The great persuader: Baz Luhrmann on his biggest gamble yet

This story is part of the April 30 edition of Good Weekend.See all 18 stories.

It takes a moment to work out what’s different about Baz Luhrmann. At 59 he still looks thin, with swept-back white hair, black T-shirt and glasses on a chunky black chain around his neck as he hunches over a laptop. Working to finish his upcoming movie, Elvis, he’s as dapper as ever. And laser focused, as always while working.

But Luhrmann, who inhales fashion when he gets up in the morning, speaks fluent Prada and is friends with Vogue supremo Anna Wintour, is wearing shorts. Khaki, in fact, with black slides. The man who once said he could never direct in shorts because “you’re actually leading an army”, has succumbed. “Yes, I am into shorts,” he says, amused, during a break. “Reminds me of my dad who was, of course, in the navy. These are probably like naval bloomers.”

Has the pandemic been that tough? Or has working so hard to tell the life story of Elvis Presley, the late, great King of rock ‘n’ roll, caused a short circuit that has made Luhrmann’s fevered creative brain go from “style” to “caj”.

The answer lies where you find him. You get out of an Uber on the Gold Coast Highway, a short ride south of Surfers Paradise in Queensland. Ignoring the baking heat and traffic noise, you walk past Oriental Massage, Waves Laundromat and Indian Delights – but not as far as White Lady Funerals and KFC – until you reach a bus stop. Behind it is an unassuming former Australian Federal Police office that must have been ideal for undercover detectives wanting to avoid being noticed.

This is Miami. The other one. Out the back, dressed-down Queensland Baz is deep into a dialogue replacement session – standard in movies to improve the sound – over four time zones. Austin Butler, the American actor who plays Presley, is on the Warner Bros lot in Los Angeles; accent and dialogue coach Tim Monich is in New York; and sound designer Wayne Pashley is in Sydney.

Austin Butler as Elvis; the actor calls Luhrmann a “visionary genius” and has been a fan since he was 12. Credit: Hugh Stewart/Warner Bros

“Let’s do two for warm-up, then go straight to ‘Mama’,” Luhrmann says into his laptop. Butler, a 30-year-old best known for playing cult member Tex in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, checks where to start, then delivers a line. “Get offa me! Mama, you get in the car!” He says it four times, in a voice so deeply from the American south that it could be the real Elvis.

Luhrmann, who is noting down takes on a small whiteboard marked A, B, C, D and E, asks for more urgency. “She’s a long distance,” he encourages. “It’s so noisy. Imagine it. Throwing it right across a crowd. Life and death! Life and death!”

“GET OFFA ME! MAMA, YOU GET IN THE CAR!” Butler says as though it really is life and death that Mama gets in the car. Then he does it three more times just as urgently.

“Great,” Luhrmann says. “A, B, C and D were all perfect. That’s a good way to finish.” From other time zones come thank-yous. “Talk soon,” Luhrmann says to his star. “Stuff to catch up on, but all good. Over and out, we’re done.”

Every one of Baz Luhrmann’s five movies – made in trademark Bazentine flamboyant, high-energy, theatrical style – has been a creative risk, with the financial and reputational stakes getting progressively higher. His breakout 1992 film, Strictly Ballroom, a camp comedy about ballroom dancing, was followed by Romeo + Juliet (1996), a Shakespeare play set in a Miami gang war. Then came Moulin Rouge! (2001), a musical set in Paris that is a pastiche of hit songs about love; Australia (2008), an ambitious Top End epic that combined romance, war and Indigenous storylines; and The Great Gatsby (2013), a 3D version of a classic American novel that used hip-hop to show the impact of jazz in the 1920s. Then there was the Netflix hip-hop series The Get Down (2016).

Now the risk is upsetting the millions of fans who still worship Presley around the world. Butler, a relative unknown in his first lead role in a movie, has to be convincing and the music has to show why the King was one of the 20th century’s greatest and most-beloved entertainers. But the stakes are higher than that. Luhrmann is an outsider telling a famed American story in a movie made entirely on the Gold Coast, just as he did with Gatsby in Sydney. If Elvis fails, it will not only be personally crushing, it will make it that much harder to get Hollywood backing for whatever he does next.

