The movie magician

November 01, 2008

The most expensive Australian film ever made is due out in weeks -- and it's still not finished. So what exactly does Baz Luhrmann have up his sleeve? Christine Jackman reports.

The Weekend Australian Magazine November 1-2, 2008

Baz Luhrmann is living in a mental asylum - and the clock is ticking. Across the globe in another time zone, studio executives are chewing their nails as they fret about bottom lines and box-office takes, for Luhrmann's latest project, the somewhat cheekily titled Australia, is already setting the sorts of records that make Hollywood's money men nervous. The longest shoot in 20th Century Fox's formidable history of movie-making. The most expensive Australian film ever made.

With an estimated budget of $130 million and rising, the alarm bells must be starting to sound as shrill as the ker-ching! of a thousand cash registers. Consider this: if Australia runs close to the 170 minutes that has been reported in the media, Luhrmann's production company, Bazmark, will have spent roughly three-quarters of a million dollars of other people's money for every minute of screen time. Ker-ching!

But even that's a big if, and therein lies the real problem. Because, with its much-vaunted release date just weeks away, on November 26, nobody has seen a final print of the film. Why? Because one doesn't exist. Ker-ching! Ker-ching!!

"We always thought it was extremely precarious," Luhrmann admits. "We're going to give it our all and at the moment it's an absolutely real date. But I would not be truthful if I didn't say it's a little like landing a jumbo jet on an aircraft carrier in a storm…

"The film still hasn't, in a sense, come together. I like to work in such a way that I can be open to the evolution of the story and the world we're living in. I shoot in a way that I can respond and evolve to the world I'm in and the film I'm feeling as it draws to its conclusion. So it's a constant quest and journey - and that isn't over."

And so Luhrmann is holed up in the asylum - literally. Built in the 1880s, the 30-room Italianate mansion in Sydney's Darlinghurst that serves as home for Luhrmann's immediate family and base for the Bazmark operation was originally the official residence of the governor of the Sydney jail before becoming a psychiatric hospital for several years.

When Luhrmann and his wife and creative partner, Catherine Martin, known universally as "CM", moved into the sprawling sandstone villa in the late 1990s, christening it the House of Iona, they quickly suspected some of the more wayward spirits from that time had never left; in 2001 CM told a journalist that she believed a female ghost often accompanied her around Iona, switching off lights and closing doors. And last year there were reports the couple had sold three gilt mirrors on the advice of a "ghostbuster" who had suggested the antiques might be responsible for enticing the spirits of an elderly man and a young girl back from the netherworld.

But as I cross Iona's threshold to meet Luhrmann, a different sort of craziness prevails. To borrow from another great film - and, by his own admission, Luhrmann does that a lot - I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more, Toto. (Days later, I discover Luhrmann prefaces his production notes for Australia with another Wizard of Oz reference: "Somewhere over the rainbow / Way up high / There's a land that I heard of / Once in a lullaby.")

Here, in the ornate foyer, a battered pair of R.M. Williams boots and a copy of Vogue lie abandoned beside a plush red sofa; there, a floppy Mexican hat has been tossed beside a baseball cap on the antique hatstand by the door. A grand piano that no doubt once enjoyed pride of place in the foyer now sulks haughtily behind a dressmaker's dummy and a clothes rack bulging with plastic-wrapped costumes. A child's black bicycle, festooned with a yellow bow, has been abandoned in a corner. And at the far end of the room a statue of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god, covered in floral wreaths, casts a resigned eye over the barely contained chaos.

So, too, do the publicists - and Australia has a phalanx of them, including those who work for Bazmark and those drawn from Fox's ranks. Already this interview has been scheduled, cancelled and rescheduled. And then cancelled and rescheduled again. Luhrmann, they say, is working around the clock on post-production, tweaking visual effects and vetting musical mixes, and at some point, surely, the man has to sleep as well. Skittish personal assistants are watching the time, too, knowing their boss is likely to pull another all-nighter tonight. And although Hollywood is a long way away, those alarm bells are starting to sound awfully loud. Ker-ching!!!

