Nicole Kidman returns to Australia for Baz Luhrmann

From The Sunday Times
September 14, 2008
Nicole Kidman returns to Australia for Baz Luhrmann
In his enormous new movie Baz Luhrmann is not only bringing the actress back home, he’s redefining an entire country

Whichever way you cut it, the land down under is huge. The state of Western Australia alone — the left-hand third — unfolds nonchalantly at 11 times the size of the UK. The difference is, it’s home to a mere 2m people, dwelling largely in southern Perth. Up here, in tiny Kununurram, a thousand miles to the north (the “Top End”, as the locals call it), there’s plenty of legroom. Bar the odd Aboriginal settlement and remote dots like this one, God’s country remains decidedly empty.

Our minibus spews dust as we jolt along the desert trail, eyes peeled for suicidal ’roos, noting warnings about crocs in the river and the deadly snakes and “spideys” that lurk under the rocks. Before long, we are a speck in a land that time forgot — a blistering crucible of prehistoric rock, squat boab trees and a blinding azure sky. This isn’t the faux Mad Max outback, a morning’s drive from Sydney. This is the real McCoy, big and parched. Bloody beautiful. The idea of shooting a movie in such hostile terrain, one that would suck the last drop of gumption out of Ray Mears, is not to be entertained lightly. (Darwin, the nearest city, is 500 miles away.) Making a $130m picture out here ought never to have come within a whiff of a cigar.

“Forget ‘the country’,” says the film’s male lead, Hugh Jackman. “It’s like going to Mars.” An hour later, however, on an arid plain beneath a spectacular escarpment, you arrive upon it — the trailers, the lights, the generators.

The centrepiece, like something out of a John Ford western, is a sprawling, ramshackle homestead, surrounded by horse corrals and a creaking water tower, against which Jackman leans, grubbed-up and bearded in his Clint Eastwood duds. On the veranda stands Nicole Kidman, in an elegant green period dress, her pale skin the ward of an assistant with a brolly. It’s 100F in the shade, but there is no shade. Sweat drips like a tap with a worn washer. Arms flap reflexively in the great Aussie wave, beating off the incessant flies. “The film truly is about the landscape and how the outdoor experience can have an effect on your soul,” insists its director, Baz Luhrmann. Done up, quite impossibly, in an immaculate, pressed white outfit, complete with dandy stetson and neckerchief, he looks like Mr Benn after he’s just stepped out of the changing room.

When Luhrmann titled his movie, he was laying down a marker. “Why Australia? Well, first of all, to get people all uppity about it, so there’s a lot of comment,” he explains. “I think about films like Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Africa, Casablanca, Hawaii, by James A Michener : epics that use one word to describe a place. The film can’t be definitive about Australia, but ‘What does it mean?’ is not a bad place to start when you’re creating a story.” Sixty years ago, Casablanca meant “faraway, exotic”, he adds. “I think even now, to the rest of the world, ‘Australia’ just means big, somewhat mysterious, somewhat misunderstood. This is a land far, far away. It has a sense of fairy tale about it.”

Dubbed an antipodean Gone with the Wind, Luhrmann’s film tells the story of Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman), a haughty British aristo who, on the eve of the second world war, inherits her own Tara — a Belgium-sized ranch named Faraway Downs. Arriving in the apparent back end of nowhere, “she’s forced, kicking and screaming, into having to engage, not only with the landscape, but with the people”, as Luhrmann puts it. “The act of doing that transforms her.” The land of Oz, though, is not all merry. Rival land barons are circling. In 1942, to save her home, Ashley is forced to drive 1,500 head of cattle along her own yellow brick road, accompanied by Jackman’s man-with-no-name “Drover” and an Aboriginal boy (Brandon Walters). Their quest concludes in Darwin in the aftermath of the port’s bombing by the Japanese.

Shades of Red River? With classic imagery aplenty, let’s just say that Luhrmann has always been a sucker for the iconic reference. “The Beatles didn’t just make that sound up. It was an English interpretation of American rock’n’roll,” he counters. “Shakespeare made popular cultural references all the time. Picasso is probably the best example of it. You draw from the vernacular that’s around you.” Devotees of the Aussie screen legend Chips Rafferty might also cite 1946’s The Overlanders, a film with a similar story line.

Maybe we should just remain in thrall to Australia’s old- school sensibility: those days before blue screen, when an exotic backdrop meant lugging your production, kitchen sink and all, into the heart of darkness, as Zulu or The African Queen did, but without the turbulence of Apocalypse Now. There was, says Luhrmann, no way to fudge it. “I love being in the northern Sahara, but you can walk along and a Bedouin will serve you a Coke from a hole in the ground. The cellphone reception is better than in Beverly Hills.” It was plenty of nothing he craved — “And the greatest abundance in the northwest of Australia is nothingness.”

