INTERVIEW: Baz Luhrmann and Hugh Jackman

Kat Halstead meets Baz Luhrmann and Hugh Jackman, the director and star of outback epic, Australia.

Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s latest film is a truly epic journey, not only for the characters, but for the whole production team. The 165 minute film attempts to capture the essence of a country often under represented on the big screen, and with a cast featuring some of the world’s finest Australian actors – including Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman – and a story that spans many different aspects of the country’s history, it’s a landmark project and one of the most anticipated releases of the year.

“To the rest of the world, Australia is the faraway of the faraway,” says Luhrmann of his home country. “There’s a great line in the beginning of Out Of Africa, when Karen Blixen finds out that her husband is having an affair and she says, ‘I’ve got to get away, I’ll go anywhere. Africa, Australia… well, maybe not Australia’.”

It was classic films like Out Of Africa that inspired the project in the first place. “The movie musical was a great childhood love of mine, but I was also a big fan of the historical epic,” explains Luhrmann. “Epics were the kind of movies that you would hear about for weeks before the films actually arrived, and every single person in town would go to see them. You can imagine the impression made on a small boy in rural Australia by films like Lawrence Of Arabia and Ben-Hur; big, romantic adventures set in distant, exotic locales where the landscape amplified the inner emotional journeys of the characters… When watching these kinds of films, from Gone With The Wind and Ben-Hur to Lawrence Of Arabia and Titanic, the audience was communing in one big motion picture experience. I wanted to create a cinematic work that would be similarly inclusive because I feel passionately about having more inclusiveness in our lives. Bringing people together brings comfort to the heart and soul in this unpredictable world.

“The next decision was what historical events, what landscape?” he continues. “And as much as I began the pursuit of this in a love for the epic, pretty quickly the historical event of the bombing of Darwin was a good action sequence, plus it was not very well known, plus it was the same Japanese attack force that hit Pearl Harbour. But the stolen generation stopped me in my tracks. I knew about that but the more I researched it, I realised that this was a dark chapter in the story of our country, a scar, but that I was in a place where I could take something very serious and difficult – a difficult pill – and put it inside a great big entertainment. And this was the genesis of the idea.”

The ambitious project appealed straight away to its Australian stars. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” enthuses Jackman. “I hadn’t done an Australian movie in eight years, so to come back and make a film of this magnitude, scale and ambition – using my own accent! – was a dream come true. Dream role, dream movie, dream cast, dream director.”

“Nicole was at my house for a Super Bowl party,” he explains. “Baz had just called me about the project, and I asked Nicole if she had read the script. She said ‘no’. I said ‘Oh, Baz said you were doing it.’ She said, ‘I am.’ I said, ‘But you haven’t even read the script!’ She said, ‘You don’t need to read the script, just do it. It’s going to be amazing. You’ll never have a better job in your life.’”

Ironically for a film called Australia, Kidman sheds her Aussie accent in favour of an English one to play Lady Sarah Ashley who travels across the world to look after a cattle farm called Faraway Downs. “When she first arrives in Australia, Sarah is as uptight as Katherine Hepburn’s character in The African Queen,” Luhrmann says. “She is closed off to life and to love. But at Faraway Downs and beyond, she is forced to engage with the landscape and with the people, and she experiences a rebirth of spirit. She is completely transformed by the journey.”

Along the journey Lady Ashley meets The Drover (Hugh Jackman) who joins her in an attempt to save Faraway Downs from a local businessman. “A good drover will get your cattle to market in better condition than when they left,” Jackman explains about his character. “When you consider the size of the herds and the vast landscape they travel through, that is no small feat. He’s more comfortable out there with his horse and the cattle than he is with people. He’s his own man. He doesn’t want to be beholden to anybody, which is why someone like Lady Ashley presents quite a few problems for him.”

“The Drover hates the wealthy, land-owning Establishment, and Sarah is the poster girl for the aristocracy,” Jackman says of the fiery relationship portrayed in the film. “He takes delight in shocking and teasing her, because everything about her annoys him. She’s arrogant, pretentious, frustrating and impossible. But in a crisis she’s truly amazing. The Drover comes to really respect and admire her. He’s built a wall around his heart with his anger, but those walls start to break apart as he comes to know Sarah better and becomes a kind of father figure to Nullah.”

