A behind-the-scenes look at Australia the movie

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By Vicky Roach
November 15, 2008 12:00am

THEY don't make movies like Australia any more . . . and for two very good reasons. First: it is prohibitively expensive - the budget for Baz Luhrmann's World War II epic is reported to have gone $US30 million ($A46 million) over its $US100 million ($A152 million) budget.

Projects as audacious as this one can bring a film studio to its knees. Heaven's Gate (1980) actually managed to sink one.

"There's always that possibility," observes veteran film critic David Stratton. "Everybody must have been very nervous over the past few weeks when the delay occurred and rumours started flying. It's an enormous risk."

Special section: Australia the movie

And second: there's a perfectly viable climate-controlled alternative. None other than George Lucas advised Luhrmann he could do the whole film in the studio on a blue or green screen.

In such circumstances, the Sydney-based filmmaker's decision to take up to 400 crew on location into the Australian interior for eight months in 40-degree heat could almost be seen as a kind of grand folly. Given the remoteness of the location, 90km of roads had to be gravelled and regraded to make them passable for trucks.

About 60 tonnes of molasses were sprayed on to sections of the dirt road between Kununurra and Carlton Hill, where the film's fictitious homestead of Faraway Downs was built, to stabilise the road surface and stop it breaking up.

"It was like moving an army . . . an astounding logistic battle," says producer Catherine Knapman, speaking from the Sydney post-production studio where the key creative team is working around the clock to put the finishing touches on the film before Tuesday night's world premiere.

"There are reasons why filmmakers these days do it all in a studio.

"I used to tell myself this all the time on the road when I was booking a charter flight with one hand and organising a camel (with the other)."

Australia tells the story of an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) who, after inheriting a sprawling cattle station, reluctantly enlists the help of a stockman (Hugh Jackman) to save her property from a takeover plot. As the pair drive a large herd of cattle across the country, they witness the Japanese bombing of Darwin first-hand.

The large ensemble cast includes a who's who of Australian talent, including Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson, Ben Mendelsohn, David Wenham and Essie Davis. Had Luhrmann and Oscar-winning co-conspirator Catherine Martin, with whom he has two children (Lillian, 5, and William, 3), made the film on a soundstage at Fox Studios, they could all have slept in their own beds. And an awful lot of people - in both the creative and the financial departments - would now have a few less grey hairs.

The filmmaker briefly considered that option before characteristically choosing to do both.

Luhrmann is such a perfectionist, he decided that even the East Kimberley ranges could be improved upon back in the studio where, after eight months on location, he has spent another nine months in post production. Nobody could accuse this film of cutting any corners.

"He said, 'Why don't I go out on location, grab everything I can, glean everything from the landscape and having the actors in that immense territory, then come back to the studio and enhance it?'," says director of photography Mandy Walker, tipped as the first woman to be nominated for an Oscar for cinematography even before the film is released.

"Those big landscape shots where we had 1200 cattle and 30 horses and Nicole and Hugh galloping along the salt pan, that's something you can't do on stage.

"And then we would come back and do the close-ups on the green screen. Or we'd be able to shoot a big sunset shot and not have to be scrambling around in the 45 minutes that we had of beautiful light. We'd have three or four days (back in the studio) where we reproduced that light. It was the best of both worlds."

Walker describes Luhrmann as "a visionary". Knapman uses the word "inspirational". Both Kidman and Jackman constantly defer to the filmmaker in interviews. If it weren't for the individual stature of each of those involved, you might think they sound more like devotees than co-workers.

Presumably, it's the confidence the man inspires in those he works with that also encouraged the bean counters at 20th Century Fox to back him on such a major gamble as the most expensive Australian film ever made.

Of course, Luhrmann's track record is remarkably good when it comes to pulling off unlikely successes - critical and commercial. After making ballroom dancing cool again (Strictly Ballroom), he took Shakespeare to the top of the US box office (Romeo+Juliet) and then went on to reinvent the movie musical with Moulin Rouge. The filmmaker is often referred to as "The Wizard of Oz" in international publications. And he has prefaced Australia's production notes with a reference to that film's signature song: "Somewhere over the rainbow/Way up high/There's a land that I dreamed of/Once in a lullaby."