Then Luhrmann arrives, and the mad whirl stops. Or rather, as he folds himself into a leather Chesterfield and locks his intense focus on this conversation as if it is the only task at hand, it all begins to make sense. Whether you call it making a movie or weaving a dream, what appears to the rest of us to be a crazy-making collision of commercial imperatives and creative energies is as familiar as oxygen, as natural as breathing, to Luhrmann and his clan. "We're a little circus family," he says serenely of himself, CM and their children, Lillian (Lilly), five, and William, three. "We live in storytelling. That's ordinary to us, not extraordinary … Our life and our creativity is one; we can't separate them."

* * *

T.S. ELIOT'S PRUFROCK measured out his life in coffee spoons, but after a boyhood spent in Herons Creek, a fly spot on the map 30km southwest of Port Macquarie, NSW, the man born Mark Anthony Luhrmann prefers the rhythm of artistic projects. "My life has been meted out in the creative works," he says. "It was the time of La Bohème; it was the time we did Chanel (an ad for the fragrance, starring Nicole Kidman), the time of Romeo and Juliet, of Strictly Ballroom, Midsummer Night's Dream. They are so inherent in the fabric of our lives that you lose concept of time itself.

"Apparently this film (Australia) has taken me four years - but it feels like yesterday that I first went to Broome."

And so, to tell the story of the time of Australia, we must return first to the end of the time of Alexander - for the genesis of Luhrmann's latest epic can be found in the dust of his thwarted plans to shoot a film based on the life of Alexander the Great. Having secured the support of veteran producer Dino De Laurentiis, he and CM spent two years scouting in Morocco and Jordan when word filtered through that a competing project on the all-conquering king had been given the green light.

The choice was stark. Enter a game of Hollywood quick-draw in a bid to beat no less a rival than Oliver Stone to the screen - or walk away. Never one to be rushed in his pursuit of a dream, Luhrmann chose the latter. "At that time, for CM and I, our greatest creative vision was to have children," he says. "So we bowed out. We were living in Paris at the time; we returned and had our little girl and it was the most exquisite family time together for us."

When it comes to rolling the credits for that "creative vision", realised in the form of Lillian Amanda Luhrmann (international release date: October 10, 2003), the director is happy enough to give himself second billing. "For CM, it was the only thing in her life, like, 'Yeah, yeah, I design - but what I really want is a house and children'," he says of his wife, whose acute aesthetic eye had by then bagged her two Academy Awards. "I wasn't like that. But I'm a person who never wants to miss out on any adventure, even if I don't know what it's going to be … And when they came along, what completely rocked my world was … children are a parallel universe. It doesn't really change things for me, but it has enriched my life in ways I couldn't have imagined."

And more quickly than he could have expected. For as the couple hunkered down with baby Lilly in a "fantastic boho loft in Marais", on Paris's Right Bank, their talk turned naturally to where this child - and any more to come - would ultimately call home. "By then, we were living variously in New York, in Paris and here (in Sydney), but what about our children?" Luhrmann expands. "Who are they? Do they belong to that global network of children who are brought up in three countries?

"CM is crazy about Paris. She speaks marvellous French, and now so do my children. For me, New York is the centre of the world. Paris is for dreaming, London is for fun, Brazil is for dancing, but when it comes to home, it's Australia. It's where we come to be ourselves, to be resuscitated."

And so, just as one child had entered the world, another "creative vision" was conceived. Swept aside were the dusty maps of Ancient Greece and Macedonia, the thick volumes on Moroccan interiors and Turkish trade routes. Now, Luhrmann surrounded himself with "every Australian film ever made, every Australian historical book", discovering and rediscovering his culture and homeland: "To have all this Australiana in this place in Paris threw into relief just how far away we (Australians) are, and how unique we are, and how powerful it is to live on the edge of the world, in a really spiritual way."

Whether it is Christ wandering the desert for 40 days of soul-searching and temptation or Mad Max aiding a group of settlers under post-Apocalyptic siege, time spent in the wilderness has always occupied a special position in the human narrative, representing an opportunity for transformation and spiritual renewal. "It's a universal story, that there's an exotic place at the end of the world where you can be transformed by experience or by love," Luhrmann enthuses. "There's always been the faraway. And Australia, particularly the Top End, the Outback, remains the faraway of the faraway."