Warner Bros, which has put up a budget rumoured to be more than $200 million, offset by federal and state film incentives (including a 40 per cent tax break for eligible Australian productions), has raised the stakes by releasing Elvis only in American cinemas, rather than simultaneously on streaming service HBO Max as it did with Dune and other movies during the pandemic. It needs Elvis to appeal to a young audience who only knows the King as a heavyset Vegas act in a white jumpsuit. And, after two devastating years during the pandemic, cinemas really need hits this year. Put it this way: if it doesn’t work, it will be Heartbreak Hotel all round.

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You could fill a book with celebrity news about Luhrmann, as he set about charming, entertaining and sometimes upsetting audiences over three decades. He and Catherine Martin, his four-time-Oscar-winning wife who is known as CM, have a circle of famous friends that used to include David Bowie casually swinging by as he walked his dog in New York. Their social whirl includes Cannes premieres and Met Galas. Major stars – Nicole, Leo, Hugh and others – love working with them.

Luhrmann has long knocked back overtures to direct Harry Potter, James Bond or Marvel movies in favour of continuing to create his own work, diversifying into operas, musicals, commercials for fashion houses and perfumes that are styled as exotic short films, music producing, a theme park, Paul Keating’s 1993 election campaign and even hotel design.

He and Martin have made more news lately for putting their spectacular, five-storey New York home on the market for $US20 million ($27 million), planning to downsize to an apartment there while keeping a place on the Gold Coast. He appears on a new set of Australia Post stamps devoted to filmmaking legends. And the hit musical based on Moulin Rouge!, which is running in New York, London and Melbourne, is transferring late next month to Sydney.

More news emerges as I join him over three days of intense post-production: Elvis will have a world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival next month before opening in cinemas around the world, including Australia, on June 23-24; and Luhrmann has re-edited Australia, a film that succeeded in many parts of the world but was critically savaged, into a six-part series called Faraway Downs that will stream on Disney + later this year.

Luhrmann directs Tom Hanks, who plays Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker.Credit: Hugh Stewart/Warner Bros

Many films are finished in post-production suites that are not much more than functional. But Luhrmann being Luhrmann, his is a tan wildlife safari tent with glass walls that has been plonked on the grass next to the old Australian Federal Police office. The interior has been transformed into a fair representation of what’s happening inside his fevered, Elvis-obsessed, under-pressure brain. Presley paraphernalia is everywhere: records, books, coasters and props that include a serviette indicating Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker (played by Tom Hanks), has unlimited credit at the International Hotel in Vegas.

Two large whiteboards set out an exhausting list of jobs that have to be done. One focuses on this week, accounting for every waking hour; the other on the weeks leading up to the cinema release, including international premieres, a visit to Californian music festival Coachella with American rapper Doja Cat, the Met Gala in New York, significant birthdays and the study term dates of his and Martin’s children, Lilly, 18, and “Egg”, 16.

When Luhrmann talks about his life, ageing or the elaborate systems he uses to keep a disciplined work routine, his sentences collapse, restart, then loop in unexpected directions. He’ll start by referring to being “an obsessive list-writer”, move to having his assistants learn to catch his ideas, then refer to his habit of scribbling in half-finished notebooks. “I recognise my chaotic mind,” he says. “My mind is not linear. It is chaotic.” Then he’ll tell his young assistant Fletch, a former Cirque du Soleil performer who has joined a different circus, something he has to do later in the day. And five other things that need to be chased up.

When Luhrmann talks about his life or ageing, his sentences collapse, restart, then loop in unexpected directions.

Luhrmann’s break is designated on the whiteboard as “lunch with Gary M” for 60 minutes. He has a chicken salad – catering is delivered for the 20-plus people working on the movie in the building – eaten at a table outside until the hot sun forces a retreat to the tent. Luhrmann, always directing, rearranges the seating and gets Fletch to turn off the air-conditioning so it won’t interfere with the dictaphone recording.

