1 April 2002
The Age - click
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Catherine the great
By Karl Quinn
Last Sunday evening Catherine Martin sat in the
Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, her husband Baz Luhrmann by her side. As the award for Best
Costume Design was torn open by Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller, she felt her breathing slow
and began to wonder whether she would even be able to stand if called to the podium. She
soon had the chance to find out: "The award goes to Catherine Martin and Angus
Strathie for Moulin Rouge ..."
"I felt so sickeningly nervous that I was never going to make it up on stage, that I
was going to trip over my train, that my heels were going to give way, that I wouldn't be
able to unfold the piece of paper, that I would forget to read someone's name out,"
she told The Sunday Age two days later.
Of course, she did none of those things. She made it to the stage, she read out her names
- "you feel this acute sense of responsibility to the people you work with, and you
want to acknowledge them" - she even managed not to drop her Oscar. A little later,
she did it all over again (the second award, with Brigitte Broch, was for Best Art Design,
the award she missed out on in 1997 when she was nominated for William Shakespeare's Romeo
+ Juliet) and felt, she says, "exactly the same. It does not get any easier".
In her acceptance speeches, Martin made a point of dedicating both Oscars to her husband.
The first time she described him as: "the extraordinary Baz Luhrmann, who cares as
much about the embroidery on a can-can skirt as he does about lens size or dialogue. This
is your Oscar, Baz." As she clutched her second Oscar of the night - becoming the
first Australian ever to win two Academy Awards - she offered this: "And to Baz. You
come up with ideas that even I sometimes think are crazy. But you've taught me to live the
dream that anything is possible through ideas, hard work and discipline. Thank you for
letting me come on this journey with you. You are my other half. This is for you."
After the awards, Martin and Luhrmann did the party circuit: The Governor's Ball, Vanity
Fair, then, around 3.30am, back to the Chateau Marmont where family and friends were
waiting. "The whole thing just sort of flashed by in an instant," says Martin.
"It's extraordinary. You're in a room full of people that are congratulating you,
that are incredibly famous, that you can't believe you're talking to. The film community
here in Hollywood is extremely friendly and inclusive, you feel part of a huge family.
It's terrific."
Martin was determined to come back down to earth. "You have to move on. Today's
rooster is tomorrow's feather duster. I've lived the celebration of the Oscars, I've had
an incredible time - and I'm back to being a feather duster today. I have to make sure we
get everyone on the plane to Vegas, to make sure we don't lose my mother at the airport
(she was preparing to take her parents and Baz's mother to see the Cirque de Soleil water
show, Eau). Life goes on."
But not exactly as before, surely? Something must have changed? "Well, not really
very much. We've finished the five-year journey of Moulin Rouge, on a very high note.
There's a sense of relief and a sense of freedom from having to serve the greater master,
which is the work you produce, promoting it, and that responsibility that you have to
yourself and to the studio and to your collaborators so that you don't let the work sink
like a stone. That's what's changed.
"And you become aware that the Oscar has a much greater meaning than being about you
winning; it's a symbol of achievement that's outside yourself and represents the people
around you. It is not the pinnacle of success, it's the symbol of it. It's not about
whether the design in Moulin Rouge was better or worse than any other movie, because when
you get into the level of nominations, the level of calibre of fellow nominees, well, what
are you saying? The buttons on Nicole's dress were nicer than the costumes in Lord of the
Rings? We're really happy that Moulin Rouge got the nod, but it's a bigger thing than just
an individual achievement."
In 1958, Sydney boy Angus Martin won a scholarship to the Sorbonne to study for his
doctorate in French. On his first day there, he met a young woman, a mathematics student
named Claude. Three years later, he brought her back to Australia as his wife. Angus
taught French at Sydney University, and became a professor and the head of department (he
retired a couple of years ago). Claude's English was not good enough for her to work as a
maths teacher, so she tutored in French. On Australia Day 1965, their daughter Catherine
was born. While they were in France in 1968 for a sabbatical, their son Andrew greeted the
world.
Catherine was always a very active, very busy, very bossy child, remembers Angus, now 66.
"She was always doing something, making something. We had no inkling early on of her
artistic talents, though she was very articulate. But she was always making things out of
cardboard, and in hindsight I can see they may well have been set designs."
When Catherine was six, her mother taught her to sew. "I was trying to make dresses
for a doll," Catherine recalls, "and my mother was explaining to me that my
method of cutting out the pattern was very rudimentary. I couldn't understand why, when I
was cutting out a T shape and putting a hole in it to make a dress, I was getting wrinkles
under the arms, and my mother was explaining to me it was because there was no arm hole
cut into the dress. I remember that quite clearly."