In Australia, Dorothy's sparkling red shoes have been replaced by RM Williams boots and dusty Akubras.

"My story was always going to be about a mythological Australia," Luhrmann has said. Yet the film's box office returns are a very real concern.

At the Australian Movie Convention in September, the head of 20th Century Fox in Australia, Marcus Oliviera, said he believed the film would outperform Titanic to become the highest-grossing film in the country.

To surpass that record, breaking $57 million takings, roughly a quarter of the nation's population will have to see it.

It's a tall order, but not without precedent. When adjusted for inflation, Paul Hogan's comedy Crocodile Dundee actually beats Titanic at the box office.

On an international scale, Australia must take more than $400 million to be deemed a bona fide box-office triumph.

In addition to its huge production costs, a traditional marketing campaign and a prestige awards push will raise the break-even bar to a touch over $240 million. At the post-production studio, however, the crew seem remarkably unfazed and unaffected by the amount of tension now surrounding the as-yet unfinished film.

It's just five days before Australia is scheduled to have its first showing in Sydney, the day before the official premiere, and Walker and Knapman are chatting in the sort of relaxed manner that suggests they have all the time in the world to shoot the breeze.

Although they've been burning the midnight oil, they are remarkably upbeat. Walker is immensely proud of the finished product.

"I saw the film in a run through the other day and it's absolutely amazing," she says. "I'm incredibly confident."

And while Australia might have cost significantly upwards of $US100 million, every cent was well spent, according to Knapman, who is well qualified to comment given she was the one on the ground monitoring expenses.

"On a film like this you actually have to employ someone to pick up cow dung," she says. "That was the sort of thing I'd have to say to the financial controller: I had to hire another 10 people today. I had to name the activities and there would be this outlandish list."

The shopping bill included items such as special cattle feed as well as the conventional list of groceries.

"On Moulin Rouge I learned a lot about dancers and their requirements, and wooden floors, and nibbling watermelon. On this project I had to buy and sell cattle. I just sold my last 43 at auction on Tuesday. They're not just ordinary cattle, either.

"The cattle we had on this movie were short horns. Short horns, by the way, have long horns - so it's a complete misnomer. We researched very carefully. The breed isn't common any more - Brahmans are hardier - but that was (the breed) they used in the Top End in the '30s and '40s."

Luhrmann's attention to detail is legendary. He and Walker, who has been working on the film since 2005, went on a number of expeditions to scout out suitable locations.

"Every time we went to a place, we'd go at dawn and we'd go at the middle of the day and we'd go at the end of the day," she says. "It is a really incredible landscape up there . . . and it does really affect you."

Walker says that from the moment Luhrmann told her he was planning to make an epic in the style of the '40s and '50s, films such as Lawrence Of Arabia, Gone With The Wind and Giant, she knew that it would be special. Stratton, too, joins the chorus of praise.

"It's great to see a film made on this scale on location," he says. "Maybe Baz is the true descendant of David Lean. His pictures were always done on location and achieve something of the scale I imagine Baz is aiming for."

Walker, meanwhile, despite the harsh and unforgiving nature of the landscape where she was shooting six and seven days a week in scorching heat, doesn't recall it being particularly arduous.

"There were three units working at the same time," she says. "At one point, I had somewhere between 50 and 60 people in my department, but it was so well organised and we had such fantastic people that it never fell apart.

"We planned everything really well so we were in certain places at certain times to express certain things that the landscape would give."

The Melbourne-born, Los Angeles-based cinematographer (Lantana), who had previously worked with Luhrmann on the Chanel No.5 commercial, was well aware she was taking on a huge challenge.

"There was no infrastructure in the Kimberley for filming, our trucks would do a six-day drive to get up there, bring all our generators and trailers and the rest of it, so it wasn't easy. And it was really hot and dry," she says.

