Archive for September, 2008
After months of only having our small teasers to watch, 20th Century Fox have finally released the full length trailer for Australia. The delay in releasing the trailer may have been a smart tactical move, as many of the other Oscar contenders released theirs almost simultaneously a few weeks ago; this way the spotlight is on Australia. Running at 2 minutes, it largely focuses on the developing relationship between The Drover and Lady Sarah Ashley. With a fantastic score, the trailer quickly switches gears between romance and tragedy, showing some startling scenes depicting the bombing of Darwin in World War II.
You can stream the video here at ninemsn, or download it from our media section.
110 screencaps are available in our gallery, with more feedback, media and discussion at our forum!
September 29th, 2008
This month, the magazine Australian Women’s Weekly turns a whopping 75 years old! To celebrate this occasion in style, who more iconic and stylish than Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman could grace this special cover?
Taken from the editor’s letter, “It’s no surprise that we are all fascinated by our heritage - it makes us who we are and shapes our lives. As our covergirl, Nicole Kidman, says in her birthday message, The Weekly’s heritage is “comforting”. We are extremely proud that Nicole and Hugh Jackman - two of Australia’s most iconic stars - agreed to be on the cover of our historic birthday issue and chose to talk for the first time to The Weekly about their roles in Baz Luhrmann’s highly anticipated film ‘Australia’.
The issue features a nice six page spread, with multiple images from Australia. Copies are available at Australian newsagents as of today, 24th September.
The full HQ scans are now available in our extensive gallery.
September 24th, 2008
During September Australia’s famous airline, QANTAS, launched its ‘Australia’ campaign; the airline’s biggest promotion since the Sydney Olympics spokesperson, Wooldridge, says. “We’ve literally taken over the airline,” with Australia images and logos incorporated into most Qantas branding, including boarding passes.
Having recently flown with QANTAS australiamovie.net can safely report that the above comment is not an understatement. Anyone flying with QANTAS will not escape knowing about this movie. Boarding passes branded with information on how to win a trip to the Sydney premiere, a special in-flight preview and exclusive interview with Hugh Jackman, and even after exiting the plane the welcome bombardment continues. Entering and exiting the plane, the portable walkways are filled with half a dozen framed posters, each QANTAS gateway has a different billboard featuring one of the three character posters previewed just recently. Need to check your Arrival/Departure info on the large screens? You’ll find a large billboard for Australia above those monitors also. As you go to collect your baggage, you may think you’ve heard the last of Baz and his team…what was the name of that movie Kidman and Jackman are in again? Oh that’s right AUSTRALIA….says the giant indoor (but outdoorsized) billboard as you stand waiting more than long enough for your baggage to reach your hands. …and driving out of the airport, you’d want to tell your friends and family about what you’ve just seen, right? Well of course as you’re leaving they have luminous billboards of our lovebirds kissing in the rain. Promotional bliss.
Previously announced promotional partners Tourism Australia and RM Williams are now also joined by Coopers, Kirks, Natio, Telstra BigPond, News Limited and Jacob’s Creek. If they’re anything like this latest partnership the public awareness for this film will be huge!
September 18th, 2008
The latest magazine feature for Australia has hit stands in People magazine’s, September 22nd edition.
The magazine is featuring a handfull of movies being released around the tail end of the year and discussing their Oscar potential. Australia is the only movie discussed to have a full page spread, and exciting for us eager fans, a new picture!
“There’s no doubt the little boy in me prefers to be scruffier,” says Jackman, “And a little rougher”.
A scan is now available in our gallery.
September 14th, 2008
Autumn and the holidays used to promise moviegoers a handful of sweeping, big-canvas movies designed to transport audiences to different times and places as well as woo Oscar voters with their grand scale and ambitions.
Those films have largely disappeared from movie theaters, but one of cinema’s most romantic directors hopes to bring them back in style, at least for one season. With “Australia,” Baz Luhrmann is trying to revive the David Lean-style wide-screen historical drama in much the same way that “Moulin Rouge!” helped bring back big-screen musicals.
Set on the eve of World War II, the film has Nicole Kidman playing an English aristocrat who travels to Australia to sell a family cattle farm and instead winds up falling in love with both the remote terrain and a rugged cowboy (Hugh Jackman). The movie is an expensive, lavish labor of love, a valentine from Luhrmann to his native country and an opportunity to show the rest of the world the hypnotic beauty of Australia’s Outback.