It’s hard to believe there is still so much to finish on a movie that was ready to roll before the pandemic. Hanks and wife Rita Wilson were among the first celebrities in the world to test positive for COVID-19 – and among the first people in Australia – three days before the start of shooting in March 2020. Despite fears the movie was dead when the couple recovered and returned to the US, Hanks came back to the Gold Coast later that year as filming resumed, even though it meant two weeks in hotel quarantine.

Austin Butler sings the early Elvis hits because of the relatively poor quality of the original mono recordings, with the real Elvis singing the later songs.Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Many of the cast are Australian, with Olivia DeJonge playing Priscilla Presley, Richard Roxburgh and Helen Thomson as Elvis’ parents, and David Wenham as country singer Hank Snow. But other overseas actors also did two weeks’ quarantine, including Kelvin Harrison jnr (who plays B. B. King), English singer Yola (gospel legend Sister Rosetta Tharpe) and American musician Gary Clark jnr (blues singer Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup).

Luhrmann says Elvis is not a traditional musical biopic. It tells the story of Presley’s life, from discovering gospel music as a boy to becoming the King, through the eyes of his wily manager, who Luhrmann likes to say was “never a colonel, never a Tom and never a Parker”. More Amadeus, which was about the relationship between a jealous Antonio Salieri and the genius Mozart, than Bohemian Rhapsody or Rocketman. “I always thought of Elvis really as a way of exploring my greater interest: America in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s,” he says.

Butler sings the early hits because of the relatively poor quality of the original mono recordings, with the real Elvis singing the later songs. But, to show his seismic impact on a music scene dominated by country singers, there are bursts of new versions by Doja Cat, Tame Impala, Jazmine Sullivan, Diplo with Swae Lee, Chris Isaak and Stevie Nicks among others. “You’ll hear Elvis sing the classics but right next door Doja Cat will be doing an interpretation of Hound Dog while Big Mama Thornton [played by Shonka Dukureh] sings it,” says the director.

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Luhrmann’s drive and vivid imagination date back to his colourful childhood. As Mark Luhrmann, he grew up in Herons Creek, a small town on the north coast of NSW, where his father ran a Mobil service station and, briefly, a cinema. With his two brothers – before a sister arrived – Luhrmann pumped petrol, served food and entertained the customers with magic tricks. His late father, Leonard, a navy diver in the Vietnam War, kept the boys busy with work and physical challenges. He would dump them in the bush at night to find their way home or weight them down in a river with an oxygen-breathing device and get them to crawl to the shore.

Luhrmann’s just-as-strong-minded mother, Barbara, later a ballroom dancing instructor, viewed life through a more romantic lens. When his parents divorced, Luhrmann initially stayed with his father, then went to live with his mother in Sydney. At school, he was given the nickname “Baz” because his hair resembled television fox Basil Brush, later changing his name officially to Bazmark.

“Baz was very different and very eccentric and very, very brave in that he always was who he was.”

Arriving for year 11 at Narrabeen High on the northern beaches, he formed a lasting friendship with Craig Pearce, who has co-written almost all his movies, including Elvis. “He was very different and very eccentric and very, very brave in that he always was who he was,” Pearce says from London, where he’s finishing work on a six-part series he has created, Pistol, about the Sex Pistols. “We became friends because we were in the music group together in high school. In Guys and Dolls, he was Sky Masterson and I was Nathan Detroit. We both discovered that we had this really passionate interest in stories in theatre and movies.”

Both wanted to be actors and, after Luhrmann appeared in the 1981 film Winter of Our Dreams and in television’s A Country Practice, they trained at NIDA: Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art. As a drama school exercise, Luhrmann and friends worked up a 20-minute stage musical about ballroom dancing that turned into a longer stage show, then the hit film Strictly Ballroom.

