Baz Luhrmann

Pam Cook

• Editore: British Film Institute
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838714475
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Film & Video

This is the first major book-length study of the work of Australian film-maker Baz Luhrmann, one of the most exciting and controversial personalities working in World Cinema today. Luhrmann's reputation as an innovator rests on the evidence of the three films known as the Red Curtain Trilogy: Strictly Ballroom (1992), William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001), which together demonstrate the development of a highly distinctive style and brand. Pam Cook, who was given unprecedented access to the Luhrmann private archives, explores the genesis of the Red Curtain aesthetic, from Luhrmann's early experience in theatre and opera to his collaborative working methods and unique production set-up. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Luhrmann and his chief collaborator, designer Catherine Martin, she traces the roots of their work in an increasingly globalised Australian film culture, investigating the relationship of their company Bazmark to the Hollywood studio Twentieth Century-Fox, and the influences on their style and production methods. At the book's heart are substantial analyses of the spectacular Red Curtain films and the historical epic Australia (2008). This lively and original study of one of contemporary cinema's most fascinating figures will appeal to film scholars, cultural historians and Luhrmann enthusiasts alike.

One
Once Upon a Time in Australia

Baz Luhrmann is a natural showman. He delights in entertaining others with tales of film-making adventures and misadventures, and in telling his own life story, which he views as inseparable from his creative journey.¹ The idea of a journey (whether actual, emotional or psychological) is a central thread in his artistic output and fundamental to his identity. It also provides a narrative structure for many of the myths on which stories are based. Luhrmann is fascinated by myth, which he sees as a form capable of communicating with people from different contexts and cultures. He talks about his drive to mythologise, or to manufacture high drama from everyday events. At the heart of his work, as with myth, lies a core belief in notions such as fate, destiny, the power of love and the inevitability of death. As he relates it, Luhrmann's life takes on the aura of national myth. It has become part of the brand, or persona that he has built for himself over the past fifteen or so years. It is a fable that captures the ideals on which Australia was built, as a land of immigrants, a new country offering to its settlers the possibility of advancement denied to them elsewhere. While this national myth may not have the power of the American Dream, it does inspire a certain sense of adventure, and a lack of respect for official boundaries. It is no accident that the logo for Bazmark,² the company set up by Luhrmann with his wife and chief collaborator, designer Catherine Martin, is a customised version of the Australian national coat of arms that carries the banner 'A life lived in fear is a life half lived'.³ As a nation, Australia is comparatively young,⁴ and it is postcolonial, a legacy that has significant impact on its ethnically diverse culture. This context of postcolonial struggle for an independent identity informs Luhrmann's work, and much Australian cinema. Other influences are Australia's remote geographical position as an island continent in the southern hemisphere, its perceived lack of cultural visibility on the global stage,⁵ and the fact that it has a relatively small population for such a large land mass.⁶

Bazmark company logo

Luhrmann's story has a fairy-tale ring: a young boy growing up in rural New South Wales moves to Sydney and goes on to become a celebrated international theatre and film director. Born Mark Anthony Luhrmann on 17 September 1962 in Sydney, he moved to the countryside with his family after his father returned from the Vietnam war. He grew up in the small town of Herons Creek close to the Pacific Highway, a major transport route that runs along the coast linking Sydney to Brisbane in Queensland to the north. His parents owned a gas station, a pig farm and shops, one of which – a dress shop – was run by his mother Barbara. Luhrmann describes the place as isolated, but at the same time there was a steady stream of assorted passers-through, some of them celebrities, some travelling artists. His father Leonard was a keen photographer and diver who had been involved in underwater research on the Great Barrier Reef, and he taught Baz how to use a Box Brownie camera and how to process and print photographs. He was also the proud owner of Bolex Straight 8 and Leica cameras. At one time he took over the running of the local cinema when the owner died. He appears to have been an energetic entrepreneur and educator who encouraged his sons⁷ to be physically adventurous, inventive, resourceful and to push themselves to the limit. His belief that 'anything is possible' spurred Baz to try out many different activities, from horse-riding, football, water skiing and diving to playing guitar in a band and ballroom dancing (dressed up in Elvis-style jump suit). Baz and his brothers staged magic shows and plays, and set up an amateur radio station. Amid this relentless round of creative pursuits, Baz made home movies on the Bolex in which he experimented with primitive trick effects.

