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| Nicole Kidman & Ewan McGregor in “Moulin Rouge” |
MIAMI BEACH, Fla., June 9, 2001–At least that’s what director Baz Luhrmann is betting on with his wild and sexy extravaganza Moulin Rouge. But can it be done? Are audiences willing to let go of their special-effects laden, explosion-ridden expectations and allow the carefree and romantic song and dance to wash over them?
It’s certainly a risky proposition.
Sure, the lavish musicals of yesteryear, such as Meet Me in St. Louis, Singin’ in the Rain and The Wizard of Oz were the mainstays of their time. Directors like Busby Berkeley and Vincente Minnelli were the heroes. And even in the ’60s, films like The Sound of Music and West Side Story packed theaters and won Oscars. But a new form of cinema was emerging. It was called naturalism, and it began to take over the artifice of the musical world.
Besides Madonna‘s Evita in 1996 and the animated films churned out by the Disney machine, musicals have been pretty much missing-in-action for years. Others have tried the formula. James L. Brook shot his 1994 I’ll Do Anything as a musical but then cut the songs when it tested poorly with audiences. Woody Allen tried his hand with the 1996 Everybody Says I Love You, but that certainly wasn’t considered one of his best. Kenneth Branagh‘s musical version of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost last year got, well, lost at the box office.
Of course, there have been a scattering of successes in the last 20 years, especially with the 1978 film Grease, but for the most part, any form of musical entertainment has been satisfied mostly by dance. Films like Saturday Night Fever and Flashdance thrilled audiences in the ’70s and ’80s, and even the more recent Billy Elliot and Save the Last Dance have had an audience with a love for dance. And of course, with the advent of MTV, the whole spectrum changed forever. Short, conceptual videos based on the hottest songs filled the “musical” niche–and further heightened the fame of rock stars everywhere.
But that was all before Baz.
The worldly, handsome and down-to-earth Australian director, known for his highly stylistic and unique films, such as Strictly Ballroom and William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, decided to reinvent the Orphean myth–the Greek classic about an artist who travels into Hell to find his true love, Eurydice. But as always with Luhrmann, there was a twist–he would set the story in turn-of-the-century Paris at the infamous club, the Moulin Rouge. And along with all the decadence and lasciviousness of the time, he would fill the screen with song and dance unparalleled in recent years, and give us two bright stars, Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, to play the doomed lovers in a Bohemian world of pure abandon.
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| Baz Luhrmann & Nicole Kidman |
The film has unfortunately been pitted against some heavy hitters, and its box office has not been booming, coming in at about $38 million so far. The reviews have been mixed, with a love/hate reaction, but fans who love it, like Rosie O’Donnell, who has seen the film five times, can’t stop talking about it.
Hollywood.com caught up with Luhrmann, his wife Catherine Martin (C.M. to her friends), the film’s costume and production designer, and Anton Monsted, the music supervisor, in Miami at the Delano Hotel, a place where a modern-day musical may well be set. With flowing white curtains and art deco décor, the hotel has all the makings of the ultra chic, without the pretentious trappings.
Sitting on the porch by Luhrmann‘s poolside cabana, he, Martin and Monsted talked about the film and how it may revive the musical genre. But wait. First, we were welcomed to “Baz’ madcap world,” as he calls it. In the middle of the interview, a woman asked us a question about the poolside cabana suites at the Delano. Luhrmann was very accommodating and answered her questions. Then, he insisted we put it in the interview, telling us, “As Baz is talking about Tom and Nicole, he switches gears to explain how great the Delano Hotel suites can be, with the great upstairs and downstairs, to passerbys. Life goes on no matter what!”
Now…on with the show…
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| Nicole Kidman & Ewan McGregor in “Moulin Rouge” |
Baz’s style
Luhrmann admitted “[Moulin Rouge] could quite possibly have been the hardest film I’ve ever made–so complicated, you wouldn’t believe. But like any work of art, however popular it is or not, to show the labor is not the point. [Audiences] don’t want to see our suffering, [they] want to see the final work. It’s a piece about life, isn’t it? Albeit comic and tragedy, tragedy and comedy, it still has to have joy and life in it. Your experience has to be different than mine.”
“My other two films belong to a ‘Red Curtain’ style cinema with this film acting as the third and last one in this particular style. It’s theatrical cinema, it’s audience participation cinema, which means this: The audience is essentially always aware that they are watching a movie. Yet on the other hand, it’s not a passive experience, you’re not saying ‘oh, look at the illusions.’ No, you are actively told within the first ten minutes of each of those films, ‘wake up, wake up, you’re going to get involved. And if you don’t want to get involved, you might as well get out.'”
The birth of Moulin Rouge
“While I was researching La Boheme seven years ago,” Luhrmann, who staged a production for the Australian Opera House at the age of 27, said, “I went to the Moulin Rouge to see LaToya Jackson wrestle a snake, but she wasn’t on that night. I was aware of what a fascinating place it really was. It was a place where a lot of pop culture began. It was scurrilous and outrageous. It was really much more hard core than the ’60s. The nightclub of your dreams–wild, sexy, energetic–and yet one relates to it as a kind of cheap, nasty print on a hotel wall, like a Toulouse Lautrec painting.
“So you have to find the world to set it in, and I looked at Bohemianism of the 1840s, when it really began. And then the commercialism of Bohemianism in 1899. One wanted to look at a reflection of where we are now–a sort of portal to the 1900s.”
