Buzy Baz

WE were talking about Shakespeare and opera and politics and Australian culture and the Hollywood studios, and Baz Luhrmann, …

WE were talking about Shakespeare and opera and politics and Australian culture and the Hollywood studios, and Baz Luhrmann, a motormouth in the best sense of the term, could have talked all day. But he became truly animated when it came to the subject of his wedding which, in a most elaborate expression of life imitating art, was a show in its own right. Baz and his regular production designer, Catherine Martin - he always refers to her as C.M. - were married in Sydney earlier this year. They chose the date, January 26th, because it was both her birthday and Australia Day.

"We decided to use our own creative process to create a private show for us and us only," he explains. "We don't believe in the church and our church is really the temple of the theatre. All the music we used was from our own productions - Strictly Ballroom, La Boheme, and so on, and I shot it all on Super 8, but nobody will ever see it except us.

They invited their 60 guests to a dilapidated Sydney warehouse. "When they arrived, all these boys suddenly came out playing violins" he continues. "A giant gate opens up and there are these big silver busses for them. Everyone gets on and they're driven to the Sydney Opera House. The boys appear again with their violins to serenade them as they get off the busses. They get on to this giant black room and it starts to rise up. It's the hydraulic lift on the Opera House stage, but they don't know that. They have no idea what's going on.

"Meanwhile Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen from La Boheme is playing, really loud. As they come on to the stage of the Opera House, I'm there on the stage, the groom. We built this church looking back on the audience and as they came up they broke into spontaneous applause. Then C.M. arrives on stage; and Love Is In The Air is playing.

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"Next comes our celebrant, Noel Staunton, the technical director of the Australian National Opera - this huge fat guy who looks like Henry VIII and is wearing a dress, and he floats by wires down on to the stage. Afterwards the busses took all the guests to Noel's apartment - it's amazing, like a big warehouse - and we had this great, long, gold table with golden chairs and candelabra. And we had great catering. We got to do a show and to enjoy it for ourselves."

Was it difficult getting the hire of the hall? "Our little opera was the lowest budget opera ever staged at the Sydney Opera House - and the highest grossing," he says, referring to his production of La Boheme in a 1950s setting. "It made so much money that they keep begging us to bring it back.

We've brought it back three times now and that's it." When I mention that I saw a recording of the production on television, he dismisses the TV version as "terrible - you don't get the sense of the theatrical".

Clearly, his acute sense of the theatrical permeates Baz Luhrmann's life and work. Now 34 he was raised "in the middle of nowhere", as he puts it - in a tiny New South Wales village in the Australian bush. "It had one street and 16 houses," he says. His parents broke up when he was a child and he lived with his mother at a remote service station. Like the hero of his first film, Strictly Ballroom, Baz first got involved in performance at an early age when he competed in ballroom dancing tournaments - an interest fostered by his mother, a ballroom dancing teacher.

When he was 21, Baz moved to Sydney to become an actor. He failed the audition at the National institute of Dramatic Art, but landed a leading role as the lover of the Judy Davis character in John Duigan's 1981 movie, Winter Of Our Dreams. Three years later, he re-applied to the institute and was accepted, and it was there that he first devised Strictly Ballroom as a workshop performance piece. He then developed it as a stage musical, playing one of the leading roles and staging the show in Sydney and taking it to the World Youth Theatre Festival in Bratislava where he received the best director award.

Virtually unknown outside of theatre and opera circles in Sydney, Baz brought his subsequent movie of Strictly Ballroom to Cannes in 1992 and took the festival by storm, getting a 15-minute standing ovation from a cheering audience after its midnight premiere. Made for just $2 million, the movie went on to take over $80 million at the international box-office and Baz was besieged by movie offers.

"I turned them all down - Larry Flynt, Evita, all of them," he says. "After two years I told my agent I didn't want to look at anything else that was offered." Instead he co wrote and directed an opera, Lake Lost, and directed Benjamin Britten's opera, A Midsummer Night's Dream in a British Raj setting.

"We have a philosophy: we are not for hire," he says, and by "we", he refers to himself and his regular team of co-writer Craig Pearce, co producer Martin Brown, editor Jill Bilcock and, of course, C.M. "We create projects that make life interesting and fulfilling for us, opera, films, election campaigns.

Yes, election campaigns. Two Australian elections ago, the prime minister, Paul Keating was in trouble in the polls. "We really believed in him," says Baz, "and we offered to help. Who he is was not being communicated clearly, so we worked on his speeches, press conferences, all the shows - and they are shows. I directed his promotional films, We re-designed his wardrobe, re-dressed his kids, changed his make-up and influenced the ad campaign." Unfortunately for Keating, perhaps, Baz and his team were away when the next election was held and Keating lost it.

They were immersed in bringing Baz's second movie, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet to the screen and it has become the most commercially successful Shakespearean adaptation to date, making the Bard as accessible and attractive to mass audiences as they did with opera and ballroom dancing. "We don't set out to make art accessible," Baz insists. "We set out to tell it as we see it. We don't see things obscurely and a lot of people see what we see. It's like adjusting the clarity. It's just good story-telling, basically."

Pulsating with raw energy, swooningly romantic and dazzlingly designed, the movie is a radical re-invention of the great romantic tragedy which retains the "original language and re-locates the play to a contemporary American setting, the violent beachfront city of Verona Beach where a deadly feud persists between the powerful dynasties of the Capulets and the Montagues.

"We took a question as our starting point," says Baz. "If Shakespeare were making a movie of this play, how would he do it? We spent a year researching the mythology of Shakespeare. Every one of our decisions came from our research into the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare was a great, rumbustious storyteller who connected with an audience of 3,000 drunks and he was dealing with bear-baiting and prostitution as competition. "He insisted that Shakespeare's name be part of the movie's title. "I knew that with all this modern imagery, the studio would try to hide the language. I had to fight them to keep the language. And they were going "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, as opposed to whose?". They, don't know that Shakespeare didn't write the original story, that it comes from an Italian story and that there are hundreds of versions of it."

For all his exuberant confidence in conversation, Baz Luhrmann admits that the fear of failure is there all the way through the creative process. "You expect failure," he says. "If I described to you the process of making this film, I couldn't describe the daily fear we went through for two years. Like we went $2 million over budget. We, were in Mexico, we had storms, people were kidnapped, people were sick - we all had dysentery.

"BUT that stuff is easy The fear is that you are leading all these people who trust you, people you really care about, down a road where they're all going to get consumed in a hideous fire. What a joy that this thing has done so well in the end. We would have been happy if it just made its money back, but it's made about $85 million so far. It went straight to number one in the US box-office and beat the Stallone film (Daylight) that opened the same weekend. Last year 20th Century Fox had two movies that made money - Independence Day and our film.

"They were freaked out about the film in Hollywood. They don't understand its success at all, which in Hollywood is a very disturbing thing. They wrote it off as the Zeitgeist movie - `we don't know what it is, but it's caught something in the air'. Now I have a deal with Fox for two years. They're building a studio in Sydney. I've offices there and in LA and my whole staff maintained. So I could sit in this hotel room for two years and do nothing, and not have to worry about anything. Of course that's not going to happen."

Of course not.