Baz sees the big picture in Australian landscape

DIRECTOR Baz Luhrmann's next film is to be called, simply, Australia.

Setting up: Baz Luhrmann in Western Australia's Kimberley region, one of the locations he will use when shooting starts in March. Picture: Bazmark

DIRECTOR Baz Luhrmann's next film is to be called, simply, Australia.

"I couldn't take the title away if I tried because it named itself," said Luhrmann.

The film is a grand romance starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman but, in the tradition of Casablanca and the television series Dallas, the setting is integral.

The backdrop for Luhrmann's film is the cattle industry in the 1930s and Darwin before and after it was attacked by the Japanese in World War II.

"The film is not didactically about this country - the title represents the main character's journey, her state of mind," said Luhrmann from his base in Sydney's inner-city Darlinghurst.

Cameras will roll for five months from March. As was the case with his previous two films - Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge - the key backer is 20thCentury Fox.

Kidman plays Lady Sarah Ashley, a highly strung English aristocrat, who arrives in Australia to find her cad of a husband dead and her only assets a piece of land the size of Belgium and thousands of cattle.

As she drives the cattle overland to sell in Darwin, her disdain for the rough drover at her side (Jackman), and for the country, disappears. "That land which seemed brutal and foreboding is now achingly beautiful, and, through the way she starts to relate to that land, she comes alive and finds her inner strength," said Luhrmann.

Landscape will amplify the drama and emotion of the story in a way not seen in film for some time because of cost, technical challenges and its perceived lack of appeal to 17-year-old boys.

Luhrmann would not comment on the budget but it is understood to be just under $US100million ($130million), making it the most expensive Australian story committed to the big screen.

At least four weeks of the five-month shoot will happen near Kununurra in northern Western Australia, with the state Government contributing $500,000.

Luhrmann emphasised the tourism benefits of two of Australia's biggest stars acting against its landscapes and said he was negotiating with other governments.

He said the films The Overlanders and Giant had inspired Australia and also, in the "magnificent" way it used the landscape, Jedda. But the biggest influence, he said, was Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace.

Luhrmann will gather his main cast, including an indigenous boy who will play the third key character, for a workshop in Sydney next month. They will have riding lessons, script discussions and work on costumes.

Luhrmann said he was surprised by what the two years of research unearthed.

"Darwin was attacked 64 times in six months ... The government (disguised) the truth: 2000 whites were killed and non-whites were not counted, so the toll was far greater," he said. "But everything in the film will be in service to a great romance ... Facts will be moved around but not in a way that fundamentally disturbs the truth."