Kidman slinks into the tight, tented gazebo where we are talking and perches elegantly while a lackey divines water. “This is the last of a dying breed, this kind of movie,” she echoes. “They don’t build stuff like this any more. To feel that air and see people ravaged by the elements, as hard as it is, it’s exquisite. I dreamt of making a film that had the passion and the weight of the films I grew up watching — Gone with the Wind, Doctor Zhivago. When Baz and I first started speaking about this, seven years ago, I said there needed to be a film about our land that speaks on a much broader scale.” I wonder whether Lady Ashley might be something of metaphor, too — the quasi-royal who comes down under, only to have the Aussie knocked (back) into her? She laughs: “I don’t know that it’s ever been knocked out of me.” For all her cool grace, a couple of dark patches have started to spread around even her sainted armpits.

Australia marks the third collaboration between Luhrmann and Kidman, after Moulin Rouge! (filmed in Sydney) and that weird Chanel No 5 ad. “I’ve been able to enter into the psyches and ideas of some of the greatest minds in the world and that, for me, is a big gift,” Kidman chirrups, not merely content with her Nintendo Brain Training. “When you enter into the vision that Lars von Trier or Baz Luhrmann has, or Sydney Pollack or Jane Campion or Kubrick . . . These are the philosophers of the world. They’re good professors.” She did her “thesis” on Virginia Woolf and Henry James, she says; she’s learnt to speak Russian; she can hammer out a passable Moonlight Sonata, not to mention parley an “array of accents”. Should her husband, Keith Urban, ever step out of line, he should note that, on Australia, she acquired the ability to crack a whip. “I’ve got a busted shoulder at the moment,” she says, giving it a rub. “You gotta have a few scars, right?”

In recent months, what with marriage, the baby and hitting 40, Kidman seems more in the public eye than ever, despite her secluded life in Tennessee, near the heart of Urban’s music business. (“He’s in my trailer,” she confides. “He’s forbidden from coming down, though. He’s actually very jet-lagged, so he’s up there asleep.”)

It is Catherine Martin, Luhrmann’s wife, who remains his most steadfast collaborator, going back to Strictly Ballroom in 1992 — a film, indirectly, that has reshaped Saturday-night telly. While her husband has done the front-of-house stuff, it’s Martin, the production/costume designer, who has been furtively bagging the baubles (two Oscars for Moulin Rouge! and a Tony for their Broadway La bohème). On Australia, wearing a producer’s hat has added to the responsibilities, an unenviable task given the logistical woes of building everything out here from scratch (transporting every last nail up from Sydney) and wrestling with meteorological vagaries. They hadn’t felt a drop of precipitation here in the dry season in 50 years. Recently, however, it chucked it down, turning the set into a quagmire and causing the whole shoot to be rescheduled.

For both Martin and Luhrmann, the film is a venture into the unknown, a departure from the “red curtain trilogy” (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge!), films that, like their exceedingly amiable author, are as camp as the village of tents within which 200 of his crew have been billeted. Australia would have been the second instalment in a trio of historical epics. Yet after two years of prepping a version of Alexander the Great, with Leonardo DiCaprio, it was shelved once Oliver Stone’s version began. “It was devastating,” Luhrmann admits, “but the only way we could have done it was to race to beat Oliver, and that seemed destructive, pointless.”

The pair may revisit it “when we’re both in wheelchairs”, jokes Martin. Indeed, Luhrmann’s film output can hardly be described as prolific, this being only his fourth in 16 years, which can be put down, he says, to his pursuit of other life interests and the fact that he and Catherine are “research junkies” whose meticulous groundwork takes for ever. “The list is very long where people have knocked on the door and said, ‘I’ll give you the income of a small country, would you do this?’ Sometimes I think, ‘That would be fantastic... James Bond, that could be fun.’ We’d be a whole lot wealthier, that’s for sure. But when we make something, I say, ‘What can we do that is truly reflective of an interest we have?’ ”

Here, it’s about Australian self-confidence, the right of a nation to pursue its own destiny “instead of being caught in a sort of cross- fire of other people’s stories”, as Luhrmann puts it. “I guess what I’ve received in bucketloads, no matter what the outcome, is a much more direct understanding of my country, particularly its relationship to England and the sense of the republic, as well as the whole indigenous question.”

