Catherine Martin talks film, fashion and life on the Gold Coast
As she embarks on a new chapter, the Oscar-winning designer invites us into her vibrant ‘shack’ to talk empty-nesting, creative adventures and the power of saying ‘no’.
“Welcome to the fibro shack!” beams Catherine Martin. Granted, it’s a lovely shack, sun-drenched and airy, befitting the most-awarded Australian in Oscar history (Martin: four Academy Awards to her name, two apiece for Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby), her husband (filmmaker Baz Luhrmann, her partner in both art and life for the past three decades), and one of their children now that Lilly, the couple’s 20-year-old daughter, has moved out.
“We used to live down the road on the beachfront in a much fancier place, but we fell in love with this area and this came up for rent and we just thought, ‘We’re going to downsize’,” says Martin.
She’s still in her pyjamas – a floral set in slate blue and flamingo pink – while her hair and make-up is applied for this photoshoot. At one point, she leaps up to grab her beloved CellReturn LED mask, a high-tech skincare device that, when worn, makes her look like a member of Daft Punk.
“We’ve been sharing bathrooms, which, let me just say, is an eye-opener,” she adds. “But we’ve been really happy as a family in our little shack.” (Who is the worst bathroom offender? “I am really fast,” Martin says. “It’s our daughter Lilly. She is a creeper. She gets a tiny bit of real estate …”).
It isn’t the biggest house on the street, a road studded with soulless mega-mansions bearing down on Miami beach. But the shack has the most character. Within its clapboard walls is a trove of Australian film history: a gold-embroidered TCB (Taking Care of Business) tassel, saved from the set of the couple’s most recent project, Elvis, is framed and hangs alongside family photographs of Martin and Luhrmann with their children. The kitchen is full of well-thumbed Ottolenghi cookbooks and blushing peonies in Maison Balzac vases from Martin’s recent collaboration with the homewares brand. And there are racks of clothing everywhere. Several are full to bursting with the outfits – a beaded Prada bomber jacket, technicolour floral suiting from REDValentino, a couple of printed shirts from Oroton – that Martin is taking with her on her next holiday, first to Venice, where she is boarding the Orient-Express with Luhrmann en route to Paris, where the couple still keeps an apartment.
“I’ve wanted to go ever since I saw Kylie Minogue and Michael Hutchence on the Orient-Express. That’s how long I’ve wanted to go. Sadly, I’m not going with Michael Hutchence.” Martin grins. “I’m going with my Michael Hutchence.”
Even more racks contain the clothes that Martin has laid out from her own wardrobe for this photoshoot: the red sequinned Miu Miu gown that Martin wore to the 2017 Met Ball, treasured Prada dresses, a floral-embroidered Prada pencil skirt. And some eight pairs of shoes from Prada and Miu Miu: crushed pink velvet sandals, chunky black brogues, a handful of sky-high satin platforms. “Why do women wear heels?” Martin sighs, as she slips on a black pair, teaming them with a slashed Prada dress in a shade of Granny Smith green.
Unsurprisingly, given she is one of the world’s most respected costume designers, Martin loves clothes. “I love fashion,” she declares. “I love the savoir faire, I love wearing clothes, I love looking at people wearing clothes.” When asked to estimate the size of her wardrobe here in the shack, she grimaces. “Look,” she begins, “this is something I really have to deal with.” She pauses. “A lot. It’s really bad.” Some important items are in specialty storage – though not all of them, and the Queensland humidity has wreaked havoc on her eveningwear, including the Miu Miu gown, which loses a few ruby paillettes over the course of the day. Other historic pieces, such as the jet Collette Dinnigan beaded dress she wore to the 2002 Academy Awards – as well as 11 pairs of Prada shoes – have been donated to Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.
But that still leaves a sizeable (and enviable) designer wardrobe up here on the sunny Gold Coast. “I have throw-out sessions where I’ll get all my friends over and we’ll try to relove, recycle, reuse,” Martin shares. “Certainly, I’ve been buying less new. I’m a bit of a Vestiaire Collective addict. There’s a bargain hunter in me.” Recently her daughter has begun rifling through the racks. “Look, I think clothes need to be worn. I’d prefer them to be worn than [in the wardrobe].” she pauses. “But she has been known to … Like, ‘You took that $650 hoodie and put it through the washing machine? Really?’.” Martin is deadpan. “That wasn’t what I had planned for that.”
Ever since the Luhrmanns descended on the Gold Coast in 2020 to make Elvis, their sixth film, the city has been home, long after stars Austin Butler and Tom Hanks returned to Hollywood. “I don’t wanna go on about it too much because I don’t wanna advertise it,” Martin admits. “I don’t want to let the secret out.”
From a filmmaking perspective, the city is a perfect place to work, with great weather, talented crew and top-class soundstages. And from a personal level, Martin loves the “work-life balance”. Every morning she pops around the corner to Pilates Pad – “just up on the Gold Coast Highway” – for a class and goes for long strolls down Miami beach. “I called Baz this morning, I was walking on the way to Pilates and he was marvelling at the weather, because he’s in New York.” She nods in the direction of her veranda, which looks directly onto the ocean. “It wasn’t quite like that today.” Not that she can enjoy this view from her bedroom. “I’m looking at the wall,” she laughs. “But I’m fine with that. ’Cause it’s quite good to be in your little cocoon. And then you come out, you have a coffee, and you have all of this to look at, which just puts you in a really good mood.”
