BAZ LUHRMANN: The Hollywood Interview

BAZ LUHRMANN: The Hollywood Interview

Red Curtain Trilogy  

This article originally appeared in the February 2004 issue of Venice Magazine. It was the second time I've interviewed Baz, the first one being for the theatrical release of Moulin Rouge! back in 2001 (Still looking for that interview! It's on the ancient technology of floppy disc somewhere in my files.) This interview was for the Los Angeles run of "La Boheme" at the Los Angeles Opera.

It's hard to believe that it's been seven years since Luhrmann has had a theatrical film released as a director. But his Australia, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, will be released later this year. Looking forward to it.

Closing the Red Curtain with “La Boheme”
Before moving on from the cinematic delights of his Red Curtain Trilogy, Baz Luhrmann revisits the Puccini masterwork which kicked off his career.
By Terry Keefe

I first spoke to filmmaker Baz Luhrmann in the spring of 2001, on the eve of the opening of his feature Moulin Rouge!. He was already a highly accomplished director by any standards, with the box office successes of Strictly Ballroom (1992) and Romeo + Juliet (1996) under his belt. But Moulin Rouge! was a different level of project entirely. Working with his biggest budget to date, 52 million, Luhrmann was attempting to revive the movie musical, a genre that couldn’t have been deader at the time. And in what must have caused even more sleepless nights for the studio bean counters, he wasn’t doing it in the most safe and conservative manner. Moulin Rouge! combined the style of traditional movie musicals with every imaginable strain of pop culture to create something very new, a giddy pastiche that was intoxicating as absinthe to some, and a little too much for others. In the days leading up to its release, it was impossible to gauge what critical and popular reaction would be. Studios and careers have fallen many times in the past on daring film projects and Moulin Rouge! was as daring as they come. Knowing full well that positive publicity was going to be a key factor in the film’s future, Luhrmann leaped into a barnstorming tour of interviews, seeming to be everywhere at once. Although he was clearly aware of the stakes, Luhrmann didn’t seem to be unnerved at all by them, and that probably shouldn’t have been a surprise. After all, this was a man who had previously created a Shakespearean film that teenagers embraced, and he had also made ballroom dancing actually seem cool with his debut picture Strictly Ballroom. The impression I received was that he was primarily concerned with explaining his bold vision to the prospective audience, hoping to convince them that his magic carpet ride was one worth taking. The audiences agreed that it was. Moulin Rouge! would go on to be a smash in every way, grossing $175 million worldwide and receiving eight Academy Award nominations, winning two. The film’s influence reached wide in Hollywood, as it unquestionably paved the way for the success of Chicago the following year.

The Baz Luhrmann who I met last month is obviously now in a very different position career-wise from when we first spoke. Having conquered the world with Moulin Rouge!, he’s a proven commodity on the largest of scales, and investing in his next big undertaking is most likely now seen less as a risk than as a wise decision. And in terms of his creative direction, things are also changing for him. Moulin Rouge! was the cinematic culmination of what Luhrmann refers to as his “Red Curtain Trilogy,” which began with Strictly Ballroom. The term “Red Curtain” refers, in a broad sense, to the hyper-realistic style that Luhrmann, along with his longtime partner, production designer, and wife Catherine Martin, have pioneered. Luhrmann has announced that his next film will be the story of Alexander the Great, which will likely be a step in a new aesthetic direction for him, but before he moves on to that next chapter in his filmmaking odyssey, he has decided to return for one final time to the opera which was like the opening notes in the Red Curtain Trilogy, “La Boheme.” No, Luhrmann never made a theatrical film of the grand Giacomo Puccini masterpiece, which is the story of a doomed love affair between the seamstress Mimi and the writer Rodolfo in Bohemian Paris, but it was his production of it in 1990 at the Sydney Opera House which truly began his career and led to the financing of Strictly Ballroom. And the spirit with which he and Catherine Martin reinvented the opera is the same one which drove their Red Curtain Trilogy.