"But I took it as a challenge. And I did find it really exciting. It was a really fantastic experience. Lawrence Of Arabia was shot in Morocco in the desert and they built a little tent city . . . basically what we did." (There were 250 tents set up to capture the towering escarpments of the Cockburn Ranges in the El Questro wilderness park.)

"I don't know how many films you get to make like this in your life. But I'm glad I got to do this one."

Of course, it takes a certain sort of character to succeed in such a male-dominated occupation in the first place.

"Mandy is indomitable," says Knapman. "And forthright. She's a great creative collaborator for Baz and Catherine. She got behind the project and never looked back. And is still not looking back either as she blearily staggers out of the grading suite . . .

"As the DP, you're out in the elements all day. And there she'd be with the zinc cream all over her face, because she's very fair, and a hat and her collar up trying not to get burnt.

"Nothing was too hard . . . she just took it all in her stride."

Walker will make Oscar history if she lives up to expectations and is nominated for an Academy Award.

"It would be great if I was awarded anything for my work on this film, but at the moment I'm not really thinking about it," she says. "I'm really proud of the movie and I think we've done a great job and I just want people to enjoy it."

Walker also prefers not to make too much song and dance about gender in relation to her achievements, adding she always thinks people are "hiring me because of my ability rather than whether I'm a woman or a man".

But she says the fact no woman has even been nominated for an award for best cinematography is extraordinary.

"It can be for no other reason than traditionally it's a male-dominated area. There are still only a few women doing my job, but it's not gender specific."

Mythologically speaking, the Outback is also very much a male domain. But Australia is being described - by the very few people who have seen it - as a woman's journey. According to Knapman, British aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman) is transformed by the land.

And while references to the film often describe it as Baz Luhrmann's Australia, many of the key behind-the-scenes team are actually female.

"We were this group of bossy women," Knapman says. "Myself, Mandy and Catherine Martin."

An exhibition of Douglas Kirkland's behind-the-scenes photographs of Australia will be on display at the Entertainment Quarter, November 18-30. Australia opens nationally November 26

Source: The Daily Telegraph

Australia Photographic Exhibition
18 November, 2008, 4:00 PM - 30 November, 2008, 3:00 PM
Opposite Cinema Paris

Take a behind the scenes look at 'Australia' the movie.

See the movie as captured by celebrity photographer Douglas Kirkland at an exclusive exhibition opposite Cinema Paris.

For the opportunity to take home a signed framed image from the collection, simply make a gold coin donation to bid in the Silent Auction. All proceeds will be donated to the Australian Conservation Foundation to help preserve Australia. The highest bidder from the auction also receives an 'Australian Beaty' Natio hift hamper worth $500. Click here to view the silent auction terms & conditions.

18 - 30 November
Opening Hours
Tuesdays 4pm - 8pm
Wednesdays 11am - 3pm
Thursdays 12pm - 8pm
Fridays 12pm - 8pm
Saturdays 11am - 7pm
Sunday 23 Nov 11am - 7pm
Sunday 30 Nov 11am - 3pm

Limited Edition 'Australia' EQ Gift Cards
Celebrate the cinema release of Baz Luhrmann's new epic by purchasing a limited edition 'Australia' Gift Card and go into the running to win a holiday at Cable Beach Club Resort in Broome* to experience Australia's natural beauty.

For every limited edition 'Australia' gift card sold, a donation will be made to the Australian Conservation Foundation to help preserve our natural heritage sites.

Visit the exhibition or EQ Reception to purchase your limited edition 'Australia' EQ Gift Card this Christmas.

For more information, call 8117 6700.

*Terms and conditions apply - click here to view

Baz Luhrmann's flair for the dramatic
Few have seen finished epic 'Australia'
By ANNE THOMPSON

Days before its Nov. 18 world premiere, Baz Luhrmann's "Australia" was still an unknown quantity, a period romance shepherded by a director known for his visual flair, a lengthy wait between passion projects and a penchant for tweaking his films right down to the wire -- while often commenting publicly on his frenzied work in progress.

In other words, this guy has a flair for the dramatic.