The film opens Nov. 26. LA.com Film Critic, Glenn Whipp, spoke to Luhrmann and Jackman about the film.
Read more…
On making an old-school epic:
Luhrmann: When I was growing up, the genre I loved was the sweeping romantic epic. Four-category movies. And that’s what this is. It has comedy, romance, action and drama. You don’t have movies like that anymore. Maybe you hit two of the categories, but not all four. And that’s what I’m trying to do.
Jackman: They don’t make them nowadays, and for good reason. When they work, they’re fantastic, but they’re incredibly hard to make. You need a brilliant director with just enough craziness to undertake it.
Luhrmann: It’s a movie for the whole family. And that’s death, because you think, “Oh. It’s a children’s movie.” No. But children can see it. It’s the kind of movies families used to see over the holidays. It will make you laugh, make you excited, make you swoon.
Jackman: The movies Baz found inspirational for this were “Gone With the Wind,” “Out of Africa,” “From Here to Eternity” and “The African Queen.” Movies in that true Hollywood style where the landscape is as big a character as the people in it. That’s what gives the story scope and size.
On their collaboration:
Luhrmann: One exciting thing about making movies is working with actors and showing people a side of them that they otherwise did not know. With Nicole (Kidman), people didn’t realize she could be funny. With Hugh, it’s him putting across the iconic cowboy character with wry, offhand humor. It’s the kind of leading man performance we don’t see much anymore.
Jackman: Nicole told me that whatever you think the movie will be, it will be slightly different because it’s Baz. Baz is an artist. He’s always creating. All his movies ultimately have a great message about love — love conquers all despite the rules of society. That’s definitely a theme in this.
On the “love” between Jackman and Kidman as seen in a particular “Australia” publicity photo lighting up the Internet:
Jackman: That’s a good shot, that one. Even my wife said, “That’s a hot photo.” It’s weird because my wife and Nicole have been mates for a long time. Neither of them would like for me to mention how long. They used to share an apartment together when Nicole first came to L.A. So I’ve always had a lot of affection for Nicole.
Luhrmann: Again, you look back at those movies I mentioned, and you have Gable and Leigh, Bogart and Hepburn, Streep and Redford. They’re not pairings you might immediately imagine, but there’s a lot of heat when opposites attract.
Jackman: Definitely one of the things you can say about Baz’s movies is that there’s unbridled passion. And these two characters have a sexual attraction, a magnetism, they can’t deny. On shooting in the Outback Jackman: The Outback, there’s something sexy about it. Everything that matters in town — how you dress, the bar you go to, the car you drive — is stripped away to the bare essentials. Just who you are. That’s where things can happen.
Luhrmann: It’s the last remaining true frontier. There’s such an abundance of nothingness. Even with the Sahara, you have people there. Here, there’s an extra and profound beauty.
Jackman: When I was 19, I spent a number of months in the Outback on an African mission. I was with a group building houses. And I stayed on one for about a month. That was a defining time for me. For a second, I didn’t think I was going to come back. There’s something very hypnotic out there.
Luhrmann: Kununurra (the tiny town in northwestern Australia where some of the movie was filmed) is where I reconnected with the movie. I went there before we started shooting and stayed by the river one night. I had a fire. I may have had a tiny splash of wine. OK, maybe two tiny splashes let’s not go there. And I never left for six weeks. The sense of stillness was incredible.
On what the movie means to them as Australians:
Jackman: I’ve never been this invested in a movie, that’s for sure. In every way. The aspirations of this film are to appeal to everybody, yet it is a movie called “Australia.” My home is Australia. The idea of it not working is one I don’t really want to contemplate.
Luhrmann: To take this genre and use my country as a canvas that’s a tall order. We’ll see if I’ve succeeded.
September 13th, 2008
Fall Movies
By BROOKS BARNES for the New York Times
Hugh Jackman is a big, macho movie star. Got it?
In talking up Mr. Jackman in advance of “Australia,” his coming romantic epic, three executives at 20th Century Fox all described the actor as a “rough-hewn” throwback to Hollywood’s classic leading-man types, a “young Clint Eastwood.”
Baz Luhrmann, the director of “Australia,” which co-stars Nicole Kidman as an aristocratic cattle owner, also talked up Mr. Jackman’s manliness. “There are not many actors who have an ability to pick up a Nicole Kidman, throw her on the bed and ravish her with believability,” Mr. Luhrmann said.