Nullah, played by young Aborigine boy Brandon Walters, is one of the most enchanting aspects of the film. “He is both black and white in a world that cannot tolerate having such individuals integrated into their society,” explains Luhrmann. “Ultimately, Sarah defies the social order and gives him a home. In turn, Nullah is the catalyst that opens Sarah’s heart and brings her and The Drover together.”

At 165 minutes the film is significantly longer than your average blockbuster, but Luhrmann has no plans to edit it down. “The truth is you don’t really finish movies, they just get taken away from you. Guys with balaclavas and gaffer tape come in. None of the films are really ultimately finished in my mind. But they’ve crossed a line, they live.”

Australia is in cinemas now.

CINEMA: Australia

Baz Luhrmann’s ambitious epic is a sprawling labour of love that seems as much a personal journey for the director as it is the characters on screen. Self consciously local from the very beginning of the project, the film – which is part romance, part Western and part war film – embodies both time and place with a great care and authority that could only be borne from sheer passion.

The story follows the journey of British aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), who inherits a huge cattle station, Faraway Downs, following the death of her husband. When its future is put at risk by a greedy businessman she joins cattle handler The Drover (Hugh Jackman) in an unlikely allegiance to protect Faraway Downs and make a stand against the man threatening her future and the future of its occupants. One such occupant is Nullah (a spellbinding performance by newcomer Brandon Walters), a young mixed race boy outcast in Australian society but whose innocence and effervescence captures the hearts of Lady Ashley and The Drover to create a untraditional family unit.

Although set against the backdrop of the Second World War and the Japanese bombings of Darwin, the personal story is what really wins through here, very much at the expense of any real historical or social impact. The bombing itself is fantastically shot but far too brief, which – when you take into account the repetitive shots of sweeping landscapes and the fact that the film is nearly two hours long – seems a bit of a waste.

That said, the landscape does look amazing. The Australian outback is incredibly cinematic by nature, and becomes even more so in the hands of Luhrmann, who gives it real life and character. However, it does slap the viewer in the face with Aussie stereotypes (at times it looks like something from the local tourist board), but these are often accompanied by a knowing wink and a humorous “crikey” or two. There are also more than a few cheesy moments (the ongoing references to The Wizard Of Oz and various incarnations of Somewhere Over The Rainbow are particularly guilty of this, as is Nicole Kidman’s overly mannered performance), which adds yet another dimension to a film that has too many angles.

Both an epic and personal story, the film has a wide appeal, but doesn’t quite satisfy in either respect. Shot lovingly and featuring mostly strong performances, the cinematography and personal relationships really shine through, but at 165 minutes most people will get a bit fidgety after what feels like the third or fourth ending.      Kat Halstead

CINEMA: The Day The Earth Stood Still

When it comes to unnecessary remakes, the middling ones are even more infuriating than the really bad ones. While Psycho and The Wicker Man had the good grace to be completely dreadful, it’s projects like Planet of the Apes and The Manchurian Candidate that disappoint the most. They had the potential to impress by taking the original material and improving upon it, but in both cases the end result was just a so-so ‘reimagining’. We can now add The Day The Earth Stood Still to that list.

Jennifer Connelly plays a scientist who is spirited away by the Government to Central Park where a massive glowing ball UFO thingy has landed. To the surprise of everyone, it turns out that said glowing ball contains an alien called Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) and a great big hard-as-nails robot called Gort. Why are they here and how will mankind react to the appearance of extraterrestrials?

In short, they are here to deliver the message that we’re killing the planet and as you might expect, mankind (well, the Americans) don’t take too kindly to having their authority questioned, and so Klaatu decides that instead of saving the Earth and mankind with it, he may as well do away with us pesky two-legged parasites because we’ll only end up ruining all his hard work. It’s at this point that the whole film is mapped out for you and you begin to resent paying £350 for a cinema ticket.

The first 30 minutes of The Day The Earth Stood Still are exciting, fast-paced and full of strong visuals, but standards soon start to slip and it just turns into a standard, sentimental ‘message’ movie with no proper resolution.

A large part of the problem is there’s just not enough of anything. We need to see more of Gort laying waste to tanks, buildings and soldiers, we need to see more of Klaatu doing cool alien stuff, and we really need to have the idea that we’re destroying the world rammed down our throats. Like the 1951 original and its stark nuclear warning, it’s clear that 2008 audiences are meant to leave the cinema thinking hard about what they have just seen, but unfortunately it’s just not explicit enough. To an audience used to seeing all manner of disasters befall their fellow man, the only way to make the masses sit up and take notice is by showing a drowning polar bear, or slowly zooming in on a little monkey that looks a bit lonely because the mummy monkey has been boiled down to make iPods.