Martin’s bonhomie is infectious. She happily recounts the best advice she has ever received, which was from her father, about regretting saying no to things more than saying yes. “What I’ve noticed is that saying yes to the right things means that it’s easy to say no to the things that you don’t want to do,” Martin offers. “When you are younger, you feel a lot of guilt about not having boundaries about what you are prepared to do, or not to do.” Recently, that’s all disappeared, and in its place is confidence and conviction in her own time and capabilities. Some things Martin has said yes to recently: the collaboration with Maison Balzac on a range of fanciful glassware, decadent textiles and wallpapers for New Zealand brand Mokum, and joining the inaugural Miu Miu Women’s Tales Committee, alongside filmmaker Ava DuVernay, actor/director Maggie Gyllenhaal and Miu Miu’s Miuccia Prada and Verde Visconti.
Her appointment was announced at the Venice Film Festival, at the premiere of Stane, the latest instalment in the Miu Miu Women’s Tales short film anthology series. It’s a story of family obligation and private fury, spearheaded by Croatian director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović. “The beauty of working with Miu Miu is that you really have a carte blanche, in the full meaning of the word,” Kusijanovic enthuses. We are speaking in the back of a water taxi during the film festival, fresh from the rapturous reaction at Stane’s premiere, which was attended by Martin alongside Miu Miu ambassadors including Sydney Sweeney and Emma Corrin.
Though the film features Miu Miu costuming – star Danica Curcic wears a lemon yellow Miu Miu dress in the climactic scene, a bold colour that accentuates the chaos around her – it is not, as Martin puts it, a “fashion film”. “I looked at all 26 movies,” she shares, “and what is interesting is that it has been a consistent effort over the 15 years to create a space in which female directors get to practise their craft. And the reality is it’s not really about the clothes.” As Kusijanović sums up: “Even though it’s a film supported by a fashion brand, somehow the fashion never overtakes the story. The message comes first. And the fashion is there as a costume to talk emotionally about the character and is part of the development of the story.”
While developing the short films that comprise the Miu Miu Women’s Tales collection, directors including Kusijanović, Chloë Sevigny, Miranda July, Mati Diop and Janicza Bravo are given a single directive: to examine what it means to be a woman today. “It shows Miuccia’s commitment to filmmaking and her love of filmmaking,” notes Martin. “And the commitment hasn’t wavered. The only thing I long for is that more people know about it. Because to me, it’s those commitments over decades that actually bear fruit.” This is one objective of the Miu Miu Women’s Tales Committee, along with strategising about how to expand the program’s mission.
Martin’s first major interaction with Mrs Prada was during a presentation for her 2013 film The Great Gatsby, where Martin was pitching for Prada’s involvement. “I had dry mouth syndrome,” she recalls. “I was completely and utterly overwhelmed.” The Prada brand and the Luhrmann-Martin world had collided before: Prada made leather suitcases for Nicole Kidman’s character in 2008’s Australia and provided a boxy, navy blue suit for Leonardo DiCaprio to wear in the couple’s sophomore production, 1996’s Romeo + Juliet. And it would continue to mesh, with Prada and Miu Miu crafting costumes for Olivia DeJonge’s Priscilla Presley in 2022’s Elvis. But The Great Gatsby’s crystal-embellished party finery was their first true partnership.
“When you have to present and justify yourself to someone that you respect, you better be sure that what you are proposing actually has validity,” Martin says. “And it did. And that conversation started then, and we’ve continued to have a creative conversation … a dialogue that we are able to have that’s both creative and fashion-based, and intellectual.”
When asked about the synergy between her work and that of Mrs Prada’s, Martin demurs. “I would never put myself in the same category, or compare in any way.” But we can: there is an intellectual rigour to both designers’ work, whether it is Mrs Prada building a wardrobe for women forging their own path, or Martin using costume to craft whole cinematic worlds that bring her characters’ interiority to life.
Martin, whose own wardrobe brims with Prada and Miu Miu, praises Mrs Prada for her ability to identify and distill the concerns of the modern woman into clothing. “Those clothes are designed for a woman actually to be worn by women,” Martin says. She is drawn, whether consciously or not, to female designers for this reason: she namechecks Alémais, Zimmermann, Christine Centenera’s Wardrobe. NYC (“incredible quality and really beautiful tailoring”), and Camilla and Marc. “On an everyday basis, what are you gonna wear that you can actively participate in the world in?” Martin sums up. “Because I’m always scampering about. So it has to be practical.”
Martin turned 59 at the end of January. “I feel at the beginning of a new part of my life,” she offers. “I adore my children, but they’re getting to an age where they’re actually adults and they have their own lives. And that’s huge for someone who’s just only really had work and parenting and family life – that’s been my entire life. So now I have a big void.” She pauses. “That’s been quite difficult to come to terms with, actually, this year. On the one hand, it’s just terrifying and incredibly sad. And on the other hand, it’s like, ‘Oh I’ve got all this time to fill with more creative projects and fill with self-development. Learn new computer programs. Do the French conversation classes’. I’ve always said I’m gonna get my French into gear.”
But Martin’s ultimate ambition is to keep creating. “I really want to keep as fit and healthy as I can,” she says, so that she can continue doing her work, whether on brand collaborations, or her forthcoming documentary on fashion as social history. “And I’m looking forward to the next big Baz Luhrmann project,” she smiles. “I have no idea what it is, but I think, ‘Wow, what an adventure!’.”
When Martin accepted the Longford Lyell Award at the AACTAs in 2022, she declared in her speech that she was only just getting started. And it’s true.
“I think my ambitions are just to keep working, to keep engaging with my industry and storytelling, and being open to new experiences,” she reflects. “There are so many opportunities right now that you’ve gotta be careful not to take too many. As you get older, the amount of time you have is shrinking. You just need to be sure that you make – without being precious – the right decisions. And you really have the time to enjoy the process of making whatever you’re making. Because you can’t live by success or by failure. You’ve actually gotta live by the journey to the destination.”
This story appears in the February issue of WISH Magazine, on sale now.
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