Perhaps feeling that description was not vivid enough, Mr. Luhrmann added, “He is also excellent with a cattle whip.”
Read more…
Here’s what Mr. Jackman’s bosses and colleagues are trying to say: Mr. Jackman, 39, is on the verge of megastardom, the kind that comes with Oscar nominations and demands for script approval. But to join the short A-list of male movie stars he must move past all that girly singing and dancing stuff on his résumé.
In Hollywood, where typecasting remains very much a force, Mr. Jackman retains a slight stigma. Isn’t he the guy who won a Tony Award for playing a flamboyant gay songwriter in “The Boy From Oz” on Broadway? Didn’t he host the Tony Awards for three years running? And didn’t he also produce and star in “Viva Laughlin,” that campy CBS musical series that bombed last year?
With “Australia,” which Fox plans to release on Nov. 26 in North America, Mr. Jackman will get the chance to prove that he can play a big-time romantic lead in a big-time movie. And with any luck, the film will be part of a one-two punch erasing any lingering worries about his ability to open a movie. “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” in which he reprises his “X-Men” role as a hirsute mutant in need of a nail file, opens on May 1.
“I think it will surprise people,” Mr. Jackman said of his performance in “Australia” during an interview on the Fox lot. “I’m never that worried about positioning myself, and I don’t like labels personally or professionally. But this is definitely the straight-down-the-line, classic, old-school leading-man role I’ve been waiting for.”
Mr. Jackman was not Mr. Luhrmann’s first choice. Mr. Luhrmann intended for Russell Crowe to play the character, a brooding drover with no name who helps Ms. Kidman’s aristocrat drive cattle across a barren homestead during World War II. But Mr. Crowe and Fox sparred over money. (At the time the combative actor fumed to a reporter, “I do charity work, but I don’t do charity work for major studios.”)
Mr. Luhrmann, the director of critical darlings like “Moulin Rouge!” “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet” and “Strictly Ballroom,” said Mr. Jackman was initially under consideration for the smaller role of a greedy land manager. “I was keen to have Hugh in the film, but I didn’t immediately see him as the drover,” Mr. Luhrmann said, adding that Fox worried about Mr. Jackman’s marketability.
Fox grew more comfortable with Mr. Jackman’s star status after “X-Men: The Last Stand” opened in 2006 with strong results (it ended up making more than $450 million worldwide), and Mr. Luhrmann had become impressed with Mr. Jackman’s gung-ho attitude. Ms. Kidman, a friend of Mr. Jackman’s wife, the Australian actress Deborah-Lee Furness, gave her approval at a party in Los Angeles.
“Nicole came bounding in and said she heard I was talking to Baz,” Mr. Jackman recalled. “I said: ‘Yes, I’m very excited. But I haven’t yet seen a script. Tell me, what is it like?’ And she responded: ‘Oh, I haven’t read the script. It’s Baz. Just sign on.’ “
Not long after, Mr. Jackman found himself enduring intense horse training in Texas. For the role he would need not only to woo Ms. Kidman’s character, who inherits an enormous cattle ranch in a remote part of Australia, but also to ride herd over 2,000 cattle and rope horses. In one scene he would need to jump off his horse and grab a stampeding cow by the tail. Another scene called for him to stand in the center of a corral and lasso a wild horse.
Mr. Jackman played down the rigor required by most of the wrangling work. But even he was impressed with the lassoing. “The horse went ballistic when I got that rope around his neck,” he said. “My gloves ripped, the rope peeled skin off my hands. I just remember being so happy that I did it that I didn’t care at all.”
Filming took place in Australia’s barren Northern Territory. (In the film Ms. Kidman’s character owns a sprawling desert property near Darwin, a small Australian city bombed by the Japanese during World War II.) The shoot came with dust storms, scorpions and, down the side of a cliff from Mr. Jackman’s trailer, a lagoon slithering with crocodiles. The shoot lasted 157 days in total, an epic period even for an epic drama.
“I almost fainted on the first day,” Mr. Jackman said. “Incredibly hot, incredibly remote.”
It was a long way from his days starting out in musical theater in Sydney, a time when he worked as a part-time clown at children’s parties. (In another job around that time, a pre-muscled Mr. Jackman was paid to stand in the lobby of a local gym as the “before” model.)