It’s part of the Baz Luhrmann legend that when he was first announced as the director of “La Boheme” at the Sydney Opera House in 1990, 9/10ths of the subscribers cancelled. At the time, he was best known as a very experimental theater director. But when the red curtains rose on his production of “La Boheme,” Luhrmann would quickly silence most of his critics, with the show going on to set box office records in Sydney. Although he kept many of the traditional elements of the opera in place, Luhrmann updated it in ways which brought the original spirit of the piece back to life. In Puccini’s day, opera was the popular entertainment. It was sexy. And in keeping with that, Luhrmann cast attractive twentysomethings in the leads, while pushing the time period from the 1800s to 1957. The result not only satisfied opera purists, but it also introduced a whole new, younger audience to opera for the first time.

In the audience at the Sydney Opera House were the future Broadway producers of “Rent,” who drew inspiration from the production, and more than a decade later convinced Luhrmann to re-mount “La Boheme” for a Broadway run. Luhrmann went on a worldwide talent search to find the top young opera talent in the business, eventually landing an international cast which alternated shows. Three different performers were cast for both the roles of Mimi and Rodolfo. Amongst the Mimi’s were Lisa Hopkins from the United States, Ekaterina Solovyeva from Russia, and Wei Huang from China. And the Rodolfo’s included David Miller and Jesus Garcia from the United States, and Alfred Boe from the United Kingdom. Opening on December 8, 2002, the new version of “La Boheme” was an instant smash, nominated for six Tony Awards and winning for Best Scenic Design (Catherine Martin) and Best Lighting Design (Nigel Levings). Starting in January, the show will be presented in Los Angeles at the Ahmanson Theatre.

Baz Luhrmann has been doing interviews all day long by the time I see him, but he never seems to tire. Once again, I shouldn’t be surprised. Someone who tired easily would never have been able to create the vast new worlds which he has been showing us behind his Red Curtain for over a decade now.

So does this new staging of “La Boheme” feel like a closing of a circle of sorts for you?

Yeah, that is why we did it. We did it for two reasons probably. One, I really wanted to live in New York for awhile and stop touring. We’re always running around, doing crazy things, which is part of the work that we do. But also, “La Boheme,” when we originally did it, was the very beginning of this period of work that the Red Curtain Trilogy, those three films, belonged to. It was the same investigation of style. It was the same idea of taking emotional stories and telling them in heightened, creative worlds, right? So as I was moving out of it, and as I was turning 40, and given that when I first did it, I always said rather arrogantly, as I was an arrogant little thing [laughs], “We don’t want to be 40 and doing ‘La Boheme.’” But I figured that I should revisit it, as a way of closing off, as a way of making sure I wasn’t past 40 doing it, right? And what was really interesting, and this was not artificially looked for, but I think in all honesty if you look at the one I did in 1990, and here we are in 2003, it’s a coarser show but what’s true about it is that it has a sort of brash youthfulness. It’s all about the possibility of life and energy and “Wow, isn’t life going to be incredible?” And I’m the last person to turn around and say that it wasn’t because we’ve had a great journey and it still remains that. But having just done it again, and having turned 41, and having just had a baby in the last few weeks, a little girl, Lillian, I think this production is a finer work. But it’s also more melancholic. It’s not about lamenting the passing of that youth in a sense of “life will never be good again.” It’s the naiveté of the ideals. An understanding that while the ideals are very real, the way in which one maintains an open heart, or a belief or a search for some sort of truth, is not by keeping all the doors open. It’s not by being extreme. It’s not by going “I’d rather die than -” Because you’re just going to end up dying. We all know our friends from our bohemian youth and there were three kinds. There were those who actually did die of a drug overdose. Those that actually stayed there and they are very sad. You just can’t get through to them that it’s time to grow up. And there are those that grow up, and of the grown-up ones, there are the ones who get angry about it for some reason and say, “Oh, I was an idiot and I got ripped off by the commune,” or whatever it was, “and you owe me money.” And [there are those who are in] the category that I hope stories like “La Boheme” help you with, and [they say,]“It was beautiful, it was extraordinary, it was exquisite, it was naïve, and it was perfect. But it could only be for a certain amount of time.” You can’t explain this to a young person, but in trying to keep all the doors open, you’re actually imprisoned by them. You’re super-imprisoned by them. But when you shut them off, you get this kind of next journey, which isn’t a physical one but a sort of spiritual one.

In terms of the staging, what differences are there between Sydney and now?