To illustrate, he cites Out of Africa. "As the film opens, the main character is breaking up with her lover and she is saying she has to get away: 'I'll go anywhere. America. Ceylon. I would even go to Australia … Well, perhaps not Australia.'" This is Luhrmann, impersonating Meryl Streep, portraying a Danish baroness. Trained as an actor, it turns out he still harbours a keen talent for mimicry; during our interview he will also channel a raucous Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning writer who collaborated with him on the script, an exquisitely understated Paul Keating, to whom the filmmaker offered styling and speech-making advice during the 1993 federal election, and even Nicole Kidman in the character of Australia's protagonist, Lady Sarah Ashley.

Kidman, on her third venture with Luhrmann following star turns in Moulin Rouge! and the subsequent, mini-Moulin ad for Chanel No 5, shares her director's vision. "I dreamt of making a film that had the passion and the weight of the films I grew up watching - Gone With The Wind, Dr Zhivago," she said in a recent interview. "When Baz and I first started speaking about this, seven years ago, I said there needed to be a film about our land that speaks on a much broader scale … To feel the air and see people ravaged by the elements, as hard as it is, it's exquisite."

Luhrmann picks up the thread: "If this were the 1950s or '60s or '70s, a story like this might have been set in Africa or the Middle East or Asia. But the contemporary realities of those places these days distract from the canvas of it. What's great about Australia is, it's still relatively misunderstood and still relatively adventurous to people from around the world … My (story) was always going to be about a mythological Australia, not a film about Australia. The word 'Australia' is a symbol to this woman, Lady Sarah Ashley, of a transforming relationship and change in her life she had in this country she had never heard of."

And so, the Luhrmann family circus packed up its caravan. It was time to farewell Paris and head to the faraway of the faraway.

* * *

"SOMETIMES WE HAVE TO GET LOST to find ourselves. Sometimes we gotta go walkabout." The world may have to mark time for several more weeks yet before it finally sees Australia, but in the meantime a good chunk of it should have heard this catchline from Tourism Australia's complementary promotional campaign, Walkabout. That's assuming the nation's PR people are investing our money more prudently than they did with the wrong-headed "Where the Bloody Hell Are You?" venture. This time around, Tourism Australia is betting $40 million that audiences in 22 major media markets worldwide will fall head-over-heels for Brandon Walters, the 11-year-old Aboriginal star of Australia, when he invites them to go walkabout in two 90-second featurettes created by the Bazmark team.

When federal Tourism Minister Martin Ferguson joined Tourism Australia's head honchos to launch the campaign last month, everyone was at pains to stress the ads were designed to stand alone, rather than rely on public awareness of Australia, or promote the film itself. But listening to Luhrmann reminisce about his time in the Kimberley, as he sits beneath a striking black-and-white photo of members of the Mirrawong clan, on whose land the set for the film's cattle station Faraway Downs was built, it is acutely evident that Australia and Walkabout share the same pedigree. Why? Because, as it turns out, the very first person to accept young Walters' invitation to go walkabout was Luhrmann himself.

"Brandon Walters was a very, very rare find," he explains. "The casting team had seen more than 700 boys (in order to cast Nullah, the mixed-race child to whom Sarah Ashley develops a maternal attachment), then Qantas brought 10 of them down here and we worked with them. When Brandon was identified (the next question was) how to work with this little boy, whose family had not been outside of northwest Australia?

"I don't think you can experience any place or any people unless you're forced to go outside your comfort zone, to be in their comfort zone. So the only way was to go with two of my associates on a quest with Brandon's family to their sacred lands, to live their life. And it was one of the great gifts of my life: to be with them hunting 'roo, to sit around the campfire, and play harmonica with (Broome-based band) the Pigram Brothers, to be spearfishing with them and to see one of my associates get almost eaten by a shark.

