Baz Luhrmann: The MOULIN ROUGE Hollywood Interview Flashback

(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]

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Phillip Noyce: The Hollywood Interview

Director Phillip Noyce confers with actors Derek Luke (left) and Tim Robbins (right) on the set of Catch a Fire (2006).


THE ART OF NOYCE
By
Alex Simon

The following article appeared in the November 1999 issue of Venice Magazine.

Phillip Noyce was born April 29, 1950 in Griffith, New South Wales, Australia. The son of a country lawyer, he moved with his family to Sydney when he was 12. As a teenager, he began experimenting with an 8mm camera. He turned the hobby into a passion after viewing a program of American underground films, when he realized one didn't need much of a budget to capture exciting images on film. With tiny donations by friends, he made his first short, Better to Reign in Hell in 1968. He then enrolled as a law student at Sydney University, but after a year switched over to the arts.

Throughout his studies, he continued making short films with equipment owned by the university's film society. He also became the manager of a filmmakers' co-operative and worked briefly as an assistant on professional productions. In 1972, he was one of the first dozen students enrolled at the Australian Film and Television School, where he made two shorts and a 50 minute documentary, Castor and Pollux, which won the Rouben Mamoulian Award at the 1974 Sydney Film Festival and represented the school at the Grenoble (France) Festival.

The success of his first professional film, God Knows Why, But It Works (1975), a dramatized documentary about the work of a Greek-born doctor among the Aborigines, paved the way for Noyce's first feature, Backroads (1977), a powerful drama about race relations. He followed this immensely impressive though low-budgeted film with Newsfront (1978), a heart-felt valentine to newsreel filmmakers before the advent of television. After a couple of lesser dramas, Noyce returned strongly with the suspenseful thriller Dead Calm (1989). That film won him an invitation from Hollywood, where he went on to make big budget hits, most of which display Noyce's fascination with technology, such as the Tom Clancy adaptations Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), the Joe Eszterhas-scripted Sliver (1993), and The Saint (1997). Noyce's latest is The Bone Collector, a tense thriller starring Denzel Washington as a best-selling author and former member of New York's finest who is paralyzed from the neck down, and is reluctantly recruited to aid a rookie cop (Angelina Jolie, excellent as always) in her investigation of a series of brutal serial killings.

Phillip Noyce is a bear of a man in person: 6'4, with a frame that would make most NFL linebackers cringe. He recently sat down in his offices, designed by famed architect Frank Gehry, to discuss his work.

When I first heard about this film, I thought 'Oh God, not another serial killer movie.' But you really made it about the characters, not the killings.
Phillip Noyce: Yeah, we've seen a lot of movies about serial killers, a couple of which have been special: Silence of the Lambs, and Seven. It's very hard to be original on that subject. To me, when I read the screenplay, the fact that there was a killer out there was the reason to bring these two people together. It's true, that the fact that the killings are brutal provides a tension outside the relationship between Denzel and Angelina that then sort of reflects back onto them. What happens to each of the characters individually and what happens to them together, fascinated me when I read the screenplay. I've always been drawn to brainy action heroes, like Jack Ryan, and Lincoln Rhyme, Denzel's character, also thinks with his brain as much as his brawn. They're almost cousins! (laughs) It's just that Lincoln Rhyme has this problem in that he's quardropalegic. And the fear that he has of losing the use of his brain, his most precious asset, I found very moving. It's a very uplifting story. When you go out and meet quardropalegics who, in spite of their handicap, lead full lives, Christopher Reeve is the most prominent example, it's very inspiring. It's funny, I kept getting the two characters confused during filming. Sometimes I'd say Lincoln Ryan instead of Rhyme! (laughs) I'm working on an adaptation for a new Clancy film now (The Sum of All Fears) and I've found myself calling the character Jack Rhyme! (laughs) So there you are.

I thought the relationship between Denzel and Angelina Jolie was very interesting.
Yes. In many ways it's a love affair that's 99% mental. I only realized why I felt that was interesting when I met a quadropalegic in England and I asked about his sex life. And he said 'Look, your genitals are your usual place where we feel sexual response. But, it's not where it originates. In spite of what many women may think, men's brains are not in their dicks, they're in their heads. When a woman turns me on, my head becomes a giant, swollen penis! (laughs) I experience orgasm up here just as strongly as I ever did when it was mainly centered in my loins. All the pleasure cells are still operating.' So the non-physical sexual relationship they share in the film, to me, defines the essence of a true relationship. There are some similarities to Rear Window (1954), but even more than that film, Denzel's character inhabits the mind and the body of Angelina's character. It's not just that she goes out because he's confined to the apartment. She walks for him. She brings him back to life. She sees for him, touches for him, smells for him. I just found the nature of that relationship fascinating, because he recognized at the beginning that she was him! Again, they don't have sex, but that's a wonderfully romantic and erotic relationship. In many ways, this is Pygmalion, with a twist, where Professor Higgins is a detective.

