Australia Movie/Film - Baz Luhmann's Sydney

BAZ LUHRMANN'S SYDNEY

In January 2007, CNN posted on its website a fabulous collection of Baz Luhrmann media under the heading The Scene, which is a weekly travel series featuring personalities highlighting different parts of the world. Luhrmann showed us around his home town of Sydney, and the website included an extensive Baz Luhrmann interview, biography, video and gallery of images. The video in particular is very entertaining indeed, with Baz showing us around the town to the tune of his song, 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)'. Near the end of the video, we also see Luhrmann in the soundstages of Fox Studios where he says "it is in these soundstages that we are about to begin construction of the sets of my forthcoming movie called Australia". Click here to view the video.

The images are also excellent, and underneath each one are insightful comments from Luhrmann. I definitely believe that all of this material is a great way for people interested in the filming of Australia to get to know its director a bit better. CNN have contacted me directly and kindly gave me permission to use the interview and images on my website, which are featured below.

BAZ LUHRMANN IMAGES

Sydney is a supremely beautiful city. It's on the absolute edge of the world.
La Boheme premiered here, and I often found myself standing in the foyer
going, "So what did you think of the production?" and some international
guest is going, "Yeah, yeah, it was fine... this is a fantastic view, isn't it!"

What I love about Bronte Beach is that you have the beach culture,
the surf culture, and then there's a whole lot of folk from
the inner suburbs. There's a great mixture of people.

When I was casting "Moulin Rouge!" I used to take this walk every afternoon
with Ronna Kress, the casting director, and we would work on character and
possibilities. After a year of travelling the world and working with different
actors, most of the decisions I ultimately made on this spot right here.

I don't know if you can see it - you might need to put these glasses on -
but can you see on the horizon the way those ships sit? It's extraordinary.
You've got to think to yourself that that's the Pacific Ocean and if you keep
going that way you get to another fantastic place in the world, South America!

It's a classic beach club, this one, probably one of the oldest. It's an awesome pool.
I learnt to swim in a beach pool like this - look how strong those waves are, the surf
is so strong. It's like everything in Sydney it's strong, it's brash and you
have to contend with that. If you're not strong it'll gobble you up.

What I love about this image is that you have this fantastically dramatic coastline,
beautiful vast water as always, and then it backs into this gothic graveyard that's
falling down into the endless ocean and all of these people in shorts
and t-shirts doing early morning jogging. Great location, hey.

You really have to wear a hat in Sydney. The sun in this country is unbelievably
strong. You have to take it very seriously because, as attractive as it is, it's harsh,
brutal and extremely dangerous. I've had a personal experience with loss when
it comes to skin cancer, so trust me on the sunscreen. Wear sunscreen.

This is one of my favorite cafes, in bohemian Darlinghurst, near where we work
and live. It's called Lateria. A great asset of Sydney is that in the 50's so many
Italians and Greeks came out and brought their great coffee-making skill with
them, so you can drink truly great coffee in any part of the city.

Iona has been our home and our creative space for maybe 10 years now.
We recorded every single vocal for "Moulin Rouge!" here. When I was a young
actor doing a project called "Kids of the Cross", I was running with the street kids
and we broke in when it was derelict. I remember thinking, "This could be good."

Sydney is a wonderful environment for filmmakers. A lot of really large-scale
films are shot here now - "Star Wars," "The Matrix" and a funny kind of weird
musical called Moulin something or other... In these soundstages we're about
to construct the sets for my forthcoming motion picture, "Australia."

There's great Italian, Greek, Turkish and Lebanese food, Japanese, Chinese -
lots of Asian. This is a favorite little Korean of mine - I like to sneak into this
café because as you can see, not that many people know about it. I like this
whole area around here, this little Korea town; you sort of disappear into it...

In the end, Sydney's a totally coastal life. There's no center of town: everyone comes to the
beaches. One of the defining characteristics of Sydney is the egalitarianism you find. The beach
is a great leveller: it doesn't matter who you are when you're wearing a pair of board shorts.

Finally, here are two more images kindly supplied by CNN which were not featured on their website.
I'm not sure where these photos were taken, and there are no comments from Baz Luhrmann.