At the very least, he can throw a spotlight on the bombing of Darwin, the “Australian Pearl Harbor”. The strategically important city suffered more than 60 raids during 1942-43, as the last line of defence against an intended full-scale Japanese land invasion. “Nobody knew about it,” he says. “Even Australians didn’t know about it.” Back then, it was an “end of the world” place, a cut-throat mishmash of Anglos, Greek pearl-divers, Chinese gold-panners and, of course, Aboriginals. Darwin’s centre now looks too modern to be a location; Bowen, on the Queensland coast, is its proxy.

With the likes of the veteran Australian actors Jack Thompson and Bryan Brown cropping up, and Stuart Beattie doing the screenplay, native sons are out in force. Luhrmann has emphasised the melting pot, with Aboriginal actors such as David Gulpilil and Crusoe Kurddal. The real winner would seem to be Walters, an 11-year-old mixed-race boy, plucked from obscurity, who had never been to a cinema, yet finds himself as third lead to two of the biggest stars in the world.

There is also the fact that those very stars have returned home. The Hollywood A list seems positively cluttered with their compatriots, who have enjoyed most of their successes abroad. “In acting, we’re over-represented,” Jackman says. “Of course there’s a desire to want to give back to or support the industry that gave you a start.”

Backwoods Australia is certainly staging an almighty homecoming for them. In Bowen, the whole town turned out as extras. With an eye to what The Lord of the Rings did for tourism in New Zealand, local governments had been outbidding rivals for the right to host the film. In a dream piece of synchronicity, Luhrmann has just been signed up by Tourism Australia to do a series of commercials promoting the country. Despite the wonderful independent films made in Australia over the years, and the huge Hollywood imports (such as Superman Returns) that have been made in Sydney’s impressive studios, this is the biggest film, by a considerable distance, to be made about the host nation, everyone points out. “It would be so fantastic,” Jackman says, “if we could all look back and this was the dawning of a new era.”

Back on set, the tropical sun descends quickly. Luhrmann has made heavy use of the “magic hour”, the twilight period beloved of cinematographers. “Every sunset there’ll be a majestic transformation and you forgive it all,” he sighs. “It’s like flicking a switch between brutal and beauty.”

“Have you seen the sunset? It’s of the gods, put it that way,” Kidman vouches. “People go to Africa, and they never come back. I think this country has a similar ambience. It casts a spell. For the first week I was here, I thought, ‘I’m not gonna survive’ — then I just felt it turn. I know it’s an extreme way to put it, but it’s a ferocious land.”

As the rocks are kissed to a peachy hue, Luhrmann shoots a campfire scene — Jackman and the Aboriginal stockmen (Aussie for cowboy) lounging around after a hard day’s cowpoking. Given both Luhrmann and Jackman’s musicals credentials, it wouldn’t seem amiss if the actors suddenly ripped off the buckskin and burst into a disco version of The Surrey with the Fringe on Top. Amusingly, for all the millions of boab trees in the area, the one Jackman lolls against is made of fibreglass, there not being a natural one in the right place. But do not underestimate the zeal of the thespian gone native. “I would encourage you to take your shoes off, even if just for a second,” he intones. “That doesn’t anger the spirits as much.”

Sydney, September 2008: a whole year later, and Luhrmann still hasn’t finished his movie, juggling the editing while the score is being recorded. He’s sailing mighty close to the wind, given the November opening date in Australia. In the end, they had to tweak a few scenes in the studio, “doing it Lean and Lucas”, he quips. When the actors came back in to “loop” some of their dialogue (“Baz has a penchant for talking over the top of it,” Jackman says), Kidman wasn’t the only one to have given birth in the interim: no fewer than 15 babies were born to cast and crew during the course of the film, underlining both what a protracted affair it has become and that being stuck in the middle of nowhere leads you to make your own entertainment. (Jackman has even shot another film, Wolverine.)

“There’s a crushing ambition behind the film,” Luhrmann says. “We don’t make things very often, and when we do, we try to make something that isn’t always out there, a meal that maybe isn’t being served every day. Some of my favourite films are sushi, rarefied treats, but this sort of event cinema is like a Sunday meal — it’s got a starter and a main course and a dessert. It’s high comedy, high tragedy, tears, laughter, costumes. Everything big. Big actors. Big landscape.” Jackman chuckles: “Mate, if I told you the film was coming out this time next year, Baz would still be working 24/7 on it. The print will be wet as he gives it over. But, fingers crossed, I think we have something special.”

Australia opens in the UK on Dec 26