Angelina Jolie is a fascinating actress, and obviously Denzel is one of the great actors of his generation. What was it like working with them? How are they alike, and how do their techniques differ?
Denzel combines the best of two distinguished traditions: the English and American traditions of acting. The American modern tradition is called "method," where the actor immerses him or herself into the character totally. Denzel trained in the theater where you've got to do that every night. Obviously he could never truly realize the pain that a real quadropalegic goes through, so he immersed himself in the technical aspects of being a quardopalegic. Much of the decision to cast him was based on the belief that if this movie, which is basically a piece of escapist entertainment, if it was seen to be belittling the experience of being a quardropalegic, the audience would reject it and it would fail miserably. By casting Denzel, I felt that I had a man of great dignity, of great prowess as an actor, of great humanity, and someone who would never belittle the predicament of his character. Regarding Angelina, when I saw her in Gia (1998) I thought 'This is some spice that I've never tasted before, and it's hot!' (laughs) When you part come along calling for an actress in her early to mid-20's and one of such extraordinary talent comes along, it's very difficult to ever again think of anyone else, and we never did. She is gifted with her father's (Jon Voight) thespian skills. She is gifted with both parents' beauty. The camera loves her. She's charismatic. She's absolutely dedicated, constantly telling her stand-in not to worry about standing in for lighting...as complicated as we might think she is, but when it comes to acting, she's very uncomplicated, but is not afraid so much that she denies possibilities. She was fresh, hungry, eager, willing and unafraid. It was one of the best experiences I've had working with an actor.

Tell us about your childhood.
I grew up in a town called Griffith, 500 miles to the south of Sydney. It was an irrigation area in the middle of the desert, an oasis. It was a citrus growing area, the fruit bowl of New South Wales, and it was 60% Italian. My father had a lot of Italian clients who paid him in kind: fresh bread, cheese, salami, wine, which I became addicted to at a very early age. There was always an Italian wedding to go to every month. So it was a strange place. Later the area became notorious not as the fruit bowl, but as the marijuana bowl. (laughs)

How did you fall in love with movies in an environment like that?
There were two picture theaters. One screened Italian movies, subtitled. But the picture theater that I frequented was the Lyceum theater. I loved movies because I could escape into the stories, but I never imagined that I would make them. An even more important influence was traveling vaudeville shows that would come to our town. That was the main attraction for kids at these agricultural shows, the sideshows. I used to love these shows. I loved the life that I imagined the people that ran them lived. My parents used to give me and my two brothers one pound each over the three days of the show to spend. There was two ways to get in: sneak under the tent, or offer yourself as the stooge. They'd always ask for volunteers. I always did, because I got in for free. (laughs) I remember this guy took a piece of paper, stuck it on the end of my tongue. Then his wife, who was about 5 feet 2, took a sword that must've been 4 foot 6, raised it in the air, and cut the paper in half! So close to my tongue, that it wasn't funny. But I wasn't thinking of that. All I could hear was the roar of the crowd. (laughs) I just wanted to be part of the show. My earliest memorable experience seeing a film was when Psycho came to town in the early 60's. Big event. By the time it got to our 10,000 population town, it was notorious for scaring the wits out of people. I don't know why my parents allowed me to see this movie, because it wasn't on the usual Saturday matinee that I went to. That was an event, seeing people so scared by this thing. Also the shower scene was good for a young boy because it was so...sexy! (laughs)

Did you go to film school?
Yeah, I got into movies when there was no movie industry in Australia to speak of, there hadn't been since the late 30's, the beginning of the second world war. There was a thriving film industry during the depression years, largely due to one man named Ken G. Hall. He made up to four features a year, seventeen in all between 1930-1941. When I grew up, we suffered from a peculiar disease later diagnosed as "the cultural cringe," which basically told us we shouldn't bother doing anything (artistic), because the English, particularly the Americans could do it better, so why should we bother? Economically, it was true, because the picture theaters were owned by British and American concerns. When I was 17, I saw an advertisement for some American underground movies being shown by a group called Ubu Films in Sydney. I was struck by the fact that these were movies made cheaply where personal expression was the key. They basically said that anyone could make a movie. So I thought 'I'm anyone,' and I raised some money, sold parts to my friends, and shot a movie for about $600-$700 about the sex fantasies of a teenager. (laughs) I sent it to a film festival in Holland. At that time there was an anomaly in the Australian censorship laws. They seized my film when I put it in the post, and banned it, which was perfect! It was only banned for export, not screening in the country itself. It became quite notorious and did very well! (laughs)

You initially studied law, right?
Yeah, then I studied fine art at Sydney University. During that time I became manager of the Sydney Filmmakers' Co-op. It was short filmmakers pulling their films together, renting them out to theaters and showing them. We also started a number of cinemas in Sydney and Melbourne, and other cities, screening the short films of many Australian filmmakers who are well-known now: George Miller (Mad Max trilogy), Peter Weir (The Truman Show), Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant), Fred Schepisi (Roxanne), Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career), and screening them to a very appreciative audience. They were thrilled that the images reflected their faces, rather than American faces. I then went to the National Film School, as one of the first students chosen, for a one year in an accelerated course in directing. I spent about a year showing the films, and living off the films that I made at film school, one of which was a documentary called Castor and Pollux, which contrasted a gang of bikers and a gang of hippies. It became quite a success, which led to my making my first short feature, Backroads, which was inspired by Wim Wenders' Kings of the Road (1976). The film was largely improvised by the actors, even though the action part of the story was scripted.

Dead Calm is the film that brought you to Hollywood. Tell us about the genesis of that.
It was quite a departure for me in that it came out of working in television. George Miller bought an old picture theater in Sydney with his partner Byron Kennedy. They founded a director's studio that was like Coppola's Zoetrope Studios, and a number of us were under contract there, and did television work. I did two miniseries there, one about a breakout at a Japanese POW camp during WW II. I did an episode on this series about a Japanese and an Australian pinned down in the jungle fighting each other. It was about the tension between the two of them. The result of that one hour was that I realized that I seemed to have a talent for what we call "thrillers." At this time, Tony Bill who I had met when I first came to America with Newsfront, had given me a novel by the American writer Charles Williams, and this was Dead Calm. Orson Welles had been trying to make it before he died. I brought it back and showed it to George, who expressed desire to make it. Tony was kind enough to let George approach Ojda Kadar, Orson Welles' last girlfriend, who had appeared in Orson's unfinished version of Dead Calm, because Tony had not been able to convince Ojda to sell the rights to him, for him to direct. George, who is a doctor, has a marvelous bedside manner, approached Ojda and convinced her that we didn't want to make a Hollywood version of the story, and that the adaptation would be done in the spirit of what we imagined would please Orson. She agreed, then Tony very generously allowed us to make the film without his participation. And that's the film that brought me to America.