"All that excitement aside, to be there and, after the first day or so, to just be very centred. You just change your own perspective. The thing about walkabout, as I understand it, is that when you lose connection with yourself, you go walkabout. You leave your physical world behind and you find your other half - the other half of yourself - and you have a good talk until you're one again, and you go on with the journey of your life. That happened to me in the journey of this film. And it happens to Lady Sarah Ashley in the movie. It's a truth; it can happen to you here. So I was very happy to take the underlying idea of the film and communicate it to the world as a genuine invitation, and to have an indigenous child (make) that invitation… Hand on my heart, the greatest gift of this film has been my own evolved relationship with indigenous Australia."

Luhrmann hastens to add that he wove the Stolen Generation references into his story not as a response to any contemporary political debate about the issue, but simply to be true to what his own research had revealed about that part of Australia's history and social fabric. That said, he applauds the Rudd Government's apology earlier his year. "The simple act of doing that in a personal relationship of any kind is a starting point, not an end," he says. "What it does is release everybody from this story not being told, not being acknowledged, not being said."

In the film, Lady Sarah Ashley defies social convention by giving the orphaned Nullah a home. In return, he serves as "a catalyst who opens Sarah's heart and brings Sarah and the Drover (Hugh Jackman) together." The trio is torn apart as World War II breaks out, with Nullah taken to an island mission for half-caste children, which then comes under attack from the Japanese.

Of course, in reality the Stolen Generation was not comprised of half-caste children snatched from aristocratic Englishwomen. Luhrmann acknowledges as much, saying he wanted to highlight the injustice of the policy by placing a white, well-connected woman in the same heart-rending position as that endured by so many indigenous mothers of the time.

"One of the things I wanted to seed into the film was … to have someone seen as so high and mighty and privileged as Nicole Kidman, and her character Lady Sarah Ashley, with a child they loved like a mother. And to have them in a situation where the government was saying, 'For your own good we're going to take this child away from you' … And if in any tiny way this sweeping romance can contribute to the act of telling the story of something that actually happened in this country … to spark a dialogue about it … that will be a good thing."

* * *

IF Luhrmann didn't consciously court controversy with his indigenous themes, he knew he was waving a big red flag in its face with his choice of the film's title. When you live in a place where the national character is addicted to self-deprecation, actually swiping the country's name and slapping it on your personal blockbuster is a bit like hacking off Phar Lap's tail to make a wig for the school play.

The audacious idea was distilled from a heady brew of three parts "poor fella's rum" and one part pure Outback craziness, cooked up around a campfire one night when Luhrmann was sleeping rough in the Kimberley with acclaimed Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan.

"The writing process on this had been so exhausting that I'd worn writers out," Luhrmann explains by way of back-story. "At the time, I felt we were structurally heading in the right place (with the script) but I needed to reboot my own spiritual feelings about it. I loved Gould's Book of Fish; I thought Richard has this sort of Australian ability, like I try to get in the film, to mythologise and at the same time reveal a bigger truth."

So Luhrmann set out to convince the writer, whom he describes as "an Australian Hemingway", to come to far northwest Australia to help fine-tune the screenplay. There were just two problems. One was that Flanagan was at his beach shack on Bruny Island, a windswept clump of wilderness off the southeast tip of Tasmania that is home to 600-odd humans and several thousand penguins. The other was that the pair had never met.

Flanagan takes up the tale: "I started getting emails from my London agent, saying (Luhrmann) wanted to meet me. You get to a certain place in your career where you get that sort of stuff; all sorts of people wanting to meet you. It's Minnie Driver one day, Angelina Jolie the next. So I just ignored it. Then another one came, saying, 'He's flying to Hobart tomorrow morning.' So I had to shave and go up to town."

It was a match made not in heaven but, more appropriately, in the Australian faraway: the rugged woodsman of convict stock, who would prefer to go kayaking than schmooze movie types, and the big-picture man from a small town at the crossroads of nowhere. "I liked him very much," Flanagan says. "He was in a position where he could have gone to Hollywood and worked with the A-list, but instead he chose to continue to generate dangerous projects. It was a crazed and magnificent thing; he wanted to make an Australian blockbuster … and, having a taste for quixotic things, it appealed to me."

