Originally published in Good Weekend Magazine in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, May 11, 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
The day starts with breakfast at Tiffany’s. With the world premiere of The Great Gatsby looming, Baz Luhrmann is telling an early-morning audience at the New York jewellers how he was captivated by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel on, of all places, the Trans-Siberian Express. Having planned what he thought was a luxurious train journey to unwind after Moulin Rouge! (it turned out to be the railway equivalent of a tin box), he listened at night to an audio version on his iPod, with two bottles of Australian red as his only company. Scrambling to remember the year, the dapper director jokes that numbers aren’t his strong point: “Ask the studio.”
Seated beside his creative partner and wife Catherine Martin at the launch of Tiffany’s Gatsby-themed window displays, Luhrmann says he was so captivated by the novel that “at the end of it, I went, ‘There’s a movie here I have to make.’” The audience is absorbed, as it generally is when the director of Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge! (2001), and Australia (2008) has the floor.
It is easy to see why so many people, even in hard-headed Hollywood, say yes to him as they listen to a passionate volley of words, ideas, and images, underscored by flamboyant gestures that bring a planned movie to life. He charms with jokey impressions that often drop important names: Marlon Brando writing to ask for a role in Romeo + Juliet, for example. Then, as at Tiffany’s, Luhrmann will often conjure up a touching story about growing up in the small town of Herons Creek on the NSW north coast, where his father ran a service station and later a cinema.
This is the public side of a filmmaker who, at fifty, has gone from that hamlet of just eleven houses to co-writing, directing, and producing one of the highest-profile movies this year, a sumptuous drama about a gilded millionaire, Jay Gatsby, pining for the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan.
For The Great Gatsby, Luhrmann brought together some of the biggest names—brands if you like—in global entertainment and fashion: Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, hip-hop star Jay-Z as music and executive producer, Tiffany’s, Prada, and Brooks Brothers to collaborate with Martin on designs, with songs by Beyoncé, Florence Welch, Gotye, and Jack White. All have gambled their time and reputation on a risky 3D drama estimated to cost more than $180 million, including Australian federal and state government subsidies of at least $80 million. Gatsby is a New York story, set in the roaring twenties, which Luhrmann wanted to shoot in Sydney. It’s also a literary adaptation that, after delays for rain and his obsessive desire to elaborate, finesse, and perfect, is competing with such American summer blockbusters as Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness.
Luhrmann talked his first film into reality in 1990. When a commissioned script for Strictly Ballroom wasn’t working—it had started life as a stage version devised with his fellow students at the National Institute of Dramatic Art—producer Tristram Miall suggested he just tell them the story. So he did, playing all the parts.
“We put on a tape recorder and Baz told the story of this young prince of the ballroom world who wanted to dance his own steps,” Miall says. “He got up and danced around and he basically did a Baz. He conjures up fabulous images. And we said, ‘Yeah, that’s it. Just go away and write it.’”
He has become one of the country’s leading filmmakers, but while Peter Weir and Jane Campion are revered, Luhrmann attracts more than his share of criticism. Some of it comes from reviewers, who consider his films overwrought and over-hyped, some from other filmmakers, who grimace at the way his ambitious productions haemorrhage money and exhaust crews, and some from gossip columnists, who see him, being famous, as fair game.
But even his harshest critics would agree that Luhrmann’s creative record is as rich as his Moulin Rouge! nightclub scenes. While Australia disappointed at the US box office and was sometimes savagely reviewed, it did strong business in other parts of the world. He has also directed memorable opera productions of La Bohème and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the stage and produced mega-selling soundtracks. He has shot commercials for Chanel No. 5 and, just recently, a series of short films with Prada executive Miuccia Prada. He is developing a stage musical of Strictly Ballroom and a television series for Sony.
Struck by Paul Keating’s big-picture views on Australia’s place in the world and on indigenous Australia, he helped Labor during the 1993 federal election campaign—including “styling and image representation” and staging the campaign launch. He even designed a kitschy Australian theme park with Martin and fellow director Barrie Kosky, the Fox Studios Backlot at Sydney’s Moore Park.
He has had failures. When Oliver Stone got in first, he had to abandon plans for his Alexander the Great movie. The Fox Backlot never struck a chord. Sony backed out of Gatsby because it was too expensive before Warner Bros. stepped in. But Luhrmann inhabits a surreal world where, as well as turning down James Bond and Harry Potter movies, he once fielded an offer to rebrand a religion, though he won’t say which one.
Carey Mulligan, who plays Gatsby’s great love Daisy Buchanan, says, “Baz is like director/host/uncle. He does everything and he does it with such grace.” Joel Edgerton, who plays her brutish husband Tom, calls him “a perfect director” who always seems to have time for actors. “I’ve never seen him lose his temper,” he says.