You've always been fascinated by technology in your films. Where does this come from?
It goes back to those experimental films that were my first inspiration. One of those films from that period that I most fondly remember was called Burning Off, which was a silent movie that had a smell track. Burning off was something my father did every Sunday, which was burning the eucalyptus leaves, and this thick smoke would gather round the house. For Burning Off the movie, they brought in film canisters full of leaves which we burned while people were watching! (laughs) We also did things like have people leap out of the screen while people were watching, so the movie would become real. There was a term for this called "expanded cinema." I also had a light show company for a while that would do light shows at rock concerts.

Any advice for first-time directors?
The important thing I'd say is to try and look at your story for the elements that are not necessarily apparent, but which are going to connect with an audience. For example, with The Bone Collector, the story is apparently about hunting for a serial killer, but really the movie connects with audience on a deeper level because it's about resurrection, a story that, like the story of Christ, has been connecting with human beings for centuries. There's always something in every successful story that operates on a spiritual or gut level, far apart from what's apparently on the page or the screen, and you really have to find out what that one element is, and structure the whole movie around exploiting that. Secondly, nothing is more important than the characters in the story. Unless the audience finds someone to connect with, someone who engages them, it doesn't matter how many fancy shots you have, it's all for naught.

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Peter Weir: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Peter Weir.


PETER WEIR ON:
MOVIES, MADNESS AND MONTY
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: The following article originally appeared in the June 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

It's 1978 and I'm a frustrated 11 year-old film geek living in the all-American, traditional confines of Tempe, Arizona. With Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind recently having come out, UFO's were on everyone's mind, mine especially, since I was dying to take Richard Dreyfuss' place on the alien craft in said film and fly off into space with the gentle little aliens, to whose tribe I most certainly belonged. Since that wasn't an option and my mom tended to get paranoid if I even wandered away from our street for too long at a time, I settled on escape at the movies. I read about this new "Australian UFO movie" called Picnic at Hanging Rock, that was making a buzz with the critics nationwide. I convinced my mom and dad to make the trek to Scottsdale where it was playing and, needless to say, didn't get what I expected. No E.T.s, no Jedi warriors, not even a Death Star in sight, just a lot of haunting shots of the Australian outback, backdropping a story about a group of schoolgirls who, legend has it, disappeared during a school picnic, one sunny day in the year 1901. The UFO's, it turned out, were just one possible explanation of their vanishing into thin air. It was an important lesson for me in my film education. It taught me what you don't see on-screen can be even more important than what you do. It also taught me that whenever I saw it's director, Peter Weir's name in the credits of a film, I knew I was in for a cinematic treat.

Peter Weir was born August 8, 1944 in Sydney, Australia. The son of a real estate broker, Weir abandoned school and a stint at his father's business to travel to Europe and eventually return home to work with the Commonwealth Film Unit in Australia. Through his work there behind the camera and in production, he began to direct. His early efforts were the horror satire The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) and the aforementioned Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1975 (which is being rereleased later this year. Watch for it!). The Last Wave (1977), a supernatural/spiritual mystery with Richard Chamberlain, introduced the wonder and respect for the power of nature that would infuse many of his later films, as well as the theme of clashing cultures, which he would also revisit in films like Gallipoli, in 1981. This is the film that really put Weir on the international film map. A stirring anti-war drama starring Mel Gibson that echoed the finest films of the genre, such as Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957), Gallipoli told the tragic tale of two Australian lads who sign up to fight in Turkey during WW I. He re-teamed with Gibson the following year for The Year of Living Dangerously, a riveting romantic drama and political thriller set in Indonesia just before Sukarno's fall in 1965. His first Hollywood film, the modern Oscar-winning classic Witness in 1985, starred Harrison Ford in a tale of culture clash involving a wounded Philadelphia cop hiding out with an Amish enclave in the Pennsylvania countryside. The commercial success generated by both films established Weir as an important Hollywood director who could command big budgets for intelligent, adult-oriented films that stimulated the eye, the brain and the heart in equal measure. He followed Witness with The Mosquito Coast in 1986, also starring Ford as one of the most unlikable protagonists in recent film history (which made the story all the more riveting); the Oscar-winning Robin Williams hit Dead Poet's Society in 1989; Green Card in 1990; and the vastly underseen masterpiece Fearless in 1993, boasting Jeff Bridges' Oscar-caliber performance (which was ignored) as the survivor of a cataclysmic plane crash.

Weir's latest stands up to his best work. The Truman Show is the brainchild of screenwriter Andrew Niccol (Gattaca), one of the most exciting and intelligent screenwriters working today, and stars Jim Carrey in the story of one Truman Burbank, a man whose life has been a continuous, 24 hour, seven day a week TV show since his birth. The only catch is, Truman's the only one who doesn't know it's all make-believe and he starts to figure it out, much to the chagrin of the show's Messianic creator, played by the always superb Ed Harris. The Truman Show is not your typical summer popcorn fare (or typical Jim Carrey film, for that matter). Like all of Weir's films, it demands that the audience think while it's being entertained. It does both in spades. The Truman Show is one of the best films of 1998, and could well mark a new beginning in the career of Carey, one that will transform him from wacky, crazy, goofball comic to a fine, serious actor who happens to be funny, much like Dead Poet's did for Robin Williams ten years ago.

