Steve Dillon and Brett Ewins for Deadline magazine in 1988; she was instantly hailed as an underground phenomenon. She became a lesbian icon; the strip was optioned by Penguin; Wrangler Jeans paid an undisclosed fee to use her in their ads; and she was eventually credited as the inspiration for 'Bad Girl Fashion' (shaven heads, body piercing, tattoos). Although Dark Horse Comics publishes the Tank Girl strips in America, they only sell 16,000 copies per issue. And while that's successful for an underground comic, it certainly isn't going to propel any movie to the top of the box office charts. Talalay acknowledges that changes have been made to Tank Girl. 'On one level we're absolutely faithful to the strip, but on another the fans will say it's not violent enough, and the purists will say it's been Hollywood-ised. In terms of it being an underground, subversive thing, there was no way we could do that for this kind of money.' 'I hope the people who read the comics like her, but nothing can match up to your imagination and I hope they know that,' says Petty. 'It's a comic. It's not supposed to be taken seriously,' adds Talalay. 'I think we can get an audience. We didn't spend this amount of time and money to make it a cult thing.' In Tank Girl the movie, the action is set in 2033 after a wayward comet has struck the Earth and depleted the water supply (appropriately, the movie was shot in a copper mine in arid Tuscon, Arizona, a mere 130 degrees in the shade, for an almost-unbearable 65 days). Tank Girl sees her closest friends murdered by the evil Department of Water, led by Malcolm McDowell. She discovers her violent side, steals a tank, makes friends with a timid engineer (Jet Girl, played by Australian actress Naomi Watts), and takes on the Department of Water single-handed. En route to her showdown with the electronically-enhanced McDowell, she encounters the band of Rippers, gets to sing a Broadway-style Cole Porter number in a brothel (owned by Iggy Pop), and goes through 27 costume changes while cursing her way across the desert. Even though she has been toned down for the big-screen, Tank Girl's 'liberated' attitude towards violence and sexuality may prove a stumbling block in her search for a wide audience. 'Tank Girl has a large gay following and a certain ambiguity,' says Petty, who attracts the same kind of attention off-screen. 'That's what I like about her but I'm not sure everybody else will. 'The movie could become a phenomenon, or it could crash and burn and nobody will see it. But I like those odds. I know I put my all into it, and normally you're rewarded for that.' Lori Petty fought tooth and nail to get her role in Tank Girl. Passed over initially in favour of Emily Lloyd, she was waiting in the wings when the call finally came through. 'I'm legally obligated not to say anything about what happened with Emily,' says Talalay, who has produced two John Waters movies and directed Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. 'But it became clear that she didn't want to do the part. Two to three weeks before production started, things blew up to the point where I went to the studio and said we couldn't make this movie with her. 'We were lucky to have Lori waiting in the wings. Lori is Tank Girl. She's very unconventional and very, very wild. She's not your normal Hollywood star in any way.' 'When I auditioned, I just knew I was Tank Girl,' says Petty. 'And when I didn't get the movie, I thought 'they're insane, this movie just isn't going to happen because I'm not Tank Girl'.' She later appeared on the set for her first day brandishing a razor, demanding of Talalay: 'Where do you want me?.' Se laughs: 'I couldn't wait to get my hair shaved, it was one of the main attractions of the role.' But it's a far cry from her upbringing: Petty's father is a pentecostal minister. 'I think he'll like Tank Girl,' she says. 'But he asked could he bring his friends from the church and I said no.' And the shoot was demanding, to say the least. 'I did most of my own stunts, because you can tell the difference,' says Petty. 'And I have a million battle scars to prove it. I lost the top off one finger.' Now the success of what producer Richard Lewis calls 'as female empowerment movie; Mad Max meets Mae West' rests on her shoulders. But Talalay is a little more nervous. 'It all depends on how hip you are, I suppose. It's for an MTV crowd in a way. But this is a character I understand, she's someone I wish I could be,' she said. 'She wouldn't be nervous about opening a US$30 million movie and neither should I. But real life just isn't as easy as that . . .' Tank Girl will be released in Hong Kong later this summer.