Zebras, cars and all that Baz
Luhrmann is primed for the scrutiny of his Jazz Age screen spectacle The Great Gatsby
Baz Luhrmann is talking a mile a minute, the only speed he ever talks at. He has a point he needs to make about rubber zebras in The Great Gatsby.
“If someone says, ‘There were no rubber zebras in the 1920s!’, then I have photos of girls in the 1920s holding them,” Luhrmann says, striking a defiant pose as he metaphorically mans the parapets during a recent Toronto visit.
The outspoken Aussie director, a youthful 52 whose immaculate grey hair seems more fashion statement than fate, is bracing himself for the nitpickers: those who will find fault with his 3D screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 tragic romance, oft cited as the greatest American novel.
Such as with those zebras. Roaring Twenties flappers are seen frolicking with them in the mansion pool of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jay Gatsby.
Gatsby’s decadent parties symbolize the era but are designed to lure back his lost love Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan).
“Everything in this film, despite what people might say, has a historical reference. We’re research junkies.”
Luhrmann’s film, the fifth screen version of Fitzgerald’s slim novel, opens the Cannes Film Festival on May 15, following its North American release on May 10. He’s leaving nothing to chance, and that includes photos of himself. He arrives 20 minutes late for this interview at the Shangri-La Hotel, ground zero for a tightly scheduled day of media encounters, because he’s spent so much time elsewhere in the hotel instructing Star photographer Tara Walton exactly how he wants to be shot.
But at least he seems to be enjoying himself.
He grins as he recalls how he oneupped an automotive journalist for a “highly regarded” New York publication, who chided him for using a vintage Duesenberg auto (worth $3 million!) in a scene involving a plotturning accident. The writer said the car should really have been Gatsby’s distinctive yellow RollsRoyce, claiming that’s how Fitzgerald wrote it.
“He said, ‘Have you read the book, Baz?’ This made me laugh that he was invoking my name. But it wasn’t the yellow Rolls-Royce (in the accident)! Gatsby has two cars!”
One might argue, and I do when I can get a word in edgewise, that Luhrmann is the least likely suspect to be fretting about the veracity of water toys and flashy cars in his movies.
This is, after all, the same Baz Luhrmann who built his name on deconstructing and renovating such classic works as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, an ancient love story that became 1996’s Romeo + Juliet, a streetwise modern update starring a teenaged DiCaprio (they’ve been friends ever since) and Claire Danes.
This is also the same Baz Luhrmann who reinvigorated the movie musical with Moulin Rouge!, which partied like it was 1899 Paris, as the 2001gala festival opener at Cannes. That film was loaded with such anachronistic tunes as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “The Hills are Alive” from The Sound of Music.
And speaking of anachronistic music, how about that hip-hop soundtrack for The Great Gatsby, produced by Jay-Z, which is a far cry from the jazz music of the Roaring Twenties. On this point, Luhrmann can claim both inspiration and historical fidelity: Jazz was the pop music of the 1920s, just as hiphop is current to 2013, and there’s a direct link from one to the other.
Still, one can’t help but notice with The Great Gatsby just how much effort Luhrmann and his production designer Catherine Martin (who is also his wife) have expended to remain faithful to Fitzgerald’s prose.
About the only significant departure is the narration of Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway, neighbour and friend to Gatsby, framed as a talking session with a psychiatrist rather than first-person written account.
“Well, I set out to reveal the novel,” Luhrmann explains.
“Now that can be hugely pretentious, because everyone has their ‘Great Gatsby.’ But I just wanted to reveal the novel.”
True to Luhrmann’s penchant for style — he dresses like he’s attending a business meeting on a yacht — he didn’t just sit down in his living room and reread The Great Gatsby, which is actually a pretty fast read. He listened to an audiobook version of it on an iPod aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway on a trip to Russia, while sipping from two bottles of Australian red wine as he gazed in a melancholy mood at the receding Russian landscape. “I was staggered,” he recalls of the journey and tape. “It shocked me how many things I never remembered, how many layers there were.” His filmmaking reunion with DiCaprio was also a shock, although a pleasant one. At 38, he’s actually a year younger than Robert Redford was playing the title role in Jack Clayton’s 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, until now the best-known screen version. “It was slightly nerve-making, for both of us,” Luhrmann says of working with DiCaprio again. “When I first knew him, when I worked with him, he was 19. He was a boy, a gifted boy. He’s a man now, and a friend.” Not only has DiCaprio matured to the point where he can now do justice to a complex character like Gatsby, he also has a work ethic that could withstand the many challenges the film faced — including five episodes of downpours at the Australian shoot that contributed to the delay of the film from Christmas 2012 to summer 2013. “Leo has lived on film sets since he was like 7 years old. He knows no other world and you can’t waste his time. He’s a very focused, hard worker. It’s a funny thing. Getting him to commit is very hard. Once he’s committed, you can’t get him off the set.” It’s almost as hard as getting Luhrmann to slow down and take a breath. He claims to be a bundle of nerves and full of self doubt, yet he proceeds full speed ahead at all times. He actually speaks of The Great Gatsby, with all of its lavish party sets, as the “something simple” he wanted to do after the grandeur of Australia, his 2008 drama. Luhrmann exudes such confidence, I’m moved to ask him if there’s any story he’d be afraid to touch. He actually slows down for a moment to consider his answer. “No,” he says slowly. “Not if I feel like I can express something by telling that story. No. There are things that I want to do and films that I have to do. And all of my films are ones I have to make, not that I particularly want to make. I know that sounds bonkers but if I say, ‘I really think the musical can work, I guess I have to do that.’ “Then five years of my life go by, but still, I’d love to do a rom-com, or a shootout. . . .” He’s off on a tear again.