Peter Weir in person displays the layed-back unpretentiousness that most Australians are known for. He is obviously a man who is very serious and passionate about his work, but doesn't let that feeling pass over to himself. What follows are his thoughts on movies, politics, actors, and the unparalleled genius of Monty Python.

How did you become interested in the arts?
Peter Weir: Well, there wasn't a lot of (artistic) outlets in Australia when I was growing up in the 1950's. Just a lot of swimming (laughs). So there was a sort of tradition in Australia then for anyone who was artistically inclined to go to London and paint, write...which is what I did when I was 20. I went by ship in 1965...I dropped out of university. I was a real 60's kind of guy.

How did you support yourself in London?
Odd jobs, you know. I think that tradition sort of carries on. You go away for a year or two, take the grand tour, get that out of your system, then come back and settle down. But for me, there was no settling down. It was about unsettling. I wanted a job that involved lots of travel. There was a famous Australian comedian who used to say that staying all year in Australia is like dancing all night at a party with your mother (laughs)!

How did you fall in love with film?
Well it wasn't film initially. Film was just part of it. It was really show business (in general). It really all started on that ship to England. There was no entertainment, so a couple other guys and I decided that we'd be the entertainment on the ship. So we did the ship's revue and found that the ship also had a close circuit television system, with a studio, running to all the bars. So we convinced them to let us do some shows...and did our own version of The Tonight Show. We were the only channel, got great ratings! (laughs) It was all very Monty Python-esque...in fact, when I got back to Australia, I teamed up with another guy and formed a team. We worked in television there and our stuff was very would-be Python. It was essentially skit revues with rock and roll and film clips mixed in. I would shoot and direct those sketches, act in them as well, and that's where I got my taste for directing. Then I began to make short films. I'd borrow the money or steal the film, anything I could do.

Were they experimental films?
They were sort of little black comedies...and I finally sold all my scripts to my partner in the company, and decided to pursue film. By the way, what changed my mind and made me pursue film directing was seeing the Pythons perform in England. I took one look and said 'That's it, I'm out (of TV).' That was probably 1970, or so. (The Pythons) were so much better than we could ever hope to be.

Your first feature was The Cars That Ate Paris. Tell us about that.
It was a black comedy about a town called Paris, Australia that had hit hard times economically. There was a very dangerous bend going into the town which they had put there that caused accidents and then they'd take the wrecked cars into town and pirate them for their parts...The film's got a sad history, really, in this country, because it was bought by an American distributor and completely re-cut and re-voiced and we didn't have enough money to sue them...a sad thing. I tried to buy it back later and they said 'You don't have enough money in the world (to buy it back).' I can still remember stumbling out of a screening room on Sunset one sunny afternoon after seeing (the American cut). They said they were just going to 'tighten it a little.' I felt like just vomiting in the street. It was the worst feeling.

After that you did Picnic at Hanging Rock. Was it based on a true story?
Supposedly, but no one could ever find any newspaper accounts. I think it was an invention on the part of the novelist (on whose book the film was based), but why she should make up such a story I don't know. She would never answer the question about whether it was true or not, which didn't bother me. I used the device that it was probably true. What interested me was the fact that people disappear every day, seemingly into thin air sometimes, and they're never heard from again. And it's very important in many cultures to bury the body and have a feeling of closure when someone dies. With disappearance, you never have that.

We all thought that they were taken by a UFO.
(laughs) Was that the popular opinion here?

What do you think happened to them?
I don't really know. I'm of the kind of mind that accepts that there are no answers to every question. I went across a number of theories...and the most plausible one is that the rock formation that they disappeared around has unplumbed depths...filled with holes and cave-like areas that they haven't been able to reach the bottom of with the most sophisticated measuring equipment. So it's conceivable that they could've fallen into one of these caves. The other interesting thing is the notion of time itself. Sort of a Bermuda Triangle type of thing involving another dimension...every explanation you can give winds up being sort of banal. I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but I remember being disappointed when he'd come up with these simple explanations for these complex mysteries. I always was fascinated by the mystery itself, as opposed to the answer behind it.

Were you influenced by Antonioni at all? Your films have a similar style to many of his in that the dialogue is often expository and what's really moves the story is the images on-screen. You seem to be primarily a visual filmmaker.
Oh yeah, I love Antonioni's work. I think to a large extent I (tend to rely on visuals) because in the early days of the Australian film business, nobody could write good dialogue. Also, many of the actors of that period were either older actors who were classically trained and came off as being hammy on film, or younger actors with no training who were just plain awful. So the phrase 'Drop the line' became a familiar one on sets during those early days. So then you had to figure out how to convey visually what was said in the cut dialogue.

Tell us about the genesis of Gallipoli.
I wanted to make a film about the first World War...The remembrance of the battle of Gallipoli was a very stuffy, almost religious sort of ceremony that would occur every year in school, and we really didn't know what it was all about. So I did some research, actually went to Gallipoli, which is one of the only battlefields in the world that's still intact because it's still a military zone. There were bullets and knives and forks and bottles...There was no one else there, so I went down to the beach, stripped down and had a swim, and the first thing I thought when I was underwater was, 'This is where you would want to be if you were being shelled,' and I wrote a scene based on that...then I walked up shrapnel alley on to the battlefield and thought 'I've got to make this!' You know it's one thing to read about the moon and going to the moon, but it's another thing entirely to go to the moon yourself...It gave me a sense of time and reality in a very eerie way. Later, I went to Egypt and went inside one of the pyramids, and there saw graffiti written by Australians who were there during the war: 'A.I.F., Australia, 1915,' you know.

