Australia (Baz Luhrmann, 2008)

[Lino]

We have a name! More info here.

[Cinesimilitude]

The description on IMDB is quite lackluster, But I'm sure this will be great. I love every Luhrmann film so far, hopefully this won't be any different.

[Cinetwist]

I love Baz Luhrmann, but does anyone know why he's so inactive? What does he do with all his time?

Good to hear that he might be working again. Wasn't his last project cancelled because it was on Alexander the Great and Stone got his picture going first? Luhrmann's most certainly wouldn't have been any less camp but it would have undoubtedly been better, or at least more interesting.

[Antoine Doinel]

He directed that Nicole Kidman Chanel No. 5 ad a couple of years ago.

According to IMDB the budget for this fim is $100 million so I would imagine that even with the success of Moulin Rouge lining up investors took some time.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

The L.A. Daily News interviews Luhrmann.

[Barmy]

Should be interesting, but God knows why producers/investors were willing to cough up $100 million for this. Does Joe Sixpack really care about Australia? Nicole has been in a series of disappointments. Hugh Jackman is no Russell Crowe. Anyway, it's always fun to see producers waste money.

[Antoine Doinel]

An interview with Baz:

Luhrmann's landscapes
Aussie filmmaker heads for brutal land down under to make his new 'Australia'
By Rob Lowman, Entertainment Editor
Article Last Updated: 02/03/2007 06:35:50 PM PST

When last we saw Baz Luhrmann, five years ago, he was undergoing a dizzying Oscar whirl because his dizzying "Moulin Rouge" had eight nominations.

Except for a short sojourn in 2003 to our shores to annoy some opera fans while delighting others with his hipster version of "La Boheme," with its hunky guys and sexy gals, the Australian filmmaker has pretty much been down under. An attempt to do a biopic of Alexander the Great went by the wayside when Oliver Stone beat him to it.

Now he's releasing a 10th-anniversary special musical edition DVD of his "Romeo + Juliet," one of the films in his "Red Curtain Trilogy," just as he's about to start filming an epic big-budget romantic saga called - yes - "Australia," starring all Aus-sies, most notably leads Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

We recently got ahold of Luhrmann, just before he headed to the wilds of the bush. It was Australia Day, appropriately enough, complete with the local air force flying overhead. During our conversation, the 44-year-old director talked about a shift in his filmmaking from the rapid editing of his "Red Curtain" trio to the big landscapes of films such as "Giant." The change reflects his new family life (he has two children) with
his wife, costume designer Catherine Martin, whom he calls CM.

It's been quite awhile since you made a film.

So you're basically asking me where I've been. I'm about to shoot "Australia." We've been on it for a number of years. It's a fundamental shift from all those films that belonged to the "Red Curtain Trilogy." Those films came from an interpretation of the Hollywood musical. This really comes from the love of big romances that use landscapes to tell stories.

I've got to be really careful not to say I'm making "Gone With the Wind" or "Giant" or "Lawrence of Arabia." But those films share something in that they take a heightened emotional story and use the landscape to kind of amplify it. They're mythological pieces, and that's what I'm making.

You told me after you made "Moulin Rouge" you might make a small psychological drama, but I guess you didn't do that.

Actually ... no I didn't do that. We we're pursuing "Alexander" as we did "La Boheme." ... But we came to a point where we had to race or not race. It's nothing against Oliver. I have great respect for him. The world had changed, and we have changed. CM and I were buried away from public life. ... Having children was a natural gear change, and the work we were doing has come out of that. So I suppose having children is a psychological drama. It was for us.

How does that relate to your new film?

Having children is a journey in itself, but it's having an immediate effect on the work I'm doing. You can't not be affected by that. ... The film "Australia," set in the '30s, is about a woman who thinks that it's all over, thinks that she can't feel anymore. And she's trapped out in the far deserts of northern Australia.

Then she gets involved with a rough-hewed cowboy played by Hugh Jackman, and in the quest they go on, she discovers that her life can be reborn. She chooses to feel, but it takes a degree of risk.

We relate to that in our own lives. That's the best you can hope for - to find what you're dealing with in your own life in the work you're creating.

In your commentary on "R+J," you said everything now looked slow.

The irony is that many of the choices we made in "R+J" are so commonplace today that they are not even remarkable. ... In the U.S., it was interpreted and sold as an MTV "Romeo + Juliet," but the film was created on a lot of academic research on what the Elizabethan stage was. ... Did Shake-speare use pop music on stage? Yes. Did he swing wildly from in-your-face comedy to tragedy? Yes. Did he grab-bag quotes from topical things that were happening? Yes.

You also made some interesting casting choices.

"R+J" really burst out in a really good place - Leonardo (DiCaprio) and Claire (Danes) and John Leguizamo and Jamie Kennedy and all those young fellows. Whether people agree or disagree about how the material was interpreted, it's kind of a moot point because the story lives. In fact, it's time for someone else to do it now. It's 10 years old. It's time for someone else to interpret it for a new generation.

You did some very inventive things musically with "Moulin Rouge" and "R+J." Are you going to go with a traditional score for "Australia"?