And when it comes to persuasion, Luhrmann is as effective as Lionel Messi is with a football at his feet. “I don’t think Moulin Rouge! deserved to do the business it did,” says an Australian filmmaker, speaking anonymously. “It was a pretty indifferent story. But he got out and sold it.”
Martin Brown, who produced that film, says Luhrmann talks for a living, in a way. “He’s always convincing, always persuading, always cajoling, always bludgeoning when required, always getting people to do what he wants.”
The day finishes with a second trip to Tiffany’s, for a cocktail party that could have been thrown by Gatsby himself. Waiters serve champagne and JG-monogrammed canapés while guests circle glass cabinets studying jewellery from the movie. Luhrmann greets people with warm hugs, has his photo taken, tells a story about chasing down a first edition of The Great Gatsby to send to DiCaprio (“My assistant called and said, ‘Are you sure you want to do this? It costs half a million dollars.’ I said, ‘Ah, is there one for, say, five thousand dollars?’”), counsels a young filmmaker, and has his photo taken again.
The private Baz Luhrmann is quieter, more thoughtful, and wracked with doubt. “Sometimes, I admit, I must be maddening,” he says. “There are so many mad systems I’ve got around me, just to keep me moving through time and space, because my mind is always on.”
Dressed down stylishly in a red T-shirt, tailored blue pants, and blue slip-ons without socks, the unshaven, silver-haired Luhrmann is at home in Greenwich Village. To get to his office/studio on the top floor, you walk up three flights of stairs, past Catherine Martin—designer and his first sounding board on every creative project for more than twenty-five years—who breaks from her computer on the third floor to say hello.
If this is a sanctuary, an open and sunny room with a double bed tucked in one corner, it is a busy one, with people coming and going regularly. Even when he seems relaxed, Luhrmann’s mind is darting in different directions. He tugs nervously at one sleeve of his T-shirt at one point. Later, he strokes his forearm like it’s a cat.
The house cook, who has arrived breathless after walking up from the ground floor, wants a lunch order. Luhrmann goes for soup—“in the middle of the day, I’m just so churned up”—before inquiring about “some sort of wrap with amazing tahini stuff” that he loved the day before.
“I could have been eating venison and squab, it was so delicious,” he says to the cook in a manic burst of words. “I was crazy for it. And before the ball tonight, can you find out if it’s a sit-down in terms of dinner or do we dine before we go? If it’s sit-down, can you find out if they’re serving fish or whatever? And maybe a little hit of protein just before we go.” One of two young, casually dressed assistants, Blakey, is dispatched to fix an audio problem and sort out clothes and other preparations for the ball.
When the couple are in New York, they live in this Greenwich Village house with their two children, Lilly, nine, and Will, seven. Their Sydney home is Iona, a grand Darlinghurst mansion behind an iron gate with a handsome verandah and rolling lawn. They bought it for $A10 million in 2006 after renting it as both their residence and the offices of their production company, Bazmark, for almost a decade. During busy times it is a frantic tangle of people working on designs and planning productions, while the family lives upstairs.
They have listed Iona—for $A15 million—so that they can move to a house closer to the water and run a separate studio. Luhrmann was upset by a story in Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph that he says wrongly claimed they were being forced to sell because of budget over-runs on Gatsby.
Their Greenwich Village house is much more down-to-earth than Iona: nothing special outside, modern and friendly inside. But just over a fortnight before the premiere, it is the center of hundreds of small jobs to launch Gatsby.
“I exhaust people so much,” Luhrmann says, resigned to it. “We have these Bazmark rules: I recognize [my team] need to sleep odd and weird hours because we just work . . . well, it’s a blur.” When things get too much, anyone can take “a NASA nap: no less than twenty minutes, no more than forty.”
Luhrmann is not a napper, though. His racing mind won’t slow down enough. “I’m an incredibly difficult sleeper,” he says. “I can have periods when I really believe [the night] will never end and I’m dancing with devils and demons. It’s terrifying and I just can’t wait for the sun to come up.”
“It’s a whacky thing, my sleep. It’s imagination-related. I’ve got the basic things like everyone has: ‘My god, I’ve got some big deal tomorrow.’ But a lot of it is like fighting—not verbal fighting, it’s emotional fighting. I’ve got to find within myself the confidence or the belief to convey an idea.”
So how many hours does he sleep? “I won’t name the drugs, but let’s say I’ll take a sleeping potion. But even with that, I always sleep for about four hours, then I wake up and I have to go back for another bout. When I actually have REM, it’s like I’ve visited some exotic island and gone, ‘Oh my God, I remember what it’s like to have a holiday.’”