Well, Sydney itself was a very low-budget, tiny work. And it was part of a rep, remember, so it had to go in and out of the theater each night. The fundamental idea of it, the heart of the idea of it, is very much the same. But in terms of the execution of it, now we’re on a multi-million dollar budget. And what I did was, the audience although young and new in Sydney, they were coming to the opera house. Whereas now, we’re going out to meet them half-way. We’re going out into the jungle and we’re saying, “Even if you’ve never seen an opera before, not only will you get the story, but you’ll get everything and you’ll be moved by it.” And for that reason, one had to be very pictorially clear. We’re clear about the fact you’re on the streets of Paris in the 50s. It comes into the theater itself, so it’s more into the theater, the set itself. And then it’s just more lavish, it really is quite lush compared to the extremely minimal production that Sydney had.

It is true that when it was announced you were doing “La Boheme” in Sydney, 9/10ths of the subscribers cancelled?

It happened. It was so weird. We were kids. I had my opera company, under the state opera company, and it was experimental and we made operas, and I had my theater company. So I was one of those sort of irritating, young theater dynamos that made everyone go, “I want you dead. How can you be 25 and have 2 companies?” [laughs] But hey, it was a small town. Then the opera came, and it was a big risk, it was a big idea. We were only like 23, 24. So I spent like a year researching Puccini. The key thing for us is that it wasn’t about reproducing the opera exactly as it was [in the 1800s]. It was about recapturing what it felt like to be sitting in an audience in 1890, watching a show that was shocking. Young middle-class guys hanging out with prostitutes, basically, living the bohemian life and dining on coffee. It was very hard to communicate to a new audience that checked velvet pants and britches were shocking. So the choices were all based on how to make it feel like that experience. There were virtually demonstrations from the opera lovers [when our show was announced]. On the week we opened, the Gulf War broke out. I can remember George Bush going, “We’ve got a war with Iraq,” and we’re doing “La Boheme.” I noticed that in the letter section of The Sydney Morning Herald that there were more letters saying “We’ve got to stop these kids from doing ‘La Boheme,’” than there were about what was going on in Iraq! What’s slightly disturbing is that over 10 years later, George Bush Jr. is in Iraq and I’m still doing “La Boheme.” [laughs] I’d better stop doing it or we’re really going to get into trouble, you know? So indeed, the subscription cancellations happened. There were two big issues in this. One, is that Joan Sutherland is really like our royalty. She’s like the Queen in Australia. She was very negative about updating in general. We got the word that “Joan’s not happy.” So the Opera now is really out on a limb. I then learned to do what I’m doing now, to publicize. I learned that if you’re going to take risks, you really need to get out there and explain it. I got on the chat shows, I had punk hair at the time, I’ve always had wacky hair, and that helped. I got the opportunity to sort of state my case. So young people started to buy tickets and this became a big story. Sort of “Old is out, young is in.” There weren’t that many of them, but they started to line up and buy tickets. The next thing, we had Opening Night, and it was a great performance. People really rose to their feet, led by Joan Sutherland. She came backstage with incredible emotional grace and she embraced us and she told us how much she loved it. It went on to become their highest-grossing opera of all time. The subscribers came back.





What were some of the biggest challenges of doing the show on Broadway?

Number one, above all else, was that in Sydney, it was this one young boy and one young girl [cast in the leads]. And now we needed three. Not only did they have to be truly able to sing it, but they had to look and act like their roles. So we did like a year of auditioning all over the world. I can’t remember the numbers, but they’re in the thousands. I did at least 200-300 all over the world. You’ve got one from Shanghai, one from Russia, one from America. It’s the United Colors of Opera Singers, you know? They are all legitimate young stars and it’s a real circus. They’re brilliant young kids. It’s a beautiful thing, actually, that really only happened after we got going, that they really realized how special it is. I’m not here to diminish the value of opera houses. I’m from the opera world. Half my team came from the English opera. We get that. But it’s a club. And when you’re young, there aren’t that many young people around opera houses. So you’ve got these good-looking young groovy kids who equally like Radiohead and Puccini. So they just realize how special it is. On Broadway, there were fans looking for them. It was very cool.

How did the decision to mike the performers come about? That’s not traditional in the opera.