My first encounter with Luhrmann was when a stylish young trio – the future director in a New York baseball cap alongside Martin and designer Bill Marron – would regularly troop into producer Tristram Miall’s office in Sydney’s Edgecliff to develop the film. I was working, writing an entertainment business newsletter, in the office below.

I remember a day when it seemed as if a loud argument had broken out upstairs. It was so one-sided and went on for so long, I thought it must have been some kind of primal therapy. Miall now says it was a pivotal moment: unhappy with a draft of a script by another writer, he and fellow producer Ted Albert suggested that Luhrmann just tell them the story. He did, brilliantly acting out every role. “He’s a consummate showman,” Miall says. “He has supreme self-confidence and leadership ability.”

Luhrmann and Pearce wrote a script based on that performance, but the planned film almost fell over when every major Australian distributor turned the producers down. Then Miall took Luhrmann to meet Andrew Pike, best known for distributing documentaries and Japanese films, in Canberra. Luhrmann “danced the movie” in a cafe and Pike was in.

The ferociously driven Luhrmann is a great persuader. He persuades Hollywood studios to give him huge budgets for films he wants to shoot in Australia, even iconic American stories like Gatsby and Elvis. When it suits the movie, he persuades the world’s biggest stars, music identities and luxury brands to get involved. And, so far at least, Luhrmann has persuaded audiences to watch his films – going on the road to talk them up – even if critics have often dismissed them as overwrought and overhyped.

While George Miller, Peter Weir and Jane Campion are revered, reviewers often go for Luhrmann personally. “Baz Luhrmann hasn’t just tried to reinvent the musical in Moulin Rouge!, he’s tried to rewire the human brain,” wrote The Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul Byrnes in a damning review. The New Yorker’s David Denby wrote of Australia, “Luhrmann is drawn to kitsch as inevitably as a bear to honey.” And in reviewing Gatsby, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described him as “a man who can’t see a nuance without calling security for it to be thrown off his set”.

An Australian film producer, speaking privately, questions whether Luhrmann’s films need quite so much excess but admires his energy. “Baz never goes into any meeting without knowing exactly what outcome he wants,” he says. One director, who prefers not to be named, says Luhrmann’s films rely on “a smoke and mirrors effect – cut fast, put in zooms and tracks – but what the hell is it about?” He thinks audiences come for the stars and buy the illusion.

But Luhrmann’s record speaks for itself. While Crocodile Dundee is still the most successful Australian release at the domestic box office, Luhrmann has four movies in the top 11, with Australia at No. 2. As well as combined ticket sales of more than $US900 million internationally, his movies have won four Oscars, with eight other nominations, including best picture for Moulin Rouge! Luhrmann has also been nominated for three Grammys (for the soundtracks to Gatsby and both the Moulin Rouge! movie and stage musical), and two Tonys (for La Bohème and the Moulin Rouge! stage musical on Broadway).

Luhrmann with wife Catherine Martin and co-writer Craig Pearce during the 2002 Vanity Fair Oscars Party. That year, Moulin Rouge! won Oscars for best art direction and best costume design.Credit: Getty Images

Butler, who started preparing to play Elvis three years ago, calls Luhrmann a “visionary genius” and says he’s been a fan since the age of 12. “Romeo + Juliet was a huge one for me,” he says from Los Angeles. “Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet and then Moulin Rouge! They just struck me because they were films unlike any others that I’d ever seen. So he’s always been a hero of mine.”

Butler has seen the master persuader side of Luhrmann. “Baz magnetises all these incredible people around him, very creative and kind people,” he says. “There’s just this incredible group that are all a part of this one tribe, Baz’s tribe, in a way. “There’s not these separate factions, which you can sometimes feel on a set. This is just truly like a family.”

Elvis producer Schuyler Weiss has watched Luhrmann act out his movies in many meetings: doing all the voices and throwing in jokey asides as David Bowie or Mick Jagger. In early 2018, he and Luhrmann hired New York’s famous Electric Lady Studios and asked half a dozen Warner Bros Pictures Group executives, including president Toby Emmerich, to fly in from Los Angeles. Over a six-hour theatrical experience, Luhrmann outlined his vision for Elvis.