Blakey apologetically interrupts with a “time-sensitive question” about dressing for the ball, given that Prada’s tailored shirts won’t be ready in time. Does he want Tiffany’s to give him some studs? “Stud me up,” Luhrmann says, as precise about clothes as he is about food and what he wants in his movies. “I’d like to wear the JG green cuff links from the Jay Gatsby range and I’ll wear as much bling as they want. Ring Prada and get the shirts off the rack that fit me.”
Dressing appropriately is part of the job. “I want people to feel comfortable and I want to relate to them,” Luhrmann says. “On Gatsby, I wore shorts for the first time. I saw Wim Wenders once wearing shorts and I thought, ‘God, how can you direct in shorts?’ I tried it one day. It was only second unit [rather than the main filming unit], so it was kind of fun. But you can’t direct in shorts. You’re actually leading an army.”
Dotted around the walls of his office are giant Post-it notes listing important dates, jobs to be done, scenes in scripts, people to talk to, meetings required, and cryptic notes like “Snap to black slow motion silhouettes—Ballroom couples prepare” and “5.00–6.00 Prep for Blue Book Ball.” Dates crossed off a calendar show the countdown to “New York premiere,” “Anna dinner,” “Met ball,” “Film opens USA,” and “Cannes Premiere.”
“I’ve spent my life surrounded by crazy lists and charts,” Luhrmann says. “I think I’ve constructed a way, my way, of getting what’s inside my head out. I write my own writing but I can’t read it. No one can read my writing. See these funny little notebooks”—he points to two leather-bound books on the table—“they’re everywhere. [In] that one I’ve made an effort to write clearly, so I must have been really worried. But I’ve got notebooks that are just mad scrawls and squiggles.”
Another system is having “rollers” everywhere—dictaphones—so he can compose notes on creative projects, thank-you letters, messages to corporate types, things to do, or just ideas to be typed up by his team, even when he is supposed to be relaxing with a massage. Blakey lays out notebooks and writing boards at night, then collects them in the morning to keep on top of ideas and things needing to be done.
While he tends to forget his keys—one hangs around his neck now after he had to wake Martin to get into the house the previous night—Luhrmann has a near-photographic memory for film takes and music tracks. “If I’ve shot something and thought, ‘That’s going to work,’ I never forget it,” he says. But his memory has limits. “A lot of people remember very intense things they’ve been through with me. But I don’t remember the intense things I’ve been through with them that might be negative. It’s a big deal for them, but less so for me because I’m down the road on the next thing.”
Creativity, he says, is about facing your fears. And his fears include just about everything. “I deal with them usually in the first twenty minutes when I get up in the morning. Spit ’em all out. When I’m in the moment, I just can’t afford fear. I have [fears] and I have them every day. But when I go into my job, I have to flick the switch to action.”
Pressed on those fears, Luhrmann rattles through a rapid-fire list. “Is it going to be on time? What was I thinking? Why The Great Gatsby? What an idiot! Can’t I just do something small? I thought The Great Gatsby would be a simple, small project. It was essentially going to be acting in rooms. Then I started my journey and realized Fitzgerald loved modernism, he loved cinema. Jim Cameron had shown me very early on the testings he was doing for Avatar. I thought, ‘3D is a drama.’ I saw Dial M for Murder and went, ‘Well, 3D is just a little bit of [extra] expense.’”
He continues with hardly a breath taken. “I thought Leonardo DiCaprio must be Jay Gatsby. Jay-Z would be great for the music. My old friend Miuccia Prada will collaborate. And, of course, one has always got to remember that a real genius like Fitzgerald would be able to make a compact novella, but what it really is is a massive compression of epic emotions and epic physical locations into what seems a slender novella. When you go in to make it cinematic, somehow it grows.”
But where does all this restless creativity come from? “I’ve always done what I do right now,” he says. “You know why I can articulate that: I see it in my son. Will is constantly in his own world at a very intense level. He says, ‘I need to be in my own world for a moment, Dad.’ I was like that with a father who was very disciplined yet very driven, and a creative and very theatrical mother who saw things through a romantic lens.”
According to one friend, when the young Luhrmann boys were handed tea towels to help with washing up, Baz would turn his into a cape or a theatrical costume: “Not so much drying up happened, but quite a lot of theatricality.”