Your next film, The Year of Living Dangerously...
As Monty Python would say: 'And now for something completely different!' (laughs)

But it dealt with the theme of culture clash, which most of your films seem to do.
It's not surprising, growing up in a post-colonial period. Growing up as a kid, we all came from different backgrounds, Scotch, Irish, English...but no one knew and no one cared. In our society because it was started by some 150,000 convicts, you didn't talk a lot about yourself or what you did or where you were from. What the British did was very clever, instead of having prisons, they exported their convicts, the idea being that you don't want them when they get out, and you don't want them having kids and breeding more convicts. It was terrible, very racist, really...only 5% ever went back to England, because when you got out of jail, you were offered land for free. So you might get married, you might buy a pig...and when you went to a place of work or to a neighbor's, you wouldn't ask what you did to get sent there, or where you came from and would just take you on face value. So a kind of agreement grew in our country of not asking questions of people. So the whole notion of what town you came from and what your European roots were went largely undiscussed. And that's true of all my friends. And that's one of the sharp differences between our colonial experience and yours...that so many Americans are still very conscious of where their ancestors came from. I'll never forget riding in a cab during one of my first visits here, and the cab driver saying, with a very American accent, "Well, I'm really Irish, you know." To me, I think the great experiment is to leave the past behind and all the past hatreds behind.

What do you think of the parallels between Indonesia in '65 and what's happening now?
I think it's terribly sad. I saw some photos in the newspapers that reminded me of scenes I'd staged for the film, burning buildings, riots and so on.

With Witness did you have any contact with the actual Amish community for research?
No. We rented buggies and some other props from them, so we dealt with them on a business level...but the fascinating thing about that piece was that it was a genre film on the one hand, but also an examination of one of the last subcultures that has stayed frozen in time, so to speak. By looking at the Amish, we're really looking at ourselves through a prism, how our ancestors most likely were 150-200 years ago.

What was it that drew you to Dead Poet's Society?
A couple things. First it was the theme of standing up to authority, because there have been many times during my childhood and also as an adult when I wanted to stand up and speak my mind, but I didn't, and I've regretted most of those times. Second, just the idea of the boys running into that cave in the forest and the cave itself...I remember saying to my first A.D., 'You better allow a couple days for the cave sequence to be shot,' because I wanted that sort of shift into something more mythic and significant and in a way play with the time.

Fearless is one of my favorite films. It was the first time I realized what it was like to look death in the face. How did you capture that?
By talking with survivors of a plane crash. I got six names of people who'd survived the crash on which the film is based, United 262, or 232, which went down in Sioux City, Iowa. Half the people survived...and I spoke to four of the six on the telephone and they told me about the feeling of living 45 minutes with the knowledge that the plane might crash and that they could die, then the experience of the crash itself. As a result of those conversations, I completely reshaped the crash and the scenes on the plane, dropped all exterior shots, took very much the passengers' point of view...They all said it was unreal, really, especially the actual impact and the reactions of the people on board. Jeff (Bridges) was just incredible. He went places that were well beyond the realm of conventional acting...there was absolutely no projection about what the character was going through or feeling. It was all very honest and somehow captured an essence that was just...Jeff.

Now we come to The Truman Show, another culture clash movie, with the culture of fantasy colliding with that of the culture of reality.
Yeah, that's true I guess. To me, the real center of the film is the loss of reality. I think now (in the media) there's so much acting and re-enacting and dramatized news broadcasts and cops with cameras, and society viewing it all second hand. As Bill Gates recently said "We may soon never need to leave our armchairs," as if that were a good thing! And that's what I liked and what I tried to apply to the audience (in the film). They applaud, they laugh, they cry...

Any advice for first-time directors?
Don't give your big ideas up because of budget, try and do the same idea another way. Second of all, write down anything you want to do, no matter how outrageous it might sound. Say you've got a 747 crash you have to shoot, and someone's reading saying 'How the hell are we going to do this?!' Maybe later you can come up with another way to do it, like just having the sound of it, instead of having to cut it altogether just to keep it within budget. You never have enough time or money, whether it's a big film, or a little film. Third, have great parties! (laughs) Have a good time on it. Also, when you've lit a scene and you're running out of time, always ask your cameraman if there's anything else you can do, any other way you can shoot it. What else can happen in this scene? Also keep dialogue constantly going between yourself, your actors, your crew. Keep the collaboration alive throughout. Think it all through because thoughts are free. And after all, it's just film.

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BAZ LUHRMANN: The Hollywood Interview

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.

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Scott Hicks: The Hollywood Interview

SCOTT HICKS: ONE OF THE BOYS
By
Alex Simon
Scott Hicks made his bones as a filmmaker the old-fashioned way, paying his dues as a crew member during the Australian film industry’s birth in the 1970s. Born in Uganda March 4, 1953, and raised in Kenya, England and finally Australia, Hicks worked his way up to assistant director for soon-to-be big names such as Peter Weir and Bruce Beresford before moving into directing industrial films and documentaries for television. Hicks didn’t direct his first feature, Freedom, until 1982, and had to wait for his second, in 1996, to put him on the A-list. Shine was the true story of Australian piano prodigy David Helfgott, and his battle with mental illness. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, and won a Best Actor statuette for Geoffrey Rush, who played Helfgott as an adult.