Big, big decision. Because, you see, those kids can sing it any day you like. We’ll come in and turn the system off and they’ll fill the room. The difference is that when you’re sitting in La Scala, or one of the other old houses, acoustically, you can sit in the cheapest student seat, and it’s immediate. It’s not like that in the big houses on Broadway or here. So what the boys at Acme Sound have done, and we’ve spent a fortune getting this right, is not so much to amplify the voice as change the acoustics of the space. So that if you’re in a cheap seat, it feels resonant. It’s not like a rock sound, where it’s blaring out of a speaker near your left ear. In fact, I have a rule that if they spot where the sound is coming from, we’re in trouble. So it’s about it feeling resonant and sort of feeling liquid in the space.

Is the show different from night to night, because you have such a diverse cast who rotate in the lead roles?

Totally. But it delivers. People have their personal emotional connections to the performers. So it doesn’t matter who it is. Someone will say, “I saw Wei Huang,” and someone will say, “Well, I saw Ekaterina.” And you can’t argue with them who’s better or worse. They just have their passions, right? But the truth is, mostly what happens is, people who have seen more than one night have said, “I really enjoyed it because of the nuances in the differences of the performances.” But it’s a nuance, not a different story.

So is the Red Curtain kind of closing now and are you going to move on to a new act in your filmmaking journey?

Well, the curtain’s come down on Act One on my life. These are undeniable things. Like we don’t have endless acts in our lives, not yet. I think we might become really unfortunate if we do [laughs]. I have no doubt that in my lifetime, and yours, we’re going to discover another 20 years. They’re going to go, “Guess what? You’ve got another 20 years!” and we’re going to go, “What do we do now?” Take another holiday I suppose [laughs]. So, the first act is closed. I’ve turned 40, I had a little baby, and you go, “Life’s fresh and new again. Act Two!” I mean, I could make a living out of doing funky musicals. I sort of invented some of that language, so I could go on and do that forever. But I’ve made a choice that it’s not about being the richest practitioner of what I do, or even the most famous, but making sure that what we make is truly educating me and making my life just a rich one to live. Just a few weeks ago, working on Alexander the Great, I was in the jungles near the Burmese border with a bunch of elephants. I mean, how good does it get, you know? [laughs]

How is your Alexander the Great project going?

I’ve been working on the screenplay with David Hare. I’m basically back 6 months now because I need to give the screenplay another round. That’s me, I take forever to do stuff. And Oliver Stone’s doing his [own version of the Alexander story], so everyone’s happy I’m out of the way. And I have other epics too. The first way I get into trouble is that I talk about what I’m doing. Once I know what I’m going to do, I talk about it. But when I do it, is up to me. We don’t work for people really.

Have you settled on a style for the film yet?
Oh, I’m involving a language. Absolutely, absolutely. And I work on that very academically really. It’s a process-driven thing.

You’re not going to give us any hints on what that language will be, are you?
Only in that its DNA belongs more to Lawrence of Arabia than it does to musical language. Its DNA comes from quite classical storytelling, quite classical cinema. But with an edge I guess. Although “edge” is a tricky word, because it’s like [disdainfully] “let’s make it edgy,” you know? In the end, you shouldn’t be starting at style, you should be making stylistic choices that help the audience experience and feel the story in this time and in this place. Stories do not change, but the way we tell them does. So that’s where that thinking comes from.

Baz Luhrmann: The MOULIN ROUGE Hollywood Interview Flashback

Baz Luhrmann: The MOULIN ROUGE Hollywood Interview Flashback

Strictly Ballroom  

(Baz Luhrmann, above.)

(This interview with Baz Luhrmann first appeared in Venice Magazine in June of 2001. I would later interview Baz for his opera production of "La Boheme" - check out that interview here. I seem to be in the minority, but I really enjoyed his Australia, a sprawling epic with unabashed sentimentality, reminiscent of many films from the old studio era.)