Martin, who met Luhrmann at an interview for a Bicentennial opera project in 1987, says his family remember him as a great storyteller, even as a child. “He has a desire to make things, like a conjurer, appear out of nothing, to make ethereal ideas a reality,” she says. “We’re both romantics—not in a Valentine’s Day card kind of way, but in that eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century ideal of romanticism, where there’s a love of the big idea and the adventure and making something that has meaning or beauty or expresses the human condition or celebrates it in some way.”
Hence the upbeat ideas in the movies—“a life lived in fear is a life half-lived” from Strictly Ballroom; “the greatest thing you will ever learn is just to love and be loved in return” from Moulin Rouge!—as characters struggle with love, loss, and death.
Long-time writing partner Craig Pearce has been friends with Luhrmann since year eleven at Narrabeen High School, on Sydney’s northern beaches, when they discovered they both wanted to be actors. The Luhrmann family had lived down the road until Baz’s father, a former navy clearance diver who served in Vietnam, shifted the family—three sons with military-cropped hair and a daughter—to Herons Creek. When his parents divorced, Luhrmann stayed with his dad, then snuck away at twelve to live with his mother back at Narrabeen. “He was always different,” says Pearce.
Mark Luhrmann reinvented himself by shortening his nickname, “Basil,” which came from his Basil Brush hairstyle. “He always had this tremendous sense of destiny, this tremendous belief that he was going to create amazing things and do amazing things,” Pearce says. “He’s always had an incredible imagination and a desire to make life bigger and better and more exciting than it is.”
Pearce sees another side to the public Luhrmann. “He gets depressed. He gets down. There’re always really hard moments on any project. With Australia, even though it was ultimately successful at the box office, there were terrible, terrible reviews. I know he found that very hard.” Luhrmann says he has spiralled half a dozen times into black despair after bitter disappointments.
The prescription, outside of spending time with his children, is often work. “Baz is able to work every waking second,” says Martin Brown. “I don’t think there’s an off switch.” But what about downtime? Surely the couple went to the beach or the football sometimes during the decade he worked with them? “There was no downtime,” Brown says. “Never. Literally never.”
It’s day seventy-six on the set of The Great Gatsby at Sydney’s Fox Studios. Luhrmann is directing a party scene on Gatsby’s terrace that shows the vast scale of the production. DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Elizabeth Debicki as Daisy’s friend, Jordan Baker, are in the center of the huge sound stage, surrounded by 250 extras as stunningly dressed, made-up, coiffed, and bejeweled as the stars. A swimming pool has the same JG monogram on the bottom as will be found on the Tiffany’s canapés some sixteen months later. “Off we go,” shouts Luhrmann. Orchestral music swells, people dance, fireworks go off, the crowd screams.
“The whole thing is incredible,” says Maguire, in character as Nick Carraway, astonished at the party’s opulence and madness. “I live just next door. He sent me an invitation. Seems I’m the only one. I haven’t met Mr. Gatsby. No one’s met him. They say he’s second cousin to the Kaiser and third cousin to the devil.” DiCaprio chimes in, “I’m afraid I haven’t been a very good host, old sport. You see, I’m Gatsby.” Amid the chaos, Luhrmann wants the shot again. And again. And again.
But when the crew goes on location, they strike wet weather. Just as they did on Romeo + Juliet, when a hurricane forced them to relocate. And on Australia, when rain and an equine flu outbreak disrupted the schedule.
“If I have one gift, it’s to attract extraordinary weather to places where it doesn’t occur,” he says in New York. “They should truly, honestly, think about using me to re-vegetate deserts. I just have to turn up and it rains. But probably the reason it does rain is that everything I’m trying to do is sort of unprecedented, it’s sort of unpredictable.”
As well as an injury to Luhrmann—filming had to shut down early before Christmas 2011 when he cut his head open on a camera crane—the director’s perfectionism, the demands of 3D, and work on the music pushed back the Gatsby release date by five months. This is where another of Luhrmann’s talents comes in, a knack for inspiring a crew through an exhausting shoot.
“He works in a way that’s very personal,” says a former crew member. “Men and women will say he’s very seductive in a way. Both he and Catherine work hard at instilling a kind of religious fervor in what they do. On his projects, it’s more like a cult than a crew. He has a messianic quality.”
Luhrmann sees it another way: “If it’s a cult, then I’m just an acolyte serving a force greater than all of us and that’s the story,” he says. And while he doesn’t plan to be ambitious on set, he tends to think “what if?” a lot, which leads to the budget going up. Luhrmann says studios only think about one question: Is the number a good piece of business?
“When it comes to my work, even the idea of doing it isn’t a good piece of business,” he says. “It’s madness. All the films I’ve made should never have got made. Anyone will tell you that.” Not until, that is, the conjurer, the passionate enthusiast with the big ideas, talks them into reality.