Hicks has been choosy since then, going back and forth between features (Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), Hearts In Atlantis (2001), No Reservations (2007)) and documentaries (Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (2007)), but always putting quality before quantity. Scott Hicks’ latest film, The Boys Are Back, is based on Simon Carr’s memoir of the same name and stars Clive Owen as British journalist Joe Warr, a fiercely driven sports writer who now lives Down Under (Australia, for those not in the know), and finds his life turned upside down upon the sudden death of his wife, leaving Joe to care for their young son (newcomer Nicholas McAnulty). To complicate matters, Joe’s estranged teenage son (George MacKay) from his first marriage arrives from the UK to comfort his bereaved father. Hicks avoids the sentimental pitfalls that could have put this fine drama in movie-of-the-week territory, and delivers a quiet, powerful human drama that is also full of honest humor and terrific performances. The Miramax release opens in U.S. theaters September 25.

Scott Hicks sat down during a recent visit in Los Angeles to discuss The Boys Are Back and his nearly-forty year career in film.

What attracted you to this story, initially?
Scott Hicks: Well, I was sent a script, and the scripts come in, and there are just very few that move you quite so profoundly, and this was one of those. It was full of situations I felt I’d never seen. We’ve all seen films about fatherhood and bringing up children, but this was something new. It felt very real to me, and of course it was: it was based on a memoir that I was unfamiliar with at the time. I re-read it, and it moved me again, and I guess it wouldn’t let go after that. I said ‘I really want to do this.’ Then we went to Clive in fairly short order after that, and he fell for it, as well. And I thought, ‘Great, we’re off!’ That was 2004. Welcome to independent filmmaking. (laughs)

Clive Owen (left) and Scott Hicks (right) on the set of The Boys Are Back.

How was working with Clive Owen, both as an actor and a collaborator?
What was very pleasing, I think to both of us, we found the other agreed with one fundamental principle: we had to avoid at all costs allowing the film to cave into something sentimental, and avoiding some of the easy solutions. That required an actor that had the resolve to do things that are not always likable. And Clive’s not afraid to do that. He does things in the film that makes people wince, but it was essential that we didn’t soften off those edges, and we discussed at length about where to target those harsher moments, for instance when little Artie says to him, “Can I live at Laura’s?” And he says to her “You want to live with her? Right, pack your bag, and get out.” That’s not the way to talk to a six year-old who’s grieving for his mother. So it was in those critical moments that we had this mutual understanding that, if it hadn’t been there, would have led to some very uncomfortable moments on the set. A lot of actors would have protested, saying “I don’t want to do that. That’s really unlikable.” Not Clive. He had a bigger picture of how it should be.

Did you worry about finding the right kid to play little Artie?

Oh God, yes. I mean, you read the script, and it’s so great, but then the realization hits you: how are we going to find a child to do all these intense emotional things? It was a huge search, hundreds and hundreds of boys were screened all around Australia. I was seeing the pick of the crop and it got to the point where I was lying awake at night, wondering if it was ever going to happen. Then one day, I saw Nicholas and he really stood out. He wasn’t just cute and appealing with all that lovely innocence children that age have. He had attitude. There was a defiance about him that I really liked. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew it was what we needed. With George, who plays Harry, it was a different thing. He’s a proper actor who’s done a lot of work before. He’s very focused and intensely interested in the craft of acting, and is very well-equipped. In a funny way though, what Nick was doing was the benchmark, because it was real, and that’s what I needed the other actors doing.

Geoffrey Rush's Oscar-winning role in Hicks' breakout film, Shine.

Like Shine, in the wrong hands this could have been a movie-of-the-week. You mentioned earlier that you avoided clichés and sentimentality in the story. Is that the key difference between a thoughtful study of human emotions and a one-off movie-of-the-week?

For a start, I think being an independent film gives you more leeway in terms of being able to keep those rough edges in there. Whereas if you working with a bigger committee that was testing material or trying to second-guess what the audience were trying to hear, you end up sort of blandifying, and that’s where you fall into the trap of sentiment. For example, in this story, when the father says to the little boy, “Mummy’s going to die,” I’ve never seen a film where the child responds “Is she going to die by dinnertime.” Now, in the American TV-movie context, the automatic response is “What an unsympathetic child! He should burst into tears!” Then we’ll all feel sorry for him, then dad will burst into tears, then we cue the music and we fade to black and we’ll all feel sorry for them. The whole point of this was the reality of the child who just doesn’t understand.

But in the independent world, you never run into filmmaking by committee?

Not as much, although we did have one person suggest that we get a female writer to come in to do a polish on the script so we could have a “woman’s perspective.” And I was like ‘What’s the point of that? It’s from a man’s perspective! It’s about three guys!’ (laughs) You have to resist in those situations because it can run off the rails so easily.

L to R: Scott Hicks, Clive Owen and Nicholas McAnulty on the set of The Boys Are Back.

You mentioned that this film has been in the works since 2004. What took so long to get it off the ground?

In addition to getting the money together it mostly became about synching Clive’s and my schedules. He’d be off doing something, then I’d get offered a job. And that went on for a few years, until finally everything just fell into place. It’s funny, because if we’d done this in 2004, the boy who plays Artie would have barely been born. I like to think we were growing our own during the waiting period. (laughs)

The film must have resonated with you very personally, because you have two boys, right?
I do, yeah. They’re 16 years apart in age, and both grown up now, but since fathering has been such a big part of my life, since I was 18, there was a very big appeal for me. But the take-away is the idea that family is where the love is. It’s definitely not DNA, and it’s definitely not nuclear anymore. But it’s about the fact that this guy pieces together a shattered family, and that’s powerful to me.

L to R: George MacKay, Nicholas McAnulty and Clive Owen in The Boys Are Back.