Growing up, Catherine was aware that her household was not quite the same as everyone
else's - and not just because the wallpaper in her bedroom was fashioned after Toulouse
Lautrec's posters for the Club Moulin Rouge. Her home was bilingual. Speaking two
languages, she says, allowed her to see the world through two windows, to realise that
neither French nor Australian culture had all the answers. ``It strengthens you to see
that there are many options in the world, not just one.''
After leaving high school, she enrolled in a visual arts degree at the Sydney College of
the Arts, though her parents weren't entirely convinced it was the right move. By the end
of her first year at art school, Catherine had come to agree. She applied to the National
Institute of Dramatic Arts, but was told to come back when she had some life experience.
She spent a year working in the fashion industry, printing T-shirts for a while and
working as assistant to a small independent designer. Then she re-applied to NIDA. This
time she got in. "Catherine was remarkable,'' says Peter Cooke, assistant director of
NIDA, ``in having an innate theatrical sense. It's about visual literacy, and Catherine
has it in spades. ''
Towards the end of Catherine's second year, a graduate of NIDA's acting school came
looking for young talent. He was hoping to assemble a team of people to work on his
bicentennial project, an opera called Lake Lost. His name was Baz Luhrmann, and Peter
Cooke told him he had just the person he needed. ``He didn't want to just find some people
for the project and then leave them,'' recalls Cooke. ``He wanted to work with people on a
long-term basis. He wanted to set up a sort of creative commune, and that's exactly what
they've got.''
Luhrmann invited Martin and her classmate Angus Strathie (her co-winner in the Best
Costume Design category last week) to join him. Was it love at first sight? ``No,
absolutely not,'' says Martin. ``First of all Baz and I had an extremely strong work
connection where we absolutely, from a philosophical point of view, really clicked.''
They worked on Lake Lost, which debuted in Melbourne in an old TV studio in 1988. Then
they worked on La Boheme for the Australian Opera, staged in 1992. In the same year, they
reworked for the cinema an earlier stage show (co-written by Luhrmann and a young writer
named Andrew Bovell, who would go on to write, among other things, the screenplay for
Lantana). The project was Strictly Ballroom, and it announced their presence to the world
at large.
The film was the first of three Red Curtain films (so named because of their deliberate
and pronounced theatricality), a trilogy that was completed by William Shakespeare's Romeo
+ Juliet and Moulin Rouge. They married on Australia Day 1997, her 32nd birthday.
When Catherine Martin dedicated her dual Oscar win to her husband, it was no empty
gesture. She has been cast as Luhrmann's muse - or, maybe more accurately, enabler - and
it's a role she genuinely seems comfortable with. ``I have singular talents and skills
that are unique to me,'' she says, ``and I'm sure - this possibly sounds arrogant - that I
would have had a very interesting and fulfilling life as myself in the world, because I
feel quite resolved and good as a person. But the luck of meeting Baz has made my life, I
think, an even more extraordinary journey than I could have imagined.
"I believe that I had the luck of coming into contact with this extraordinary person;
and as well as that, I was lucky enough to have whatever talents or skills or discipline
or ability for hard work that made me useful in the equation. That is a huge gift, it's
serendipity, the two things coming together at once. It's a mystery like all true creative
and personal relationships. It requires alchemy and a mystery that even the people within
it don't understand, they just feel for it instinctively. We have an extraordinary
partnership that I hope continues for many years to come.''
Collette Dinnigan - fashion designer, friend and maker of the gown that Martin wore to
this year's Oscars - describes Catherine as a quiet achiever. ``She's a very giving
person, one of the most considerate people I know towards those around her,'' says
Dinnigan. ``Sometimes I think she forgets about herself and puts everybody else first.
She's one of those people who can walk into a room and never forget anyone's name,
remember every story and actually be interested, as opposed to pretending to be
interested. Fame hasn't gone to her head at all. If anything, she's just more focused.
"She's never there pushing herself or her name or her persona. She wants to make sure
everything's right, she wants to achieve whatever Baz's vision is. CM (as she's known) is
just as much a part of everything as Baz, but the two of them together are like magic,
like an enormous force, a creative force, a good force.''
Talking to people who've worked with Martin and Luhrmann and their umbrella production
company Bazmark, a number of words surface repeatedly. Extraordinary is one of them. Fun
is another. You'd be lucky to leave a conversation without hearing about
"collaborators'' and ``journeys'' a few times. Oh, and let's not forget family.
But like all families, the House of Bazmark can be demanding. Tori Collison, style
director of Vogue Australia, has worked with Martin and Luhrmann a number of times, first
in 1994 on the issue of the magazine they guest edited, later on a film clip for Christine
Anu and most recently as extras' stylist on Moulin Rouge.
"She's the most extraordinary person I've ever worked with,'' says Collison.
"She's a genius, I think. She and Baz just live and breathe it. We flew to LA to
shoot Nicole and Kylie for Vogue, and we were doing hard days, 18-hour days, but it was
fun..