One early role came from the Sydney production of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.” He played the prince. He went on to a starring role in a local tour of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” and eventually landed the role of Curly in an acclaimed London revival of “Oklahoma!” in 1998.
During that production, a permed Mr. Jackman had his first professional encounter with Mr. Luhrmann. It didn’t go well: he auditioned for the romantic lead in “Moulin Rouge!” and was passed over for Ewan McGregor.
Mr. Jackman came out O.K., though. During the same time, he was a backup choice for the Wolverine character in “X-Men” and got the part after the original actor, Dougray Scott, backed out because of a conflicting film commitment. Aside from the “X-Men” movies, Mr. Jackman’s movie career has mostly included films that missed expectations, including “The Prestige.” Whether “Australia” will work is unclear. Fox hopes it will be an Oscar force, and the footage is lavish. Mr. Luhrmann said he was influenced by sweeping classics like “Gone With the Wind,” “The African Queen” and “Out of Africa,” which Mr. Jackman says is one of his favorite films.
But the film is commercially risky. Historical epics can be a tough sell, as “Troy,” “Kingdom of Heaven” and “King Arthur” have recently proved to the studios’ dismay. And Ms. Kidman’s recent track record at the box office (“The Stepford Wives,” “Bewitched,” “The Invasion,” “The Golden Compass”) has been scanty. (The film also represents a big departure for Mr. Luhrmann, who has developed a passionate following for his colorful visual style, which often places characters in over-the-top worlds bordering on fantasy. But “Australia” is darker and more realistic looking, and includes a subplot about the government’s forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families.)
Mr. Jackman always has a backup in “Wolverine.” Judging from his reception in July at Comic-Con, the huge comic book and movie marketing convention, the action film will be a blockbuster. More than 6,500 fans at Comic-Con greeted him like a deity when he made a surprise appearance to plug the movie. People were screaming and chanting; one woman burst into tears. “It was my little rock-star moment,” Mr. Jackman said.
People who work with Mr. Jackman gush about him, too, to the degree that one starts to wonder just how badly other stars are behaving. “He is the most centered, incredibly focused actor I’ve ever worked with,” Mr. Luhrmann said. “I know everybody always says that in Hollywood, but I really mean it.”
Nina Tassler, the president for entertainment at CBS, said she had no regrets about “Viva Laughlin” because of Mr. Jackman’s involvement. “Working with him was one of the highlights of my entire life,” she said. Mr. Jackman, she added, was intimately involved in aspects of the project like script writing and marketing - rare for movie stars moonlighting in television - and said she found him humble and unassuming, an opinion echoed by others.
In wielding his charm, Mr. Jackman, whose offices on the Fox lot are located in Shirley Temple’s former dance studio and who watches “Judge Judy” in his spare time, likes to use humor. “You can’t cut my hair or my beard - but you can trim my nose hair if you like,” he said to a stylist readying him for a photo shoot.
And his looks - five appearances on People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful” list and counting - don’t hurt his bankability either, as the director Bryan Singer, who hired Mr. Jackman for “X-Men,” helpfully pointed out in an interview.
As for that “rough-hewn” label? “That’s studio-speak for a lot of chest hair,” Mr. Singer said.
As always for the the full view and all the latest breaking articles and news, visit and join our Australia movie discussion forum! It’s free!
September 5th, 2008
This past weekend saw the opening of the Archibald Prize exhibition at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG).
What’s the Archibald Prize? In accordance with the bequest of Jules F. Archibald the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales are to award an annual prize for the best portrait of a man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics.
In 2008, ‘Heath’, a portrait of the late actor Heath Ledger, not only stole the show but also achieved the People’s Choice Award. Vincent Fantauzzo is the artist responsible for this attention drawing piece, and of interest to Australia fans, whilst in Bathurst over the weekend he drew and donated a portrait of Brandon Walters (as seen right, click for larger) to the Bathurst Gallery.
With thanks to Fantauzzo & BRAG, australiamovie.net has obtained an image of the portrait currently on display. We’re also pleased to learn that three more paintings are in the works, and we hope to share them with you upon completion.
In the meantime if you’re looking to see more of Vincent Fantauzzo’s striking works you can visit his website or check out the real deal at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery.
The exhibition runs from August 29 to October 12. Entry is free. Gallery opening hours are Tuesday to Fridays from 10am to 5pm, Saturdays 10am to 5pm and Sundays 11am to 2pm.
September 3rd, 2008
Previous News Updates
