Baz Luhrmann
Baz Luhrmann
Mark Anthony "Baz" Luhrmannis an Australian film director, screenwriter and producer best known for The Red Curtain Trilogy, comprising his romantic comedy film Strictly Ballroom, the romantic drama Romeo + Juliet, and the pastiche-jukebox musical Moulin Rouge!. His 2008 film Australia is an epic historical romantic drama film starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. His 2013 drama The Great Gatsby, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel of the same name, stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth17 September 1962
CitySydney, Australia
CountryAustralia
I often think to myself, at the end of an interesting life it's maybe not such a bad thing to spend your last days with your friends sitting by the blue, blue ocean reliving the story of your life while sitting in the dangerous sun.
If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money,' they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time they'd be willing to. People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and 'The Great Gatsby' can provide that explanation.
We set it in 1899 to reflect where we are,
Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth.
Don't worry about the future.
What I think is extraordinary, apart from the inherent values of the ideas, is that we were experiencing ourselves a historic moment in the life of the Internet, an example of how massive publishing power is in the hands of anyone with access to a PC.
I mean, '8½' to me is such a great dissertation on the whole, you know, act of filmmaking and creativity.
I've tried to make 'Strictly Ballroom' impossible to date. It does feel a bit '80s but I consciously made sure there was no technology in the movie that could date it.
Historically, epics are set in Africa or Asia or the Wild West, but if you make an epic today it's hard to disassociate from the contemporary realities of those places.