AUSTRALIA: The BIG Romance
Extracted from 4 page Australia feature in EMPIRE [UK] August 2008 edition
When Baz Luhrmann named his latest film Australia, he was lacking in neither ambition nor ego. “Why Australia? Well, first of all, to get people all uppity about it,” smirks the director. “I think about epics like Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Africa, Casablanca, pictures that use one word to describe a location - Oklahoma! is a musical example. This film cant be definitive about Australia, but there’s nothing wrong with people commenting, ‘What does it mean?’ That’s not a bad place to start when you’re creating a story.” Back in the 1940s, when this movie is set, his homeland still represented something otherworldly, he remidns us: “Big, somewhat mysterious, somewhat misunderstood.”
You do overlook how huge the dman place is. The stae of Western Australia alone, where much of Luhrmann’s epic romance has been shot, is five times the size of Texas. At its far norther edge, near the tiny desert outpost of Kununurra, it’s a parched, barrent wilderness. But for the scattering of aboriginal settlements and tiny Outback dots, to arrive here is to stumble into a land that time forgot - part Serengeti, part Monument Valley - a sweltering expanse of prehistoric rock and squat boab trees, under a vast, azure sky.
“This is a land far, far away,” trills Luhrmann. “Metaphorically speaking, it has a sense of fairy tale about it.
Staging a $100 million studio flick up here - beyond transport links, cellphone reception and, heaven forbit, a decent latte (state capital Perth is more than a thousand miles away) - ought to have been laughed right out of the pitch meeting. But, on a scorching plain beneath a spectacular escarpment sit the trailers, the generators, the gaggles of four-wheel drives.
The film has already ben dubbed an Australian Gone With The Wind, and not without reason. At the set’s heard sits its Tara, a ranch house called Faraway Downs: a sprawling, ramshackle homestead overhung by a water tower and surrounded by horse corrals - a little sprig of bougainvillea the only spash of colour on a palette of earth-brown. It has been constructed from scratch in the middlge of nowhere, every scrap of building material, down to the last nail, transported by road from Sydney a whole continent distant. On the veranda stands Nicole Kidman, dressed in an elegant green period dress, her pale skin a challenge for the poor bloody assistant charged with hoisting a sun-protective brolly.
“This is the last of a dying breed, this kind of movie,” Kidman enthuses, harking back to those days before CGI, when you make your epic - African Queen, Doctor Zhivago - you had to drag your production lock, stock and barrel into the wilds. “I mean, they don’t build stuff like this anymore. To feel that air and see people ravaged by the elements, as hard as it is, it’s exquisite.”
For ravaged, she might have said “eaten”. Among the sweating crew, forarms flap reflexifvely in The Great Aussie Wave, smiting the sparrow-sized horseflies which have broadcast far and wide about the influx of tender human flesh. Mooching around with the aboriginal ’stockmen’ (the aussie term for cowboy) is Hugh Jackman: tall, tanned, bearded; bedecked in his Clint Eastwood finest. Huddled over a monitor, and completing the heavyweight Aussie triumvirate, is Luhrmann himself. It’s a hundred degrees in the shade, but somehow, in an impossibly dandy Stetson and neckerchief, Uncle Baz remains as cool as they come.
While Australia marks the first collaboration between Jackman and Luhrmann, Kidman has, of course, worked with the director before, both in Moulin Rouge! (shot in Sydney) and that odd Channel No 5 commercial. She is cast in this as Lady Sarah Ashley, a British aristocrat who, on the eve of World War II, arrives in the Antipodes, the reluctant inheritor of a massive cattle ranch.
“When she comes out here, she’s forced kicking and screaming into having to engage not only with the landscape but with the people,” explains Luhrmann. “The act of doing that transforms her.” trouble inevitable comes into paradise, for Faraway Downs is coved by rival land baribs, In 1942, to save her home, Ashle is forced to drive 1,500 head of cattle across the “Top End” of the continent, accompanied by Jackman’s man-with-no-name “The Drver” - an andyssey that concludes in Darwin in the aftermath of the port’s bombing by the Japanese.