A pair of research screenings in June yielded some upbeat reaction, and an "Oprah" crowd who saw a rough cut was enthusiastic. But few people, outside top studio execs, have seen the final film.

Luhrmann is nothing if not ambitious. With "Australia," the director/co-writer set out to fashion a sweeping 1939-set romantic adventure styled after "Gone With the Wind" and starring two stars from Down Under, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. The pic costs $120 million, less 30%-40% from Australia's new filming rebate.

After wrangling with Fox over the pic's budget, Luhrmann shot the pic over nine months with a crew of 300 on remote locations in Northwestern Australia and at Sydney's Fox Studios.

The production, after coping with 110-degree heat, windstorms and delays, finally wrapped last December. Reshoots were completed in August to cover some shots that revealed Kidman's surprise pregnancy.

Luhrmann, 46, finally delivered his locked print in time for the studio to start striking thousands of prints in Sydney and Los Angeles at 9 a.m. on Nov. 13, five days before the pic's Sydney premiere.

But for Fox exec Peter Rice, who has supervised Luhrmann's films ever since he met the "Strictly Ballroom" director at the Cannes film fest and brought him to Fox to develop "Romeo + Juliet," there's a method to this Baz-ness.

While Luhrmann told Australia's the Age that he repeatedly asked for more time to finish the picture, and the film did get an additional 13 days when Fox moved "Australia" to open on Nov. 26 after "Quantum of Solace" and "Harry Potter" changed their release dates, Rice confirms that pushing back the film had nothing to do with Luhrmann's editing needs and the director was always committed to finishing on time.

Rice knows the writer-director is prone to fine-tuning his edits up until the last minute, delivering dripping-wet prints just under the wire.

"Baz's movies are beautiful and unique because he's a perfectionist," says Rice. "There are things he'd still change on 'Strictly Ballroom.' "

On 2001's "Moulin Rouge!" Luhrmann persuaded Fox to push the pic's release date back from Christmas to May, giving him six extra months in the editing room. The $50 million "Moulin Rouge!" scored $57 million domestically and doubled its gross overseas.

At 2½ hours, "Australia's" running time reduces the number of daily showtimes. And, while it has a clear appeal for adult women hungry for romance, the studio hopes to bring in young women and men, too, and execs believe the pic has strong international potential.

The film is resolutely old-fashioned, broad, accessible storytelling, centering on Kidman's uptight Lady Sarah Ashley as she spars with, and then falls for, Jackman's rough-hewn Drover as they drive cattle across the Outback, bonding with a young Aborigine boy before being attacked in Darwin by Japanese bombers.

Oprah and her audience certainly went gaga.

"It's the best movie I've seen in a long, long time," Winfrey gushed on the Nov. 10 show. "They just don't make movies like that anymore. ... It is epic, it is majestic, it is romantic, it is a spectacle. The scenery is so gorgeous. It's everything a great movie should be."

Score one for the target demo.

As for the recent flurry of online speculation over the film's ending, and word that the studio was urging changes, Rice said the helmer -- who has final cut -- has always had a handle on the final vision.

Luhrmann wrote six endings, shot three, and tested three different versions of the film. Someone does die at the end of the pic, but Luhrmann found an ending with hope.

"It's neither happy nor sad," says Rice. "It's bittersweet and complex. It's not a simplistic ending. It's an incredibly satisfying one."

Premiere to make Bowen tang

FORMER Queensland State of Origin rugby league star Mike McLean used to enjoy playing in front of huge crowds.

But the Bowen publican is just as excited about hosting a more intimate gathering to celebrate the town's premiere screening of Australia.

Although the town and surrounding areas provided about 600 extras for the epic film, most did not receive an invitation to Tuesday's official premiere because the town's solitary cinema has room for only 273 guests.

But despite missing the cut for the gala black-tie opening, Mr McLean said there was no bitterness - people will hold their own party in his pub on the other side of town.

"I didn't get an invite, but that's all right," he said.

"I'll be there when it's released . . . I can't wait."

His Grandview Hotel enjoys a star turn in the film.