“Baz magnetises all these incredible people around him, very creative and kind people. There’s not these separate factions.”

He played music and showed slides, writer Sam Bromell read from a document that sketched the story and Martin presented her design ideas. By the time they retired to Luhrmann and Martin’s home for dinner, the studio was in.

“Those executives, I believe, came away feeling like they were already making the movie because the movie was being made around them,” Weiss says. “I’ve never seen someone sit through that experience and not come out of it thinking not just ‘I want to back that movie’; they come out spiritually arm-in-arm with Baz, saying, ‘We’re doing this together. This is our movie now.’ ”

Luhrmann says he and Pearce still write by acting out the script to get the storytelling rhythm right, something he takes right through the production. “That’s why I’m constantly irritating because I’m constantly telling the story,” he says, dabbing at his salad. “I’ll do voices. It’s like rehearsing it vocally.”

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Two days later, at designated lunch #2 by the safari tent after Luhrmann and Martin have finessed the digital effects for a Vegas scene in an Elvis-themed theatrette, he seems tenser. (He’s reverted to long trousers: tan, with a Chateau Marmont T-shirt and blue cap.)

It’s a state I’ve seen him in before (both the tension and the trousers.) On the set of Moulin Rouge! at Sydney’s Fox Studios, Luhrmann was in his element directing a scene inside a cavernous gold-and-red recreation of the famous Paris nightclub, calling action on a scene that involved 180 top-hat and tails-wearing patrons, can-can dancers, musicians and extras. “Now, gentlemen,” he commanded. “Wild, unbridled period lust! Lust! LUST!”

But when filming dragged on to the point that George Lucas needed the studio space for a Star Wars episode, an under-pressure Luhrmann had to finish the movie elsewhere, firstly in Spain, then in Los Angeles. “Every day, when I feel these fears coming on, they rock me like they rock anybody else,” he said. “But because I’m the captain, leading people to a certain place, I can’t surrender to it.”

His enthusiasm for what they were creating felt infectious as he cranked up the car CD player – with Kidman and Ewan McGregor singing – on a late-night drive through the city. “Is that Nicole?” he said, mimicking his Hollywood hairdresser listening to the soundtrack. “Oh my god, she’s great.”

“I have my fears but I have to check them at 5am when I get up,” Luhrmann says. “The set doesn’t need another hysterical, scared person.” Credit: Paul Harris

At Fox Studios again on Gatsby, Luhrmann directed a huge party scene with Leonardo DiCaprio as the mysterious millionaire, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker and 250 stunningly dressed, made-up and coiffed extras.

“Off we go!” Luhrmann shouted. Orchestral music swelled, people danced, fireworks went off, the crowd screamed ... But as the release loomed – having been pushed back five months while he finished the music – Luhrmann was mixing charm at two New York publicity events at Tiffany’s with private doubts back at his house about whether the movie was going to work. He admitted he exhausted people and could not slow his mind down, which meant sleepless nights “dancing with devils and demons”.

There have been many setbacks over the years. The Fox Studios theme park he created in Sydney with fellow director Barrie Kosky closed after just two years. His attempt to shoot an Alexander the Great epic, starring DiCaprio and Kidman, fell over. His shoots have been famously difficult, sometimes because of diabolical weather. Brutal reviews of Australia were followed by a disappointing US box office. Sony backed out of Gatsby because it was too expensive when it was ready to shoot, before Warner Bros took over. And Netflix cancelled the costly The Get Down after one season of disappointing viewer numbers.

After that series, Luhrmann planned to make a film set in both China and the West but it became impossible. “Things changed in China,” he says, without revealing either what it was about or what changed, although the country’s dimming interest in foreign movies is a likely contributor. Switching to Elvis, he deeply researched Presley’s life – the estate gave him a room in the barn at Graceland, the King’s former home which is now a museum – and he tracked down a childhood friend.