And so, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the pair headed for the horizon to see what new schemes they could cook up. Says Flanagan: "We were in the Kimberley, just drinking in all the crazy things you get in the Outback: the broken-down dreams, the madness, the characters. And one night we were having a few drinks and we got to talking about the title. I was saying I've always loved the way the Americans loved the largeness of their country, how they celebrate that in a way no other country does."

Suddenly, it seemed obvious. Australia! "It was too cheeky by half," says Flanagan. "But Baz loves anything audacious. The more disrespectful of power, the more he thrills in it."

The writer harbours no illusions about the high stakes they were playing for. "For me, the film was an invitation to go for broke, and it's opened up a world of emotion," Flanagan says. "But it's enormously brave of him. When you do something with this level of ambition, it's as likely to fail as it is to succeed."

Marinating as he does daily in cinematic references, Baz Luhrmann needs no reminding of that fact. The history of the silver screen is replete with stories of renegades chasing their dreams into the unknown, only to come to grief. Did somebody mention Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Recall that film's exquisite final scene as we cut to:

Butch and Sundance, crouched close together by a window, peering out toward the setting sun.

BUTCH: I got a great idea where we should go next.

SUNDANCE: Well, I don't want to hear it.

BUTCH: You'll change your mind once I tell you -

SUNDANCE: Shut up …

BUTCH: Australia.

Cut to Sundance. He looks at Butch.

BUTCH: I figures secretly you wanted to know so I told you: Australia…

SUNDANCE (exploding with everything he has left): Australia's no better than here!

BUTCH: That's all you know.

SUNDANCE: Name one thing.

BUTCH: They speak English in Australia.

SUNDANCE: They do?

BUTCH: That's right, smart guy, so we wouldn't be foreigners. And they ride horses. And they got thousands of miles to hide out in …

SUNDANCE: It's a long way, though, isn't it?

BUTCH (shouting it out): Everything always gotta be perfect with you!

SUNDANCE: I just don't wanna get there and find out it stinks, that's all.



Shot for a modest $US6 million, Butch Cassidy went on to earn more than $US100 million at the US box office when it was released by 20th Century Fox in 1969. Twenty-three years later, Strictly Ballroom, the project Luhrmann still describes as "the little film that could", did similar business - made for $4 million, it brought in $22 million at the Australian box office, and worldwide receipts have since added another $100 million - and caught the imagination of a new generation of execs at Fox.

With a budget climbing north of $130 million, nobody expects Australia to deliver that sort of exponential return on investment. Which is fine. Fox just wants it to be the biggest film of all time, is all. In September, the head of 20th Century Fox in Australia was reported to have confirmed the studio was aiming to surpass the record set by Titanic, which earned almost $58 million locally when it was released here in 1997. That translates to about five million tickets sold - or roughly one in every four Aussie bums on a cinema seat - in the weeks after the movie opens.

Hugh Jackman, for one, is confident Luhrmann will deliver, albeit not in any kind of hurry. "Mate, if I told you the film was coming out this time next year, Baz would still be working 24/7 on it," he told The Sunday Times in London. "The print will be wet as he gives it over. But, fingers crossed, I think we have something special."

Even as he contemplates another sleepless night in his personal asylum, Luhrmann shows no hint of pressure. "(We know) we could disappoint, in terms of experience and box office," he says. "All those things are extremely real. And would that be difficult? Of course. But whatever the outcome of the film, we've made an epic journey in which I was looking for greater connectivity and understanding in my home country. So it cannot disappoint because it has already delivered a transformative experience for myself, my wife and my children. And that is a greater outcome. We know that now in a way we never understood."

Just don't tell the Hollywood money men watching their clocks on the other side of the world. For now, they're keeping their poker faces on, betting that when he's finished his own personal transformation, Luhrmann will be able to entice the rest of us to follow him into the faraway of the faraway.

They just don't want to get there and find out it stinks, that's all.

Staff writer Christine Jackman's previous story was "Homage to the long, bloody lunch" (September 27-28), an interview with chef Stephane Reynaud.