When Hugh Jackman's character, Drover, dusts himself off after a street brawl and greets Nicole Kidman with the iconic line "Welcome to Australia", he might as well be inviting the world into the Grandview, so prominent is the historic building in the film.

The hotel's entire exterior was redecorated as a series of shopfronts for the film. All railings were repainted and red dirt was pushed up level with the doorways.

Even the newly-built beer garden was surrounded in corrugated iron to shield patrons from the adjoining sets.

Hundreds of other people who let the film crew take over their businesses also didn't make the Whitsunday Regional Council VIP guest list for the premiere.

Mr McLean, a fourth-generation publican, doesn't have a view on who should or shouldn't be on the guest list - he figured it would be a tough job for whoever got lumbered with it, given Bowen's tight community.

But he believes there should be a greater push from within Bowen to sell the story of the town that made Australia the movie possible.

"We, more than anyone, want the movie to be a success because our hotel anchored the movie, and owning the hotel for 95 years, it was a bit of a reward for being here so long," he said. "Suddenly we had something very grand on our doorstep. It was difficult - don't get me wrong - but it was great, too.

"We didn't square the deal away until a week before they started filming, so there was a lot of interesting negotiating that went on. But we wanted to do our part for the town."

Whitsunday Regional Council Mayor Mike Brunker said volunteers who gave up their time to look after the cast and crew had been put at the top of the invitation list.

"We couldn't invite everyone in the town to the gala premiere," he said.

Baz's big-budget gamble

Garry Maddox
November 16, 2008

FOR Baz Luhrmann, there was no escaping the pressure of finishing the country's most ambitious film.

During a rushed visit to New York for a tribute dinner last week, the filmmaker behind Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge! kept seeing billboards for the epic Australia.

"Can you imagine how surreal that is?" Luhrmann said. "I'm seeing the billboards and thinking, 'Hang on, that movie is still back in the mixing desk.' "

With a budget of more than $150 million and after nine months of filming and countless hours in post-production, the race to finish the Nicole Kidman-Hugh Jackman romance in time for Tuesday's world premiere in Sydney was intense.

Australia already has one record - it has to be the most gossiped about release in the country's film history. At one stage last year, it was rumoured that Luhrmann had walked off set and flown to Paris to recharge his creative batteries. A check revealed that he was shooting a scene at Fox Studios at the time.

Last week came a report that 20th Century Fox executives had forced Luhrmann to change the ending to spare the life of Jackman's character, The Drover, after negative feedback at test screenings. The scoffers instantly branded it a capitulation to the studio until Luhrmann said the report was rubbish - he determined the ending.

But why has it taken so long to finish the film? Studio executives are famously brutal about budget overruns and missed delivery dates, yet Luhrmann has stuck defiantly to what he calls his filmmaking process.

"I start out with a very clear blueprint, which is a primary story, but I shoot it in a way which has room for growth and change and evolution," he said.

"My films take so long to make because you have to feel how it's playing and what it's doing and you have to respond to that. You have to build the film [then] watch it. Then you have to deconstruct it and build another one."

This method meant finishing versions of Australia "six or seven times" before the final one.

It meant writing six different endings, shooting three of them, screening two for test audiences then settling on a different one that reflects what Luhrmann wanted to say in the film. It sounds obsessive but the director disagrees.

"I hear this but I don't think of it that way," he said. "I never feel like I'm just going over and over and over the same thing. I'm just constantly trying to make the storytelling as strong and as direct as possible."

Luhrmann said that having Rupert Murdoch as head of Fox had not meant a free ride for Australia.

"No one does you any favours at this scale," he said. "It's still a big business. In some regards, it's more difficult. The story that got out about strong-arming by the studio, all that chatter came out of one of Rupert's papers.

"Having said that, he is definitely very well-wishing of the film as someone whose family is very much rooted in our country."

Now that Australia is finished and the first reviews are imminent, Luhrmann is under no illusions that Australia is anything other than an risky venture. But he has been buoyed by the warm response from Oprah Winfrey's TV audience to a work-in-progress screening.

"Creativity and risk, they're wedded," he said. "At this scale, it makes everybody nervous."