The Man Behind the Red Curtain
Director Baz Lurhmann Reveals the Secrets of Moulin Rouge

by Terry Keefe

The "Red Curtain" is a descriptive phrase coined by filmmaker Baz Luhrmann to describe his style of filmmaking, and it is apt - cinema which is also so highly theatrical that it feels like it was birthed from the stage. Think of the fevered final dance competition of his debut feature, Strictly Ballroom (1992) which was so colorful and high-octane that it almost seemed to be an animated film come to life. Or the swirling camera and dazzling production design which breathed new life into the oft-told story of Romeo + Juliet (1996). Luhrmann's films take place in a world that can best be described as heightened reality, and they combine elements of theater, opera, traditional cinema, and numerous elements of pop culture to create an almost completely new genre. The universe behind Luhrmann's red curtain is always on 10, and it demands that the audience be anything but passive. In a Luhrmann film, you know you're watching a movie, but it sometimes feels more like a live performance. So much, in fact, that audiences at the Cannes Film Festival this year were applauding at the end of each of the songs in Luhrmann's newest feature film, Moulin Rouge, as if they were at a Broadway show.

Moulin Rouge takes place in turn of the (last) century Paris and tells the story of a young musical playwright, Christian (Ewan McGregor), who falls in love with Satine (Nicole Kidman), the star of the decadently infamous Moulin Rouge nightclub. Satine also happens to be the city's most famous courtesan, and this is where trouble comes into paradise. Zidler (Jim Broadbent), the Moulin Rouge's P.T. Barnum-like impresario, has promised the hand of Satine to the Duke of Worchester (a delightfully evil Richard Roxburgh). In exchange, the Duke will finance a renovation of the Moulin Rouge into a legitimate theater, where Satine can become a true actress. It's a tale of love vs. money. Did we mention that it's also a musical? A musical in which McGregor and Kidman sing everything from the title track of The Sound of Music to David Bowie's "Heroes."

With Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann reinvents the movie musical by delving into the past. It's almost as if he took all the music videos, studio musicals, pop albums, and stage productions of the last 100 years, stuck them into a Cuisinart, and proceeded to shape Moulin Rouge out of the mixture. There are so many pop culture references in Moulin Rouge that there are references within the references -- such as the scene in which Nicole Kidman croons Madonna's "Material Girl" while a bunch of tuxedoed male suitors chase her around with gifts, the imagery of which references the 1985 video for the Madonna song. But wait, that video was itself an homage to Marilyn Monroe's scene from the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) in which she sings "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," which, incidentally, Kidman also sings here. Moulin Rouge showcases the Red Curtain style at its most full-blown yet. It even opens with a shot of a red curtain which pulls back to reveal one of the most dazzling opening sequences in recent cinematic memory, as Luhrmann's camera flies over a recreation of the cityscape of Paris, zips into various apartments to introduce some of the lead characters, then rockets into the Moulin Rouge nightclub for the opening number.

The roots of Luhrmann's groundbreaking cinema can be traced back to his extensive theatrical background in his home country of Australia. While studying to be an actor at Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Arts, Luhrmann co-wrote, staged, and directed a play which he would develop into his film Strictly Ballroom. But before he made the jump to film, Luhrmann would produce his first opera, "Lake Lost," which is where he began his long collaboration with his wife and production designer, Catherine Martin. During subsequent opera productions of "La Boheme" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Luhrmann and Martin would develop their signature style which would eventually be brought to the world of cinema.

We caught up with Baz Luhrmann on the eve of the nationwide opening of Moulin Rouge, which had already completed a highly successful limited release in New York and Los Angeles. In both cities, audiences were lining up around the block to get a glimpse of what's behind the red curtain.

When you were at the conceptual stages of Moulin Rouge, did you know that you'd basically be re-inventing the movie musical by the time you were done?

Baz Luhrmann: Yes, that was what we set out to do. Apart from the other things that feed the process of deciding what to make, it's always been a desire of mine. I grew up in the middle of nowhere and we got lots of old television and my dad ran a cinema for a while, so I loved musicals as a kid. You know, music cinema, all this artificiality making you feel things, I've done a lot of opera and theater, and I just thought that somebody's got to get around to making that work in the cinema again. And so that was the project.

With all the songs, dance, and production design you had to try out, this couldn't have been a traditional scripting process.