The film really could have done with George Monbiot as a script advisor or a cameo appearance by Al Gore. As it stands, the story plods along to its inevitable conclusion, characters are undermined, decisions are made with no regard to logic, and plot holes are filled up by special effects.

The Day The Earth Stood Still is supposed to make us think, what if? What if we are already too late to save the planet? But the only question this film inspires is, “What if they tried a little bit harder?”

CINEMA: Dean Spanley

There’s also plenty of imagination at play in this truly original and beguiling little movie, which has a huge heart. Set in 1904 it is a tale of estrangement, reconciliation and – rather oddly – reincarnation.

Henslowe Fisk (Jeremy Northam) loves his elderly father Horatio (Peter O’Toole), but the two have never been close since the death of Henslowe’s brother in the Boer War. However, Henslowe is a dutiful son and while taking his father out one day the pair meet up with Dean Spanley (Sam Neill) a man who, like Henslowe, is fascinated by the theory of reincarnation. By accident Henslowe discovers when plied with his favourite wine (procured by the enigmatic Wrather, played by Bryan Brown) the Dean seems to regress to a past life. Intrigued by the tales the Dean tells Henslowe arranges a dinner party where he, his father, and Wrather will learn whether Dean Spanley is making it all up or really can remember a time when he was not only someone else but something else entirely.

Although the overall tone of the film is one of quiet warmth and humour, in one extremely touching scene O’Toole and Northam show their considerable stature as actors as father and son truly bond for the first time in years. However, it is Sam Neill who steals the show here in a part he clearly relishes and has enormous fun with.      Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Inkheart

Along with the animated cartoon capers aimed at very young children this Christmas, comes this extremely intelligent and intriguing movie for a slightly older generation.

Based on the trilogy by Cornelia Funke, Inkheart is all about the magic of books and reading, so no wonder it is so well written. At the heart of the film is a family of bibliophiles who have the ability to make books come to life when they read them out loud.

It was when Mo Folchart (Brendan Fraser) was reading a copy of the book Inkheart out loud to his daughter Meggie that the book came alive, trapping Meggie’s mum Resa (Sienna Guillory) inside and releasing Dustfinger (Paul Bettany) from it with the book being destroyed in the process. Years later and Mo is still searching for another copy of the book in order to get his wife back and with the help of a now grown Meggie (Eliza Bennett), a reluctant Dustfinger and aunt Elinor (Helen Mirren) he must once again read himself into the world of Inkheart. But danger lurks within its pages in the form of the thief Capricorn (Andy Serkis) who wants to use Mo’s special powers for his own evil ends.

The original, quite complicated plot of the book has been left intact in the film and makes this an endlessly surprising, fascinating fantasy. It looks amazing and there’s some atmospheric location work in Italy (where the book’s author, played by Jim Broadbent, resides) and at Capricorn’s mountaintop hideaway. Helen Mirren gives a wonderfully no-nonsense performance as Elinor, but the two standouts here are Paul Bettany as the world-weary Dustfinger who just wants to get back to his old life, and Andy Serkis who is really quite scarily creepy as Capricorn.

Although the Inkheart trilogy may not be as famous as Harry Potter this is a Christmas adventure every bit as imaginative and entertaining.      Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: The Secret Life of Bees

There’s a distinct whiff of Fried Green Tomatoes about this tale of a young white girl, Lily (Dakota Fanning) and her family servant Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), taken in by a honey-making group of black sisters (Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, Sophie Okonedo) after running away from Lily’s abusive father.

Set during the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, its political agenda is flagged from the start when Rosaleen is beaten up by racist police on her way to register to vote. But while the film could have stuck with its political convictions and explored racism on a deeper level, instead it turns into a sentimental and rather twee story about family and the sense of belonging.

Set in an almost clichéd Deep South of biscuits, grits, fried chicken and ladies going to church in their Sunday best, it not so much revels in homespun charm as rather drowns in it. A firmer, less self-indulgent edge would have given the movie a sharper focus and more integrity.      Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: The Children

It seems our appetite for horror movies hasn’t been sated yet and here’s another slice of grisly ghastliness set, aptly enough, at snowy Christmas time.