Let’s talk about your background. You were born in Uganda and raised in Kenya. How did your family wind up in Africa?
My father graduated as an engineer during the Depression in London, and there were no jobs. He saw an advertisement for young engineers to come to East Africa, and off he went. He was a mountaineer, so he looked at a map and saw these wonderful mountains, which attracted him to go. That was in the ‘30s and all my family was born there. I’m the youngest of four. There were there for 30 years or more, my parents. It wasn’t until the year when Kenya was given independence in 1963—my parents had lived through the Mau-Mau emergency and weren’t sure what would happen after independence—that my parents moved to England. England by then was such unfamiliar territory that they looked for an alternative and settled on a life in Adelaide, when I was 14.

What was Kenya like growing up?
Well, wildlife was in profusion back then, and sadly has been somewhat decimated now. I think back on it and it sounds quite romantic, and it was, but it was the only world I knew. You’d go on a drive, and you’d see these fabulous herds of animals. We’d call it “going on safari.” We stayed in these wonderful national parks, in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. As a child I remember walking up to the 12,000 foot mark of Mount Kenya, after which is a serious climb. In fact, my dad was the first person to climb the north face of Mount Kenya, which was considered unscalable. It was a 5,000 foot sheer granite rock face, which he studied for years, then he and a colleague came up with a plan of attack and did it.

He must’ve been quite a guy, your dad.

He was. He wouldn’t think himself that, because he was this very self-effacing, retiring person. I asked him why he took up mountaineering, and he said it was to overcome his fear. He was very frightened of heights as a little boy. I think he had it tough. He was sent away to boarding school at the age of 3, then at 7, he was sent to England for school and didn’t see them for seven years. It’s a definite cultural…thing in the UK that I’ll never quite understand.

All you have to do is see Lindsay Anderson’s If…to want to keep your kids out of those awful boarding schools.
It’s funny you should mention that movie. You know who I met last night? Malcolm McDowell. He came to our screening last night, he’s a friend of Clive’s, and we went out and had some drinks afterwards. And I said to him ‘You know, you are partly to blame for my induction into cinema because I was 15 when I saw If…and it was transformational.’

Did you ever see Richard E. Grant’s film, Wah-Wah, about growing up in Africa during the '60s and early '70s? The two of you would be contemporaries, I’m guessing.

Yes, absolutely, and I loved that film. There were many resonances for me, although he grew up in Swaziland, which was a bit different in nature than Kenya, but there were enough similarities that I really enjoyed his book and the film. He captured that era beautifully.

What was the epiphany you had as a kid that made you fall in love with film?

I wasn’t a kid. I was a teenager. I had really had very little exposure to cinema as a child, and no television. Basically, I started at Flinders University, which is in Adelaide, and wanted to study English and history. They had these interesting rules which were that you couldn’t study majors from two different disciplines, in my case social sciences and humanities. I wasn’t going to give up English, so I looked around for a suitable companion to English. I settled on drama, and then in drama, there was a little topic I stumbled into called filmmaking. There was a little bit of equipment, friends who were enthusiastic and would go out and shoot stuff. Suddenly this was the most fun thing you could imagine and it just took over my university life, and it became about filmmaking and seeing films. My family were completely mystified: “But you saw a film last week. Why do you need to see another this week?” (laughs) I was making up for lost time, I think. But I never imagined that you could make a living out of it.

Hicks and Max Von Sydow on the set of Snow Falling on Cedars.

What other films captured your imagination, in addition to If…?

Oh, a lot of the European filmmakers: Bergman, all the great Italian filmmakers, the sort of East Coast American filmmakers like Orson Welles, Scorsese…they were my sort of education, in a way. I remember vividly watching Max Von Sydow in Bergman’s films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and to be able to work with him in Snow Falling on Cedars was like coming full circle. It was almost an indescribable feeling. He’s the most charming man. In that film, he’s defending this Japanese-American man who’s unjustly accused of murder. The young man I cast had never acted before, and was struggling, to be honest, and I was quite concerned. And I just watched Max sit with him for a month in that courtroom, and it was like a master class for this young man. Max was so kind to him, so encouraging, when he could have been quite disdainful, and been like “It’s all about me,” but he was the antithesis of that. People would come in just to work for a day or two, some really fine actors, to appear in the witness box, and I remember one of them just fell apart when confronted by Max, being cross-examined by him. Max was so generous and helpful to me, and the actor, in keeping his performance together. Not all actors are that generous. The best ones are, because they know that any scene is only good as the worst actor in it, so it’s useless trying to steal it. Well, when working on other people’s films, I’ve seen some very selfish actors who demand attention and ruin a film

They’re usually flashes in the pan, though.

Yeah, or on the downhill slope in their careers. Clive is actually very generous, too. In doing this film, he had to accommodate, particularly when working with a six year-old, he’s so meticulous, prepared and organized, he knows his stuff. So he’s like that, and then you have this little spitball kid, who’s completely unpredictable, and Clive completely engaged him. When Clive comes to the set, he’s very loose and loves to laugh, but the minute you say ‘Action,’ he has this laser-like focus. Clive’s spirit was infectious, really.

Hicks and Catherine Zeta-Jones on the set of No Reservations.

You cut your teeth doing industrial films and documentaries. Was that a good training ground?
Yeah, I really learned on the job, because I had no real formal training at university. I had access to equipment, ideas and other people, but no real training, as such. I chose projects that interested me. They were little industrial documentaries and government department films, but some needed actors and I always tried to cast good actors, even if they had to come from another city, so I could figure out how to direct these people.

And this was the ideal time to being doing that, during the 1970s and the birth of the Aussie New Wave.