"Martin has a great sense of humour and loves dressing up on set. But she expects
everybody to do the very best they can to make the project work, even if their efforts may
be hidden to the world at large. "She's a control freak in the best sense of the
phrase. It's about being attentive to detail, which is what really sets them apart in a
visual sense. I spent ages looking at fonts for the engraving on the men's signet rings
(in Moulin Rouge), and you can't even really see them in the film.''
According to Opera Australia's business affairs director Russell Mitchell, who has known
the pair since 1992, the key to the success of the Martin-Luhrmann combination is in
getting everyone else to commit to the cause. "They have enormous skills in getting
people to be stimulated by their ideas, to commit themselves to their ideas,'' he says.
"She's bright, intelligent, stimulating, very aware of people, how they are feeling,
always measuring the temperature. They are extremely gifted politicians.''
Josh Abrahams, the music producer who recently scored a number 2 single in the UK with his
song Addicted to Bass (originally released here in 1999, and soon to be rereleased under
the name Puretone), was musical director on Moulin Rouge, a job that took up about four
years of his life. He worked out of Bazmark's Darlinghurst mansion Iona and was part of
about five people who met once or twice a week to dissect the developing script. He
describes how they work together: "Baz runs at a million miles an hour and Catherine
doesn't. He spews all these ideas out and she's a filter for them. Baz is extremely polite
and goes out of his way to make everyone in the room, even the secretary, feel like they
are welcome and important. Catherine is the opposite of that. She's harsh judge and
doesn't waste time with niceties.''
"Apart from his own ideas, Baz's main strength is getting people to contribute,''
says Abrahams, "and Catherine is his first, biggest contributor. He invites criticism
at every step of the way, he likes to have everything he says and does really challenged.
If he can get past that challenge, he knows it's a worthwhile idea. And Catherine
certainly wasn't holding back.
"Because he's Baz Luhrmann, if something wasn't necessarily a good idea, you're not
going to say 'Hey Baz, that's a dumb idea,' whereas she would. She'd be really straight up
about it, and I think that serves him very well.''
Initially, Abrahams was shocked by their demeanour towards each other. "I thought,
'Oh God, they obviously don't have a good relationship'. But then as this went on, I saw
it was just zero time-wasting. She'd say, 'This doesn't make any bloody sense,' and he'd
say, 'Oh, what do you know'. But then he'd always go and change things according to her
criticisms if they were valid, and they almost always were.''
Abrahams wondered, too, if there wasn't some truth in the rumours that had long circulated
about Luhrmann's sexuality - the suggestion theirs wasn't a "real'' marriage.
"But as I became more involved with the film, when I saw them in a non-critical
environment they were really happy and loving and warm. I was picking up Baz from his
house, sort of in his pyjamas, to go and work on something in the morning, and he'd be
rushing out of the house with a bit of toast in his mouth and kissing Catherine goodbye,
your typical sort of couple. Seeing them in a very domestic situation, and she was right
there in it, that was all the proof I needed. But beyond that, creativity seems to be the
most sexy thing for both of them, and they wouldn't be able to find anyone more creative
than each other. That seems to be the force that holds them together.''
Of course, Catherine Martin has heard the rumours too, but she's not inclined to waste
much time on them. "I don't really care what people think,'' she says. "One
lives inside one's own world, and we all speculate about everybody elses' relationships.
Those sorts of conversations have been going on since we were all tribes, and they'll
still be going on when we're living in space stations.''
Children, she says, are on the agenda, "but that's something that just takes its own
course, really. It's not something you can plan like a movie.''
For now, though, she's looking forward to taking opera back to the people when she and
Luhrmann mount La Boheme in a theatre on Broadway this year. More importantly, she's
trying to savour this little patch of special time. She knows there's much more riding on
what happens next than there ever has been before. Moulin Rouge cost $US50 million to
make, and next time she could probably ask for a lot more. But would that be a blessing?
"No, it would be terrible. Boundaries, realistic boundaries, are very good. They
create structure, a framework of discipline to work within. They make you unwasteful, and
they keep you on your toes.''
They'll certainly need to be on their toes. It's a long way down from the pinnacle of a
double Oscar win. Says Martin: "As Steven Spielberg said to Baz, `Enjoy these
moments, because it just gets harder every movie you make'. That's true, but you're given
the skills as you grow older and become more mature to handle the difficulties. Life is
like school: every year you go up a grade. There's no avoiding it.''
Nor, if you're a Catherine Martin, do you shrink from it. "Your ambitions grow with
the possibilities that unfold before you. When I was at NIDA, I used to think I wanted to
work with the Australian Opera or the Sydney Theatre Company. Working with Baz has opened
up a world of possibilities and a world of opportunities that I possibly or probably would
never have had otherwise. Baz describes our relationship as a conversation that started 14
years ago and hasn't finished yet, and I think that's possibly the best way to describe
it.''