You know, this is the third in this kind of film we've done. We set out to make a cinematic form which is the antithesis of the current cinema vernacular. Where the audience participate. Where they are awakened. Where they are alive in the cinema. Where they are actually uniting with the rest of the people in the cinema and participating. Now, the film's played in both New York and Los Angeles, in just two cinemas, but the audiences are clapping in exactly the same places during the movie in every single session. And that's good news for us, because that's why the film is different. I mention this because we built Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, and this film in the same manner. And it's very, very labor-intensive. We spend a lot of time doing very detailed academic research, then we build the plot line. And the difficult thing is to build a very simple plot. They all require simple, recognizable stories that the audience knows the ending of when it begins. They require that. And that's very hard to do. We found it much easier when we were doing naturalistic work, because when you're revealing plot as you go along, you've got something to hang it on. Whereas, when people know the plot, it's about the execution. What we had to do, for example, is you're writing the scene and you've got the boy going, "Love is everything," and she's going, "No, I'm a career girl. I can't fall in love." Then you have to convert that into musical form. And we've already set up the rule, which is an old rule, that the audience had to have a familiar relationship with the music and that the music had to be of our vernacular. So it was incredibly labor-intensive. But really, that's true of all musical work. No opera and no musical has been a quick job. I mean, "Cats" when it opened did not have "Memories" in it, for example.

A lot of the rehearsal for Moulin Rouge occurred at a place of yours in Australia called "The House of Iona," described in the production notes as a "sprawling Victorian mansion." Tell us about that.

The key actors would come down for four weeks, It's a production facility but we also live there. The same thing happened on Romeo + Juliet - Leonardo DiCaprio came and lived with us for a while as we developed it. And we take very seriously working with the actors in the sense that they do their work and we redraft based on what happens in the rehearsals and the workshopping.

What was the casting process for the leads like? Was it always a mandate that they could sing, or did you ever consider casting non-singing stars that you could dub?

They had to be able to sing. I cherish the fact that I know of many, many famous actors and I know that they can sing beautifully. But both Ewan and Nicole I had had some contact with before, because I shot Nicole for Vogue which I was the editor of for an issue, and I knew she was very funny and warm and unlike the Nicole that most people know about. And Ewan I almost cast as Mercutio (in Romeo + Juliet). I went through the process of finding out what actors could fulfill the roles and then convey emotion through voice. They didn't have to be big singers, but they had to be able to move you emotionally. They had to be able to act through voice. Basically, Ewan and Nicole were the best for the job. That's the bottom line of it.

Is it true you weren't able to screen-test Ewan and Nicole together before making the final casting decision?

Yes, Nicole was on stage on Broadway in "The Blue Room" and Ewan was in the West End in a play as well. So I really had to take a punt on that chemistry and I must say Ronna Kress, my casting director, really held my hand and said, "Look, you've got to take the leap of faith." And we did and it really is a chemical reaction between the two of them.

How was the on-camera singing filmed?

We used all the techniques. There's the traditional technique of playback, which is your basic one: They record and we do playback (on the set). But we did use a very groundbreaking technique which is where they sing live and then you replace the voice later with digital technology. It's a program which locks what you've sung to lip-sync. And then the other thing is that for a few moments in the film they're actually singing live.

I have to ask you how you created the fantastic opening where you're zipping in and out of all those buildings and all over the city of Paris.

It's a combination of very old techniques and very new techniques. The illusion that it's black and white film and then we zoom in -- that is all model work, they're old-fashioned models that are built. And then we used digital technology to put in boats and water and sky and people. We shot hundreds of little extras. There's tiny little people walking on the bridge and things to make it real. And so it's a combination of old and new. We spent all of our digital money, and we didn't have a lot of it, making things not good but BAD. Basically stopping it from looking digitally perfect, to make it look "cinematically imperfect."

What types of techniques were used to make it look imperfect?

You can equate this with the difference between digital sound and analog. They're like CDs vs. vinyl records. Because life in digital is absolutely mathematically perfect. Unfortunately, real life is nothing like that. In fact, it's the imperfections between individual violin strings that make an orchestra warm. They're all slightly out of tune. That's why when you get a digital sample of a violin and you put hundreds of them together, they sound nothing like the real thing. Because it's the imperfection that makes something warm. And we've done that a lot on Moulin Rouge. For example, when we have our camera sweeping through buildings over Paris (in the opening), we had to actually program in digitally the imperfections of bumps and shakes. At first you really do believe you might be in a bit of black and white footage, and that's because it shakes. Also, if you look at the shot it goes out of focus. We had to digitally put it out of focus.