After moving to the Gold Coast in August 2019, a flood destroyed weeks of work on costumes at Village Roadshow Studios early the following year, then the pandemic shut down the shoot. Luhrmann and Martin’s family – three generations under the one roof for a time – went through private health dramas that tested them all. He has previously admitted spiralling into black despair half a dozen times after bitter disappointments.

“He does get low,” Pearce says. “Look at his films: he’s not a moderate kind of person. He’s extreme. A lot of the joy of his films are this bravura sense of life. What does he do to get himself out of it? He focuses on the work. The work invigorates and inspires him. And having children has given him a different perspective on life.”

“Look at his films: he’s not a moderate kind of person. He’s extreme. A lot of the joy of his films are this bravura sense of life.”

Filming went smoothly once it resumed at the studios and on sets for Graceland and Beale Street in Memphis that were built elsewhere on the Gold Coast. But Luhrmann says it was tough seeing how the pandemic affected his children, just as it did for teenagers everywhere. As always, he has been wracked with doubt during nights of insomnia. “I have my fears but I have to check them at 5am when I get up,” he says. “The set doesn’t need another hysterical, scared person.”

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During the second lunch – another healthy salad – crew members are setting up a board of Hank Snow posters for a shot to be inserted into the movie. “Even after I’ve finished the movie, which I haven’t, I keep shooting,” Luhrmann says to laughter. “What is this sick obsession?” Martin jokes that they’ll know when the movie is finished when “somebody comes in and switches off the lights”, adding: “Sometimes I think we’ll still be working on the movie six weeks after it’s in the cinemas.”

Luhrmann with Martin at the 2019 Met Gala.Credit: Getty Images

There is some truth to the joke given Luhrmann changed a scene in Australia for the UK release after it had opened here and has now reworked it into Faraway Downs. “Every movie Baz makes, it’s an all-or-nothing experience for him,” Martin says. “He’ll just go until the very last ounce of energy that he has to give.”

Luhrmann twice refers to turning 60 this year. That’s not old, given Clint Eastwood is still directing at 91 and Ridley Scott at 84, but it seems to feel significant to him. “On the one hand, absolutely not one bit,” he says. “On the other hand, it just sounds funny. I’m actually better at things physically but I’ve had periods of really intense self-abuse: booze. I put weight on. At the end of movies, I usually get really, really fat because of all these tours. I’m on jetlag, I’m on every drug and booze.

“But I’m also really good at switching it off and going, ‘Right, now I’m going to be a health nut.’ I’m much healthier on this movie. For the first time in my life, I actually go to Pilates and I actually work out a bit. And I’ve been enjoying it – but that doesn’t mean I don’t party. CM and I have a philosophy which is, ‘Grow old disgracefully.’ ”

Has the pandemic – and getting older – changed his approach to telling stories? “I’m old enough now to recognise that I cannot escape my own particular way of telling stories,” Luhrmann says. “I’m just stuck with it, whether I like it or not. And whether the audience likes it or not. The only thing that can be said in its defence is that it’s truthful. I think David Hockney said, ‘That’s how I see it.’ I guess this is how I tell it.”

What does he fear? “These days, just running out of life,” he says before changing his mind. “No, no, I don’t actually fear it ... but my body isn’t going to be strong forever. My next drama is probably going to be mortality. But, in my heart, I’ll go, ‘Well, that was a pretty good movie I lived.’ ”

The schedule will soon take Luhrmann to a different continent every week. “That’s just how you open a movie,” he says. “I have to give my complete focus to finish the movie. But I absolutely also have to be involved in carrying a torch. And the torch that’s got to burn brightly is one that says, ‘This movie is worth going out and sitting in a theatre with strangers to watch.’ ”

That will become the great persuader’s next focus: letting the world know that Elvis is in the building.

Moulin Rouge! The Musical! opens in Sydney on May 28. Elvis opens in cinemas on June 23.

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