That’s right, and I got to work as a crew member on some of those big productions, when they’d come to town. I would be a third assistant, or work in the art department, but I just loved watching these guys work.

Hicks with Anthony Hopkins on the set of Hearts in Atlantis.

Who were some of those guys?
Peter Weir was probably the biggest name. I worked in the art department of The Last Wave and worked as the night watchmen at night, and slept on the set. I also worked on a little film of his called The Plumber, which was a telly movie. I’m actually in it. I walk out of an elevator at one point, since we didn’t have any extras, Peter cast me at the last minute. It’s a gem of a film, shot in three weeks on nothing, about $300,000. Anyway, Peter wanted to do some rehearsals with the key cast in the board room of the film corporation. He said “I need somebody to videotape these rehearsals. Are you interested?” And in those days, video cameras were the size of a suitcase, but I said ‘Of course!’ So I got to spend three days in this room with Peter and his key cast as he rehearsed them. At one point he looked back at my framing and said “You’re really getting into this, aren’t you?” (laughs) What a master class, you know? Then I worked on other films, by guys like Bruce Beresford, and other big names of the day. It was great.

Have you seen the new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, about the so-called “Ozploitation” movies of the ‘70s?
No, but I’m dying to see that! It was such a rarified time. I had no idea that as I was coming out of university, making films for a living was actually possible. But it was so wide-open back then, which isn’t to say that breaking in wasn’t problematic, but if you were creative you could get your foot in the door.

A lot of the guys in the documentary said that that’s what made it so easy: there were very few rules in place at that time, so you could really just take your crew out and shoot.

Yeah, there was very little unionization and delineation, so we really made it up as we went along. I remember vividly one night on The Last Wave, the scene was about this hail storm hitting a house, because these strange weather patterns are happening. In those days, the special effects were just physical, so you literally had the entire crew, the entire back office, the publicist, the caterer, and we were all chucking ice at this house. (laughs) It was crazy, but in its own way, a wonderful collective energy. So that was my film school, really, was working on other people’s films. Then there’s a certain defining point where you are either going to be a career assistant director, where I made good money, but it wasn’t apart to directing. I always “wanted to do what that guy did.” (laughs) Of course I realize now that there was nothing else I could have done. Choice wasn’t an issue. Do you remember the film Breaker Morant?

Of course.

Do you remember the actor who played the youngest solider of the trio of accused men, Lewis Fitz-gerald?

Yeah, he was the kid of the group who was spared in the end.

Exactly. He plays the newspaper editor in The Boys Are Back.

No way! I never would have recognized him.

Well, it was a long time ago. But he’s actually a director now. He directs television.

Great film.

Oh God, yes. That last scene, again speaking to the restraint we’ve been talking about, as Bryan Brown and Edward Woodward are walking across the field, away from the camera, towards the chairs that they’re to be shot in, and one reaches out his hand, and they just hold hands, and it’s just such a touching, profoundly moving image. No dialogue at all.

Scott Hicks, lining up a shot.

Except for Edward Woodward’s wonderful final line: “Shoot straight, you bastards!”
Yeah. Brilliant.

Two of my favorite actors in that film: Woodward and Jack Thompson.

Edward Woodward…(laughs) Noel Coward said “The man’s name sounds like a fart in a bath: Edward Woodward.” (laughs)

Did you ever see an old series Woodward did on the BBC called “Callan” about a working class spy/assassin.

Oh yeah! That was great! Really dark…

Yeah, dark and unrelenting, like John Le Carre, but even darker. I always wondered if Woodward’s show from the ‘80s, "The Equalizer," was supposed to be Callan in retirement.

Yeah, that would make sense, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, we digress. Let’s talk about documentaries. You’re one of the few filmmakers who still goes between docs and features. The only other I can think of who does that is Werner Herzog.
Yeah, and Scorsese does the odd doc as does Michael Apted. Coming out of this sort of sponsored documentary background, when the ‘80s arrived and I stumbled on the story that became Shine, I was hired to do these big budget documentaries for the then-emerging Discovery Channel. I did a big documentary on the Chinese army that I won a Peabody Award for, so they asked me to do a series on submarines, and I won an Emmy, and all the while I’m writing Shine, I’m working on Shine, I’m trying to get Shine to happen, and I’m thinking to myself that this is all trying to tell me something. You’re doing well at documentaries, why don’t you just stick with that. It was like I’d been given a chance to really be good at something. So why do you keep going on and on about this other story—all said in an interior monologue. (laughs) I read as much non-fiction as I do fiction, and I guess it influences the films that I make, since Shine, like The Boys Are Back, was based on truth.

Hicks (center) interviewing a subject for Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. Philip Glass is seated at right.

Your most recent doc is the film about composer Philip Glass.

Yeah, it’s out on DVD now and the DVD is really good. There’s a second DVD in the set which are my full interviews with Philip and then 45 minutes of performance. The film worked out really well and got short-listed by the Academy, and made it down to the last 15 nominations. He’s one of the most remarkable men alive, and so accessible when you’re lucky enough to be in his company. He’s completely unlike what you’d probably imagine, which is austere, intellectual, dry. He’s funny, sociable, a gossip, likes to cook for his friends. He has two kids under age 5, and he’s 70. He loves riding the roller coaster at Coney Island, just a fantastic, all-around man. But the defining moment of the film, which I won’t give away, comes early, and you see that his life isn’t all beer and Skittles. You see that in The Boys Are Back, too: the more technologically advanced we get, the more things like family get squeezed out into a tiny box. If there are prevailing themes in what I’m interested in, it would be those, I guess.

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