Before you can shout Red river or, if you’re a connoisseur of the cattle-drive sub-genre, The Overlanders (an Australian 1946 film with a similar plot), let’s just say that Luhrmann has never been coy when it comes to pastiche. “One of Baz’s great strenghts is to take iconing images and classical references and combine them together into something new in a celebratory way,” says Catherine Martin, donning twin titfers as both production and costume designer.
She shoudl know, for she is also Luhrmann’s wife; his longest-serving collaborator, right back to the directors’s debut with Strictly Ballroom in 1992. While hubby has revelled in the flamboyant showman stuff, it’s Martin who has quietly scooped the silverware (two Oscars for Moulin Rouge! and a Tony for Luhrmann’s Broadway version of La Bohéme).
This film, effectively a Western, is a step into the unknown for both; a departure from what has become known as the ‘Red Curtain Trilogy’ (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!), films which have a certain understood (and not a little camp) ’staginess;. There will be no cowboy hoedowns here - though plenty of chaps on legs.
australia itself should ahve been the second installment in a new trio of historical epics. Luhrmann and Martin spent two years pretting Alexander The Great, starring Leonardo DiCaprio - right down to choreographing (their word) the battle scnes. It was shelved following the poor box office for Oliver Stone’s version. Luhrmann has stated they may yet revisit it. But no-one could accuse him of being prolific: Australia is only his fourth film in 16 years. “I rue the day I said [I'd revisit Alexander] because I’ll be very lucky to finish this one,” he jokes.
Still, Australia’s backyard isn’t complaining. Wee Kununurra doesn’t know what’s hit it - so oversubscribed is the local motel that much of the film’s 200-strong crew have been sleeping under the stars. In Bowen, Queensland, which stood for Darwin, the whole town turned out. Knowing what The Lord of The Rings did for tourism in New Zealand, local councils had been outbidding rivals for the righst o have the movie shot on their patch.
Gettig down and dirty with the public seems long overdue. The Australian film industry has been responsible for some magnificent independent films. Its state-of-the-art Fox Studios in Sydney has also had a number of Hollywood impors, like Superman Returns. This, contrast, is the biggest film, ever to be made about the host nation. “Its got a ridiculous burden, but let me say this,” urges Luhrmann, “could be it’s the beginning of a coming-of-age.”
With Aboriginal stars David Gulpillil and Crusoe Kurddal alongside vetrans Jack Thompson and Bryan Brown, it’s certainly a case of a modern melting pot - another native son, Stuart Beattie (Colateral), co-wrote the screenplay. Significantly, the film marks the debut of Brandon Walers, an 11 year old aboriginal boy plucked from obscurity, who finds himself as third lead in the role of Nullah, a sort of adopted son to Kidman and Jackman as they steer their steers.
“I guess what I sought to get out of it is a much more direct understanding of my country,” muses Luhrmann. He hopes that his compatriots might learn something too, not least with respect to the little-known Darwin bombing - the “Australian Pearl Harbour” - in which it suffered 60 air raids as an intended prelude to a Japanese invasion. Figures. with so many Aussies swanning it on the Hollywood A-list, there’s country debt to be repaid, suggest Luhrmann. “I think that I speak clearly for Nicole and for Hugh that part of the attraction has been to get back into that country which has given us so much opportunity.”
Back on set, the cameras have been repositioned to recored a cowboy scene; Blazing Saddles without the beans. Luhrmann has made use of the “magic hour” - that twilight period when the setting sun furnishes everything with a sumtuous glow. “There’ll be a magestic formation and you forgive it all,” sighs Luhrmann. “It’s like flicking the switch between brutal and beauty.”
The impending sundown will be “of the gods” Kidman assures, and she wasn not wrong. Faraway Downs and the escarpment are all caressed to a beautiful peachy hugh. “It’s like the land is under a spell. For the first week I was here I thought, ‘I’m not gonna make it,’ and then I just felt it turn.”
It’s got to go a little way yet to catch up with Jackman. “I would encourage you at some point to take your shoes off,” he advises Empiore. It doesnt anger the spirits as much…
This article has been transcribed from an EMPIRE magazine article; purchase the four page feature complete with new images in the August 2008 edition.