When Elaine (Eva Birthistle) and Jonah (Stephen Campbell-Moore) with daughter Casey (Hannah Tointon) and autistic son Paulie (William Howes) go to visit Elaine’s family over the holidays everyone is expecting a jolly time. Being in a large house in the countryside the party sets out to build snowmen, have a few drinks and generally enjoy the festive season. But within hours of arriving the children start to behave bizarrely and as the visit progresses it turns into an ‘us and them’ fight for survival with no clear winner in sight. In fact, a lack of clarity engulfs the whole film with no real reasons given for what happens, except for a rather implausible kind of sub-plot towards the end.

Although the film is well shot and there’s sufficient quantities of blood and guts, the action becomes ever more frenetic and incredible and you’ll find yourself asking why, exactly, do all the adults seem to be reacting to events in slow motion and why none of them can take control. There’s also a rather ambiguous ending that stretches the audience’s belief even further. Director Tom Shankland made the infinitely superior Waz, so let’s hope he returns to form with his next outing.      Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Summer

Many people feel those long, summer days of their childhood were the best times of their lives and for adult Shaun (Robert Carlyle) one summer in particular sticks out. He was 16 and used to hang out with his best mate Daz (Steve Evets) and girlfriend Katy (Rachel Blake) at a local lake, dodging the gamekeeper and enjoying his freedom.

But things turned out badly for Shaun and two decades later Katy has moved out of the area, Daz is paralysed and in a wheelchair, and Shaun spends his days looking after him, and his nights in a dead-end job at the local petrol station.

The catalyst for Shaun to jumpstart his life comes when Daz is told he has just weeks to live. Shaun decides the time has come to challenge his demons and he sets out on a quest to find Katy and recapture some of the feel of his glory years.

The film is grim and gritty and sometimes gruelling to watch but the half-promise of salvation at its end really is like a burst of sunshine after rain. Robert Carlyle absolutely captures the desolation, frustration and pain of Shaun’s existence; a man going nowhere with no hope and no ideas of how he can change things. Even in silence his face is eloquent expressing Shaun’s inability to help himself. Evets and Blake are both good in support, he as a man even more at war with himself than Shaun, and she as the woman who escaped to a better world, but the film rightly belongs to Carlyle.      Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Lakeview Terrace

We’ve had plenty of neighbours from hell at the movies before, but probably none quite as self-righteous as Los Angeles’ policeman Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson). Woebetide the person living in Turner’s cul-de-sac who doesn’t park close enough to the kerb, or puts their rubbish out on the wrong day for he will take action against them.

When young, newly married couple Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) move in next door they unwittingly unleash the worst of Turner’s wrath and before long there are arguments over lighting, over bushes in the garden, and even over cigarette butts in the driveway. With flash forest fires descending on LA it looks like Chris in particular is about to ignite Turner’s fury, and once he does neighbours are going to turn into the bitterest of enemies.

Director Neil LaBute is well known for the bile and angst in the films he writes himself (such as In The Company Of Men), but he didn’t write the screenplay for Lakeview Terrace and it shows. Although the movie is slick, looks amazing and is well put together, it burns with a slow fuse, taking far too long to reach combustion point and when it does finally burst into flames the storyline is pushed just that one step too far beyond. Samuel L. Jackson does control-freak psycho well (I wouldn’t want to mess with him) but Patrick Wilson’s character Chris is really no match for him which makes the final showdown a bit damp.       Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Julia

Although there’s a barnstorming performance from Tilda Swinton in the title role, this movie is disappointing – promising much but failing to deliver.

Julia (Swinton) is, in the words of her AA sponsor (Saul Rubinek) an “out of control, suicidal, blind alcoholic”. With her life a car crash of broken promises and empty bottles Julia has no idea where she is going or how to get herself back on track. But a chance conversation with her neighbour Elena (Kate Del Castillo) seems to give her a get out opportunity – if she can kidnap Elena’s estranged son from his wealthy grandfather she could collect a handsome ransom for him – enough to start afresh somewhere new.

Swinton’s Julia is self-deluded and weak, a compulsive liar and rotten drunk whose me, me, me agenda means she can’t see anything beyond her own needs. It is a fascinating performance, pitch perfect, but it is let down by the film itself. The atmosphere is tense and intriguing up to and during the kidnap, but then director Erick Zonca takes his eye off the ball and the film goes off the boil, petering out rather than having a proper ending.

With stronger material this would have been a powerful portrayal of a life in ruins and a woman running on empty, instead it is basically one brilliant performance in an otherwise mediocre movie.      Dee Pilgrim