BAZ LUHRMANN INTERVIEW

In keeping with the travel theme, Baz Luhrmann's interview consisted almost entirely of questions regarding Luhrmann's home town of Sydney. There was also one question regarding Australia, as follows:

TS: Can you tell us what you're working on at the moment?

BL: Right now I'm working on a new film called "Australia." It's a sweeping romantic epic, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, that uses the landscape of Australia to express the emotions of the character. It will reinvestigate the idea of the mythical Australia; of the metaphor of Australia to the rest of the world. I'm embarking on this huge Australian piece because it puts me back in the land which is my birth land and my home. I've traveled around the world to so many cities and fallen in love with all kinds of places but it's great to reconnect with your own heart.

The full interview reads as follows:

Q&A Baz Luhrmann interview
POSTED: 10:54 a.m. EST, January 5, 2007

The Scene caught up with Baz Luhrmann in Sydney to talk sun, sea and his latest movie, "Australia".

The Scene: How would you describe the essence of Sydney?

Baz Luhrmann: Sydney in general is eclectic. You can be on that brilliant blue ocean walk in the morning and then within 20 minutes you can be in a completely vast suburban sprawl or an Italian or Asian suburb, and it's that mix of people, it's that melting pot of people that give it its vital personality.

TS: Tell us about your relationship with Sydney.

BL: Like any relationship that is worth it, you have to work at it, and my relationship with Sydney has gone through many different phases. It's something that recently I've decided to work at, in the sense that I wanted to rediscover that this is my home and what that means to me now that I have a family.

TS: Can you tell us what you're working on at the moment?

BL: Right now I'm working on a new film called "Australia." It's a sweeping romantic epic, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, that uses the landscape of Australia to express the emotions of the character. It will reinvestigate the idea of the mythical Australia; of the metaphor of Australia to the rest of the world. I'm embarking on this huge Australian piece because it puts me back in the land which is my birth land and my home. I've traveled around the world to so many cities and fallen in love with all kinds of places but it's great to reconnect with your own heart.

TS: What is the relationship between Australians and their environment?

BL: You need to understand that it's bigger than you, it'll always be bigger than you and you should never try and subjugate it. You have to learn to live with it. Part of that is the danger of it. No matter what your point of view is you have to accept it and become part of it. And I think that that's one of the bigger themes of "Australia."

Children at school wear caps with little curtains at the back to protect the backs of their necks and their ears. That give you an idea of how seriously they take the sun out here in this glorious country. And as for the sea, Australia is a totally coastal life. It's a world by the ocean and the largest part of the population live by the sea. The water is strong, the water has enormous emotion and personality and like a character it can turn on you when you least expect it. Like everything in this country, particularly on the beaches of Sydney, you have to respect it. It's not something that you can take for granted.

TS: What's your favorite part of your work?

BL: I've come to realize that the part I love most is working with people. It's a circus life. I will, after making something for years, have a period when I'm completely on my own and that's my own anonymous time, but outside of that most of my creative life in Sydney is spent working with creative people, all kinds of people. Life is never really me walking along on my own contemplating creative things on the beach. It's always with someone.

TS: What are the best and worst things about Sydney?

BL: When I return from other places around the world, the thing that I'm always reminded about Sydney is that it's such an easy place to live. I guess that's also a negative too, 'cause it can probably be sometimes a little bit too easy to live in the city. Some would say it's glamorous and seductive -- shamefully, shamefully seductive.

TS: How do daytime and night time Sydney differ?

BL: In the daytime, Sydney's lively and fun and brash and colorful. Then at night you start to learn there's another side to it. That's the deeper Sydney -- a little bit more mysterious, a bit more surprising, and a little bit more exotic, actually. Sydney at night has an entirely different tone. It's surely the great party town. The party is a true art form in Sydney and people practise it a great deal. You can really get quite lost in it. If Paris is a city of lights, Sydney is the city of fireworks.

TS: If Sydney were a person, what would it be like?

