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STRICTLY BAZ
Baz Luhrmann/Moulin Rouge Interview by Paul
Fischer in Los Angeles.
 Baz Luhrmann is sporting a silver-topped hairstyle
these days, looking every bit the part of the unconventional artist. Five
years since he reinterpreted Shakespeare for the youth market with his
often brazen take on Romeo + Juliet, Luhrmann is back, defying convention
and determined to reinvent a different kind of cinematic wheel this time
around, this time the movie musical.
With his third Red Curtain film, the irreverent
filmmaker says that now is the perfect time for him to turn musical cinema
on its side. "I feel like I've been gearing for this my entire life",
the energetic director explains in his LA hotel suite. "As a kid
I loved musicals and that idea that you saw an artificial film that made
you FEEL, the fact that all of the audience was involved in the story.
To a certain extent, Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet ARE musicals,
so we've just taken a final leap, really, towards a breakout in songs
in movie in the use of musicals to tell a story." Of course, having
said that, Luhrmann goes on to explain his further drive to make a third
of his 'red curtain' films was not only based on him wanting to a musical,
but as he sees it, a story 'Orphean' in shape. "That meant going
into an underworld, growing through experience, coming into that point
in your life where you realise that some relationships can't be defined
and not being destroyed by that, growing from that."
Much like Luhrmann himself who clearly identifies
with the journey of Christian (played by Ewan McGregor), the initially
innocent, idealistic and virginal poet who grows and matures through experience.
Luhrmann’ s first film, Strictly Ballroom, had a certain naivety
within it, which is in direct contrast to Moulin, a much darker and mature
work. The parallels between his own journey and that of Christian don't
escape the director. "Paradoxically, they all require a naivety of
structure and primariness in their underlying storytelling, but the resonating
execution of it is more complicated. Strictly Ballroom is the absolutely
joyous myth of overcoming oppression, the second piece is absolutely about
tragedy.”
For Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann says he wanted
the best of both worlds, “that of comic tragedy. So that you get
both joy and sadness, breaking out with song and dance.” Luhrmann
adds that Moulin, more than its predecessors, defines who he is as an
artist, “but then Strictly Ballroom defined who I was then.”
But as with Ballroom, Moulin continues Luhrmann’ s cinematic tradition
of exploring artifice in film and the relationship between screen and
audience. Asked if he hopes to continue on that path, and the director
pauses. “The language of what I’ll explore next on film is dependant
at this point, of what I NEED to make, not what I want to make. I mean
I’d love to make an action picture, but what I NEED to make is that
which is going to enrich life.”
In the meantime, that film is the audacious
Moulin Rouge. The film is set in the famous Paris cabaret
in 1899-1900 with Nicole Kidman as an entertainer and courtesan torn between
her love for the impoverished writer played by Ewan McGregor and her lust
for the riches offered by an obsessed fan played by Richard Roxburgh.
In the movie, Kidman, McGregor and others, including Jim Broadbent and
John Leguizamo, sing a range of 20th century tunes, including Madonna's
Like A Virgin and Material Girl, Elton John and Bernie Taupin's Your Song,
Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit, a clutch of Beatles songs in a
love medley, and even "the hills are alive" excerpts from The
Sound Of Music. Luhrmann says the songs were not chosen to shock or titillate.
"It was not about, wouldn't it be groovy or wouldn't it be fun."
Each song helped him move the story forward, Luhrmann said. The actors
sang their emotions on screen, and “it was important that the actors
did their own singing.” The film was strenuously shot on location
at Sydney’s new Fox Studios “which was a very important part
of my deal to make the film”, and is happy to heap praise on Kidman,
who emerges as a truer movie star from her first entrance. “Her opening
is supposed to resemble bits of Marlene, Marilyn, and those kinds of stars,
and there’s no doubt in my mind that Nicole embodies classic movie
stardom.”
As exhausted as he is, Luhrmann will busily
promote his film and hopes “that audiences will embrace it.”
We might live in very cynical times, a concept Mr Luhrmann finds depressing.
“Yes, we do live in cynical times, and you know what? Ya die, and
guess what? What kind of life is it that you get a little gift of life
and you spend three-quarters of it being bitter and cynical? THAT isn’t
living. It’s fucking sad and I really mean that in a profound way,
because I don’t want to buy into that.” Which is why Luhrmann
hopes Moulin Rouge reaches across to the cynical. “I hope that this
film will pull the rug from underneath their mechanism for protection.
The non-cynical have already found a way and they understand that you
open yourself to feeling as we tell the same stories time and time again.”
Of course, nobody can tell stories quite like Baz Luhrmann, and Moulin
Rouge, he hopes, will challenge audience through music, as they have never
been challenged before.
Born / Place: 1964 / Australia
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