His father's exceptionally high standards could have contributed to Luhrmann's legendary perfectionism, and he may well have inherited his mother's love of glamour. It is difficult not to attribute elements of the style and themes of his adult work to the bohemian setting and incessant industry of his childhood. His drive to innovate and love of classic Hollywood, his entrepreneurial skills and the epic scale of his ambition can all be traced back to the experiences of those formative years. Having developed so many interests, Luhrmann had a number of different avenues available to him. The most compelling of these was acting, which offered the possibility of reinvention of identity through role-play in different stories. Luhrmann was drawn to cinema as illusion, and the construction of imaginary worlds into which one could escape without being incarcerated. His parents divorced in 1974 and when his father remarried, Luhrmann left Herons Creek in 1977 and joined his mother in Sydney, where he became involved in amateur theatre and film groups. He attended a Catholic boys' school, and Narrabeen Sports High School, where he met Craig Pearce, who later became a key collaborator. In 1979 they appeared together in a school production of Guys and Dolls, with Luhrmann as Sky Masterson and Pearce playing Nathan Detroit.⁸ That year Luhrmann officially adopted Bazmark as his own name and in 1980, after graduating from high school, he applied to Sydney's premier acting academy the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), but was rejected as too young. Undeterred, Luhrmann set out to build a career as a performer in film and television. In the next two years he took a minor role in John Duigan's Winter of Our Dreams (1981); appeared in six episodes of the popular Australian television series A Country Practice (1981–94); formed a theatre company (The Bond); co-directed and acted in a controversial drama-documentary Kids of the Cross (1981); and had a small part in Paul Harmon's thriller The Dark Room (1982).⁹

Despite growing success as a working actor, Luhrmann applied again to NIDA in 1982 and was accepted. The experience was mixed; over-anxious to impress, Luhrmann acted out being an intense artist by engaging in some wild stunts, which did not go down well with some tutors and fellow students. At the same time, he made his mark as one to watch, and he learned about the history of theatre. Shakespeare and Molière made a significant, long-lasting impression, and Luhrmann began the practice of going to extreme lengths to research every project in depth. Although not enrolled on the directors programme, he was able to stage his own shows featuring other NIDA students. Visiting film and theatre director Jim Sharman (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975) was impressed by Luhrmann's production of August Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata and mentioned his name to the Australian Opera. Luhrmann became passionate about Brecht and Artaud, but began to realise that rather than follow the style and methods of theatre's great names, he needed to develop his own language. His interest in Joseph Campbell's writings about comparative mythology and in Shakespeare's use of familiar stories situated in magical settings fed into his desire to find a form that would speak to audiences across social and cultural divides.

The first version of Strictly Ballroom – a thirty-minute play – emerged from this context of trying out ideas and working methods at NIDA. Luhrmann put together a group of fellow students and, using a collaborative process, part of which involved individual group members occupying a 'hot seat' and having to answer searching questions from the rest of the group, they devised a piece set in the glitzy world of ballroom dancing and drawing on the David and Goliath myth and the Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale The Ugly Duckling. The method of devised theatre, in which the finished work is the result of improvisational 'workshopping' and role-play between group participants, all of whom are active creative contributors, is one that Luhrmann employs to this day. Towards the end of his time at NIDA he was selected to assist on the adaptation of The Mahabharata by Peter Brook, one of the principal exponents of devised theatre. Brook's celebrated interpretation of the Hindu story sought to give it universal relevance. Despite his mixed feelings about NIDA, Luhrmann's experiences there crystallised and gave substance and shape to his evolving world-view and modus operandi. The devised stage play Strictly Ballroom went through several transformations. It was performed at NIDA and at the World Youth Theatre festival in Bratislava in former Czechoslovakia, where it was warmly received by audiences and won awards for Best Production and Best Direction.¹⁰