As we count down to the release of Baz Luhrmann's epic movie Australia, partly shot in Bowen, we have a look at the great expectations surrounding it

Baz Luhrmann epic ready for the big screen

November 15th, 2008

The hopes of a nation are riding on Baz Luhrmann's impeccably groomed Australia, the blockbuster filmed partly in Bowen last year.

"There can be no half-measures. Call something Australia and it has to be gigantic. It has to have a heart as big as Phar Lap's. It has to be a million times larger than Texas. It has to have the blood of Burke and Wills, Kennedy and Leichhardt thumping through its veins, and just like the Australia we all know it has to be as beautiful as a bay horse galloping across a Mitchell grass plain and as tender as the pink sky of a Kimberley dawn," writes JOHN ANDERSEN. The film, featuring Hollywood megastars Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, premieres to VIP audiences in Bowen, Sydney and Darwin next Tuesday night, before the rest of us get to see it the following week, on November 26.

IN naming his much-hyped $180 million film Australia, director Baz Luhrmann has confidently taken ownership of a brand name so grand, so mighty, that if it bombs it will do so in spectacular fashion.

And if it soars, it will soar like the blackest of eagles against the bluest of Australian skies.

There can be no half-measures. Call something Australia and it has to be gigantic. It has to have a heart as big as Phar Lap's. It has to be a million times larger than Texas. It has to have the blood of Burke and Wills, Kennedy and Leichhardt thumping through its veins, and just like the Australia we all know it has to be as beautiful as a bay horse galloping across a Mitchell grass plain and as tender as the pink sky of a Kimberley dawn.

And it has to be rough and brutal in its telling of the stories of the spears dipped in blood and of the bullets that blew holes in black skin, man, woman and child, as the frontier inched its way across Northern Australia.

We don't want to be spared the death by shrapnel and fire that unfolded with terrible fury when the Japanese bombed Darwin on February 19, 1942. Darwin seems to forever fade in and out of our collective, wartime consciousness.

It's like a grainy dream we can never quite bring to clarity no matter how hard we try to focus.

The answers to the questions about what happened in Darwin are always just out of reach.

A film-maker might at last show us what the historians have so far failed to do and that is instil in us a sense of what happened in Darwin 66 years ago when the Japanese planes rained bombs and bullets on the city.

If Luhrmann is successful in telling the story of the bombing of Darwin it will no longer be a part of our history hidden behind some sort of weird conspiracy of denial, but will become as everyday as Gallipoli, Kokoda and Long Tan.

Mark David Ryan, lecturer in Australian Film at the Queensland University of Technology, describes Baz Luhrmann's decision to name his film Australia `a brave and bold move'. Naming it Australia proclaims that the film has captured the essence of who we are as Australians.

It says who we are, what we are, how we think and what we think of the world and it projects this mix of the Australian identity around the world.

If Australia takes off and becomes the international box office success Mr Ryan fervently hopes it will become, tens of millions of people around the world will see in us what they see in the characters Baz Luhrmann uses to move his story along.

Paul Hogan's 1986 blockbuster Crocodile Dundee has a lot to answer for in how Australians are viewed overseas.

Mr Ryan said that Australia, from an international perspective, was still very much a land where men walk around in vests made from crocodile skins and wear cheap felt hats, the bands of which are studded with imitation croc's teeth. This probably explains why we sometimes see tourist coaches disgorge small armies of Americans who otherwise are dressed normally except for the fact they are wearing badly made felt hats festooned with plastic crocodile teeth.

They think they look Australian. Sadly, no one ever seems to tell them the inconvenient truth.

In America, in particular, where Croc Dundee was a smash hit, it's still very much `throw another shrimp on the barbie, cobber'.

"International audiences still relate to Crocodile Dundee. Now, with (the film) Australia, there is the potential to reframe the way in which the world thinks of Australia as a country and how we see ourselves," Mr Ryan said.

He thinks the film will inevitably cop some criticism purely because Baz Luhrmann was bold enough to call it Australia.