What are some of your favorite movie musicals?

I think that I have tastes that range from "Top Hat" to "Bandwagon" to "Cabaret." I love the early Elvis musicals, but I also love "West Side Story," which is a tragedy.

You're willing to take a lot of risks that most directors would never hang their career on. Can you even allow yourself to get scared or can you put it out of your mind completely when you're starting a project like this?

It's a paradox. I'm paradoxical about it in a really big sense. Because people say to me, "My God, you're so brave," and all that. And I'm just thinking, "What are you talking about?" I'm sort of like, "Well, gee, somebody's got to make the musical work now. I guess I'll have to do that job," you know? On the other hand, it would be a lie not to say that every morning I wake up with a sort of sick feeling in my stomach as I go towards what we're doing. But it's usually just about making the day work. It's like, "Oh my god, I've got 300 shots. I'll never get there." I have no question mark whatsoever that whether a billion people go off to see this movie or only the crowds that are now lining up in L.A. or New York, there's no question that the genie is out of the bottle (in terms of bringing back the musical). And there's no question in my mind that the genie was going to get out of the bottle. If it wasn't me, it was going to be someone else. So I'm like, "What's the big deal?" How many absolutely monolithic heads of monolithic companies in the last four days are going, "You know, this is a billion-dollar idea. We own music companies. We own film companies. You bring the two together and they work? Hmmmm." [laughs] It's not rocket science to work out that the world goes around in circles and this, at some point, was going to come around again.

Given the fact that the movie musical had been considered a dead genre by the major studios for so long, did it take a lot of convincing on your part to get the green light from Fox?

No. In the old days maybe, but just think -- I've made a film about ballroom dancing and a film about Shakespeare. Nobody was knocking on my door going, "Please, we really need somebody to make a ballroom dancing film. We know it's going to be huge." or "Shakespeare! That's a great idea!" So after the first two -- they made a lot of money and won a lot of awards. I have a deal anyway at Fox where I'm about making new culture. My company is Bazmark Films, and you either want the Bazmark thing or you don't. I went in and I just basically outlined in words the basic notion of [Moulin Rouge] and they said, "Not a cent over 45 million. Come back when it's ready." And to be really honest, as much as I'd like to go into a kind of horror story about the studio, the real truth is that they've been unbelievably, relentlessly supportive, like at a ludicrous level. People lose their jobs over squandering 50 million on having a crack at the musical. And they were the ones who said, "Hey, we think this is a summer picture." I was a little bit more like, "Art house September looks good to me." They're the ones who have gone, "This is something for everybody. This can play broad." And you know, if they believe in my commitment, I've got to believe in their commitment. We're very family-orientated, in the sense that we work with the same people over a long period of time, and I know it sounds corny but I feel really great that all the people at that studio feel really proud about the achievement of this film. It gives the studio a great sense of higher morale that there are actually people saying, "Oh, you're doing something edgy. Must be great to work there." It makes Fox an interesting place to be.

Let's talk a little about your early work. Your first film Strictly Ballroom actually started as a play.

Yes, we developed it as a play when I was at drama school. And then I further developed it in my theater company and we toured Czechoslovakia; this was before the Wall came down. It won a lot of awards as a play. Then I set out to make it into a film. I realized that if I naturalized it, and this is not to demean Dirty Dancing, it would become like a naturalistic Dirty Dancing. So one had to find a cinematic language that kept the irony, that kept the sense that it had a resonating comment about artistic oppression. That's when I began developing this idea of theatricalized cinema. And it's not brand-new, you know. It's looking back to the movies of the '30s and the '40s which have a contract with the audience. I was also very influenced by Bollywood movies, or Hindi movies. Cinema where the audience participates in a movie. Where they know they're watching a movie at all times.

While you were working in theater, was it always a goal to cross over into films?

You know, I made movies as a kid and I made plays. It's never been any different for me. I've always made little movies and I've acted in movies and I've acted in plays and I've made records. We come from a small country, Australia, so everybody does a little bit of everything. You've got to. [laughs]