BL: Sydney is rather like an arrogant lover. When it rains it can deny you its love and you can find it hard to relate to. It's not a place that's built to be rainy or cold. But when the sun comes out, it bats its eyelids, it's glamorous, beautiful, attractive, smart, and it's very hard to get away from its magnetic pull. And like a fascinating creature, it also has this underbelly, which you find the more time you spend with it.

The Scene: What do you think makes Sydney so special?

Baz Luhrmann: One of the great things about Sydney is that it has a great acceptance of everyone and everything. It's an incredibly tolerant city, a city with a huge multicultural basis. It has this very dynamic relationship with Asia and China and Shanghai, my second favorite city. One of the biggest events in Sydney is the gay and lesbian Mardi Gras which happens in February every year. Everybody comes out to watch that, it's one of the big showstoppers of the year. When Leonardo takes the magical love potion in "Romeo + Juliet" and you go into "Young hearts run free," the Mardi Gras was a bit of an influence on that. It's a city where you can be anyone you want to be. It's certainly got its own edge.

TS: Tell us a bit about the beach culture.

BL: It's a real spontaneous community. The older folk will meet here probably every morning. All weekend the kids come down and all the surf lifesaving happen on the beach, so you'll see all the competitions. Christmas time you can't sleep around here 'cause they're always having Christmas parties and then there's the surf culture, all the surfer kids all out in the ocean. It's all the layers of society.

You have the very earliest beach characters -- very very old Bondi Icebergs swimmers, old chaps who get out there at 6 am in the winter who were the first ever surfers, old retirees who live by the beach. I often think to myself, at the end of an interesting life it's maybe not such a bad thing to spend your last days with your friends sitting by the blue, blue ocean reliving the story of your life while sitting in the dangerous sun.

TS: You do a lot of walking in Sydney. How does that relate to your work?

BL: I do find walking is fundamental to my creative process. Often CM [Catherine Martin], my wife and creative partner, and I would spend long afternoons walking along the coast path. Sydney has a really naturally beautiful coastline but Australia has some of the most dramatic weather in the world, and when you walk along here and the sea bubbles and is green and angry, it reminds you that there's always something bigger than the troubles which are going on in your life: we've often found that an inspiration.

TS: Sydney is famous for its food -- can you tell us a little about that?

BL: The food in Sydney is an Asian Pacific cuisine. It's eclectic but above all it's fresh, inventive and creative and that's what I love about it. When I was shooting "Romeo + Juliet" very early on, Leonardo came out for some workshops here and he was obsessed with the pancakes that Bill Granger does. Even when I see him now, many years later, he says, "They still do those pancakes?"

TS: What is it about Darlinghurst [where Luhrmann lives] that attracted you to it?

BL: Darlinghurst is the underbelly of Sydney. It's bohemian, it's very creative and above all it's lively. When I was a very young actor/director, this is the area that I lived in. There was a tiny little theatre company at the end of the road here and I remember I saw Mel Gibson do a series of short plays. There wouldn't be more than 50 people in the audience, that's how tiny the theatre was. Anyone who is in the arts in Sydney would probably begin here in Darlinghurst.

TS: Sydney has a very egalitarian feel to it. Where do you think that come from?

BL: In many places you have the town square, the place where people meet no matter what their background or who they are, and they promenade. Australians, to a large extent, tend to promenade on the beach. It's pretty hard to identify your status and who you are when you're wearing a pair of board shorts and there's a nice quality about that. (Of course, it's totally not true, it's not egalitarian at all, status is defined by who can ride that wave the best, and if you can't you're NOTHING!)

TS: Where do you see Sydney's future lying?

BL: I think part of the future for Sydney is as a really exciting place for filmmaking. Sydney is a wonderful environment for filmmakers because it's one of the few places, aside from Los Angeles, of course, which is a full-blown city with a set of sound stages right in the middle of it, technologically one of the best sound stages in the world. For the actors, it's wonderful to wake up in the morning and be just a few minutes away from the studio.

There are a lot of post-production facilities here for doing visual effects, too. The visual effects in Sydney have become really cutting edge -- we made all of "Moulin Rouge!" in Sydney and most of the visual effects were done here, too. There's an incredible new exploding frontier, creatively. So many young people who are truly gifted at it are doing that work around the world, and if you're talented it's a good place to do that kind of thing.

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