I guess in the same way "Out of Africa" had a very romantic score. John Barry brilliantly took indigenous music and didn't just layer it in. He interpreted it. That is what we're going for in this film.

"Australia" ends when the attack force that hit Pearl Harbor came down and wiped out the northern city of Darwin. At the time there was a lot of country-and-western influences from America in the music, a lot of folk influences, Hawaiian influences and jazz band music was the rage. But yet it will be a rather lush romantic score.

The "R+J" set in Mexico looked like it was adventure.

It was like "Fitzcarraldo" meets the Rolling Stones tour in the '60s. It was far-out whether it was hurricanes or kidnappings. It was very intense.

You're in Australia for your new shoot, so you should be on safer ground.

I don't know. Where we're shooting is some of the most brutal landscapes in the world. And we're doing something people really don't do anymore. We're going out in tents. ... It's going to be a test.

But you got some great actors again. Hugh Jackman ...

He's always really good, but he's really going into new territory. There's something real Clint Eastwood about him at the moment.

Will you disappear after this film?

I have more projects than I'll ever live long enough to do. But I am driving on. I usually take many years to make a film, but now that we have our children, CM and I will be as creative as we can for the next 10 years, and then we might disappear again. Finally become recluses.

[miless]

I love Baz Luhrmann, but does anyone know why he's so inactive? What does he do with all his time?

he directs a lot of theatre and opera... (I believe he recently did an updated La Boheme on Broadway)

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Should be interesting, but God knows why producers/investors were willing to cough up $100 million for this. Does Joe Sixpack really care about Australia? Nicole has been in a series of disappointments. Hugh Jackman is no Russell Crowe. Anyway, it's always fun to see producers waste money.

Well, this could be the film that resurrects Kidman's career and push Jackman onto the same level as Crowe. At any rate, I'm sure a lot will be riding on this film but as you say, does the average filmgoer really care about all this? Hard to say -- it should be interesting to see how they market this film.

[Barmy]

Did Nicole drop out of Wong's movie for this?

[Antoine Doinel]

No, she dropped out of My Blueberry Nights to help her husband through rehab.

[marty]

No, she dropped out of My Blueberry Nights to help her husband through rehab.

Which, by the way, was not for alcohol addiction but cocaine. This has been conveniently left out of the press releases.

[Jeff]

No, she dropped out of My Blueberry Nights to help her husband through rehab.

It was actually Lady From Shanghai that she was going to do with Wong. She didn't want to be out of the country while her husband was dealing with that. Wong said that without Kidman, there is no reason to do it.

[Antoine Doinel]

New pic.

[Magic Hate Ball]

New pic.

Why does Hugh Jackman's face look so small?

[Jeff]

Luhrmann is working with Apple to do a series of featurettes as podcasts, which apparently serves some educational purpose. What I learned from this thing is that Australia is going to be gorgeous. Mandy Walker has an Academy Award nomination in the bag. Would she be the first woman to be so honored? You can subscribe to the podcast here.

Great movies are full of adventure, and Australia, the next film from Oscar-nominated director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!, William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet), is no exception. But making a movie is an even bigger adventure—an adventure in creativity—and with the Apple Set to Screen Series, you can be a part of it.

Every few weeks through October, a new podcast episode from Baz and his production team will introduce you to another aspect of moviemaking, starting with on-set still photography, then moving on to costume design, cinematography, scoring, and more. You’ll get insights from the artists at work on Australia, watch them in action, view footage the rest of the world hasn’t seen yet, and follow along as the movie comes together.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

More new pics. Just scroll down to the bottom.

Some more pics.

[Cde.]

Trailer.

[Barmy]

That trailer sucks vegemite. Poor Nicole.

[rs98762001]

Agreed. Couldn't figure out if it was meant to be serious or a joke. It's like one of the spoof Best Film trailers in The Naked Gun 3's Oscar ceremony.

[Barmy]

Ha. I had the same reaction--did someone find some footage and turn it into an EPIC TRAILER parody. There is very little Bazism in there. I liked Nicole in Moulin Rouge a lot. In this trailer she's like a robotic Stepford Wife.

[Matt]

I dunno. It looks exactly like the kind of Selznickian epic (with all the grandeur and camp that implies) that he's been promising all along.

There is very little Bazism in there.

Apart from the fact that no shot lasts longer than 0.3 seconds, right?

[Cde.]

I have to agree with the sentiments in this thread. The trailer is really, really bad. Nicole needs to drop the mannerisms we see (EDIT: and hear!) at the start. Talk about irritating.

No shot lasts longer than 0.3 seconds, but there's as much attempted Malickism as Bazism in that trailer, and it's not pulled off very well. I know this is the point of a Baz film, and I've enjoyed his other work to varying degrees, but all of the natural (colour corrected to hell) photography is just so...crass.

[Antoine Doinel]

The film looks like it could be good, but Kidman's voiceover narration is awful. My girlfriend happened to walk by as I watching the trailer and she asked if it was another Golden Compass film - that's how generic Kidman's performances are getting these days.

Also curious that Hugh Jackman gets about one second of screen time in the entire trailer.

[Bananafish]

Ecstasy of Gold callback + hands running over the plant stalks + vapid color corrected to all hell grand landscape photography + Baz = no thanks.