He says the trailers for the film look `American' and he fears there could be a reaction to a perceived harkening back to the stereotype of the laconic, outback Aussie, a la Mick Dundee.

He said this could happen despite the film being a drama and being set in the Northern Territory and Kimberley in the 1920s to 1940s.

The fact it deals with epic droving trips, the bombing of Darwin and life on the frontier and that tough, outback character portrayals would be essential to the story line won't make any difference.

Mr Ryan believes some critics will savage it purely because it portrays an outback stereotype considered out of vogue in contemporary Australia.

"The critics may criticise it for projecting a stereotypical view of what it means to be an Australian," he said.

Mr Ryan says that if the movie does not do well at the box office it will `cop a lot of flak' based on its name, the premise being that if you have the audacity to call something Australia it has to win.

In effect you are taking ownership of the name Australia and you cannot abuse it, lose it, or demean it any way. Baz Luhrmann now has this responsibility on his shoulders.

An Australian cricket side or an Australian rugby union or rugby league side carries the same heavy load. Once they are an `Australian' side there is no going back.

They are the custodians of the name, the sacred name, and they have to honour and protect it at all costs.

Aussie cricket captain Ricky is being publicly horsewhipped by cricket writers over decisions they say cost Australia the Test series in India.

His real crime is not that he might have made some bad bowling calls, but that Australia lost the series.

If Australia the film stumbles Baz Luhrmann will be in for a whole lot more than what Ponting is getting from the cricket scribes who, by and large, don't hit below the belt.

Critics and the movie-viewing public are not so polite when it comes to sinking in the boot.

If the film fails and is seen as just another `aw, mate' ocker cliche dressed up in a felt hat and riding boots, Baz Luhrmann will be tied, figuratively, to a boab tree and thrashed with a stock whip by Aussie critics keen to move on from the Chips Rafferty/Paul Hogan stereotype.

But, most cinema-goers who have seen the trailers for Australia would most likely agree the the film looks good. No, it doesn't look good, it looks bloody fantastic.

Then again Twentieth Century Fox, a company owned by News Corporation which also owns the Townsville Bulletin, is not exactly going to run a dud trailer. The teasers so far look like the goods. Great skies, luscious landscapes and the people on the horses look as though they can ride like the wind, which is what we'd expect in a film dealing, in part, with the cattle industry on the northern frontier.

In the trailers aired so far Hugh Jackman looks like he was born to the saddle.

He sits well and has good hands on the reins. All of this will be important when the film is released on November 26. Things like poor horsemanship, the wrong clothing and saddlery not belonging to the era will be quickly pounced on by alert viewers.

Luhrmann is said to be meticulous about period detail. Let's hope so because one slip-up in costuming could bring the whole show undone.

From what Mr Ryan has seen so far he is impressed.

"It looks fantastic. It looks like a film of epic proportions. It looks like a quality film and to me it looks like a film that could be a blockbuster," he said.

The film, even from the shorts, has the feel of an epic. Luhrmann, who expects it to run for about 2½, is not shying away from calling it an `epic'. Already it's being compared to Gone With The Wind, the 1939 blockbuster still regarded by many critics as the best movie ever made.

The pre-release heat being generated by Australia is intense.

On his website movie industry analyst Scott Feinberg quotes Oprah Winfrey who watched a rough cut of the movie with her audience. All were in raptures.

"I have never been this excited over a movie since I don't know when. It's the best movie I've seen in a long, long, long, long time. It literally swept me off my feet," she said.

Feinberg yesterday had Australia listed as a top five Oscar chance for Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress (Nicole Kidman), Best Director (Baz Luhrmann). He had Hugh Jackman down as a `major threat' in the Best Actor category.

Australia will get the first taste of Australia when simultaneous world premieres are held in Sydney, Bowen and Darwin on Tuesday night. But this will just be a straw poll. The true poll will happen on November 26.

This is when Australia as a nation will vote with its feet when the movie opens in cinemas around the country.

By November 30 Australia will either have sunk like a stone or it will be soaring like the blackest eagle against the bluest Australian sky.