The collaborative ethos of devised theatre is fundamental to Luhrmann's stage and screen work, which cannot fully be understood without reference to it. He likens his function to that of a ship's captain, responsible for initiating the journey or project. Once the other participants come on board, then each of them has a vital part to play in bringing the ship home, but it is up to the captain to keep it on course and not to lose sight of the initial purpose. The project begins with Luhrmann's personal conception, which is tested and transformed via the interpersonal activity of everyone involved, so that the end result is both personal and impersonal. Workshops, in which playing around with ideas and different kinds of performance is encouraged, are a crucial element in the process, and the actors are required to attend these sessions at an early stage prior to the start of production.¹¹ The ship's captain metaphor is suitably swashbuckling, for Luhrmann and his crew evidently treat each project as an adventure. It is also useful in nuancing traditional notions of authorship in cinema and the cherished idea of a single source (the director) for a film's meaning, style and world-view. Despite sustained critical assault on this notion over decades, it stubbornly refuses to go away. Luhrmann's example offers a more democratic model for the cinematic auteur in which the director's signature is not the only one visible in the finished product, even though he or she is in control of its final shape. While collaborative methods are not unusual in independent film-making, in Luhrmann's case the level of recognition given to creative contributors and the visibility of the crew's working practices in promotional and other material is exceptional, and can partly be put down to his background in theatre, as well as to his production set-up. The emphasis on collaboration is also important in establishing a brand for Luhrmann's output. His name provides the fixative that binds together a fluid entity whose origins cannot be determined with precision. Nevertheless, Luhrmann takes final responsibility for all aspects of the finished product, and every detail is subject to his approval.

The play Strictly Ballroom was an ambitious multimedia event even in its simplest form. Shortly after its performance in Bratislava and his graduation from NIDA, Luhrmann was offered the opportunity to direct a musical called Crocodile Creek in Rockhampton in Queensland, where he met the composer Felix Meagher, with whom he would go on to collaborate. Crocodile Creek was set in the time of the race riots that occurred during the town's gold-mining period and was a large-scale community production featuring local indigenous and Chinese people as well as Anglo-Celtic Australians. In 1986, Luhrmann formed the Six Years Old theatre company with himself as artistic director. One of their productions, Haircut, was a reworking of the controversial 1960s rock-musical Hair, which had been made into a film, directed by Milos Forman, in 1979. Luhrmann tried his hand at a number of projects, including a revival of the play Strictly Ballroom in an extended version that had successful runs at Sydney's Wharf Theatre and the 1988 World Expo in Brisbane. This version was co-written with childhood friend Craig Pearce and began their long-term writing partnership. Another significant venture for Luhrmann in 1988 was the experimental opera Lake Lost, devised with Felix Meagher for the Australian Opera's bicentennial RA project. It was while looking for a designer for the production that Luhrmann first met Catherine Martin, then in her final year at NIDA, who co-designed the sets with friend and fellow-student Angus Strathie. They won the Victorian Green Room award for Best Opera Design, while Luhrmann won the Victorian Green Room award for Best Director. Luhrmann and Martin went on to work together on several theatre productions: in 1989 they presented a 1940s-themed event Dance Hall at Sydney Town Hall for the Sydney Festival, in which the audience was invited to relive the end of World War II celebrations; in 1990 Luhrmann staged at the Sydney Opera House the acclaimed Australian Opera production of Puccini's La Bohème, set in the 1950s, for which Martin co-designed the sets and costumes with Bill Marron;¹² then in 1992 Luhrmann, Martin and Craig Pearce worked together on the film version of Strictly Ballroom, which had been optioned by Australian music producer Ted Albert and Tristram Miall for their production company M&A.

Of all the collaborators who have crossed Baz Luhrmann's path, none features more prominently than Catherine Martin (known affectionately as CM), his wife and business partner.¹³ Theirs is an alliance in which each complements the other. Martin insists that it is a partnership of equals in which Luhrmann has the vision, while she has practical craft skills of making things and problem-solving. Their long-standing artistic and personal coalition...