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| Catherine Martin |
Martin lamented the research process as being very “elaborate and tortuous.” “Baz wants to be really clear about what all these things meant to a 19th-century audience and how the can-can felt if you were there,” she said. “The audience should access it in a more emotional, more visceral way, and relate it to our own lives. I think that’s one of the things Baz does so very successfully as a director–he pushes you to find the feeling of what it’s like being in a club and puts it up on screen.”
The cinematic musical come back
“Actually here’s the truth: a lot of musicals are being rushed to greenlight, you know,” Luhrmann confessed. “And I did set out to reinvent the musical, very simply. I did set out to find an Orphean-style story, and I did want it to be a comic tragedy. Those last two things are not what packaged movies are made of. The Orphean myth is by the nature of it both sad and happy–or happy and sad. Sadness with hope. Comic tragedy is not a vernacular that’s common in the cinema, where you can have a joke one moment and then tragedy the next.
Monsted added, “People are going to go see different films for different reasons. But I would hope that this particular film is evolving the form of the musical. It’s not a reinvention. I mean, I don’t think you can go back to Singin’ in the Rain or Sound of Music and just remake it, with say Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt in the leads, and expect that to hit audiences in a very contemporary and modern way. Anything you do that follows the conventions and rules of that kind of film I think is going to be a photocopy of that kind of storytelling. But I think what we’d love to see is that someone goes out and makes a great new musical that’s an evolution on this. A director would say ‘Oh, that’s a daring idea. Let’s do it.'”
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| Nicole Kidman & Ewan McGregor in “Moulin Rouge” |
And the more recent musical attempts?
Luhrmann said, “I’ve enjoyed them but I think there is a bigger step to take. You’ve got to find a cinematic language. I may have completed it but I hope I’ve advanced the course. Whatever happens out there in box office land, there’s a passion now. There’s a passionate wave behind our movie, like ‘Oh my god, he’s actually cracked some kind of code.’ At least the audience doesn’t start laughing when they break out into song. Like the song ‘Roxanne’ in the film. People sort of laugh at the beginning of it, but then by the end, they are dead still. It never fails. People generally buy it. But of course, some can never sign the deal. It can be scary, but you have to be open to it. But music is the great unifier of the human race. It transcends time and geography. Easily.”
The music
Moulin Rouge employs well-known songs to great effect, which is one of the more interesting parts of the film.
Luhrmann explained, “This is not a new idea to film. Judy Garland sings ‘Clang, Clang, Clang Went the Trolley’ in Meet Me in St. Louis. The film is set in the 1900s, yet she is singing 1940s big band music. So the idea of using our music to understand another place, another time, another character is a ye-olde idea. Just reinterpreted in a hip-hop, pop vernacular.”
“In musical cinema work, you find that you strip away so that you can sit there and listen to a song. You can expand a very simple moment. The scene on top of the elephant goes on for four minutes. In straight dialogue, the scene would be maybe a minute and a half and then you’re outta there.” Then in his Baz way, he recites the scene with just dialogue. And indeed, it’s about a minute and a half–clean.
Monsted explained further, “Originally, there was a lot of debate whether we should use well-known songs or whether we should have original music. And pretty early on it came out that, well, why don’t we use well-known songs that people could connect to in an immediate way. And then not trying to watch the screen and decode the story and decode the lyrics and what the song is meant to be telling them. When “Your Song” [the Elton John ballad that McGregor‘s Christian sings to Kidman‘s Satine] comes on, you sort of snap to attention, and you say ‘Oh, I know what’s going on here.'”
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| Director Baz Luhrmann |
“The songs were part of the script from day one. All of us, everyone that was working on the film, from the design office and music and every department, were offering song ideas for each spot in the script. We had lists of hundreds and hundreds of songs. With hundreds and hundreds of songs that were not right.”
“And Baz said at one point, ‘Are we going to have to listen to every song ever written?’ And I very dutifully went out and found out how many published songs there really are, which is about 5 million published just in English alone. So we weren’t going to do that. It was bit like feeling your way through the dark.”
Monsted elaborated, “The most important thing was that we had a solid foundation in the songs that the cast sang. That was our number one priority. Then we started to focus, once the film had been shot, on getting interesting people, people that we really wanted to work with. We wanted to use artists like David Bowie, Beck, Missy Elliot and L’il Kim as collaborators to enrich the music in the film. All of the cast songs have the flavor of the film, but then we wanted to make the textures more eclectic and diverse by getting hip-hop artists and rock stars, and say to them ‘do your thing.’ Although some of the music is only in there for a short period of time, you’d miss it if it wasn’t there because it adds to the texture and makes it a more colorful musical landscape.”
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| Nicole Kidman & Ewan McGregor in “Moulin Rouge” |
And the casting
“I was only looking for the right person for the job,” Luhrmann said. “I knew Ewan because I almost cast him as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. This was before he did Trainspotting and I thought, this guy is a true star. And that’s one of the sad things because right at the moment that we are opening the film, he is stuck in Marrakesh [shooting Ridley Scott‘s Black Hawk Down]. He really is a romantic hero of the old school. He can look at that camera and you go ‘I believe him. I look into his soul and I believe him.’ He captured the essence of his character Christian. He went from youthful idealism to scarred man.”
And Nicole?
“The truth is, on the one hand, she had to be Marlene Dietrich–cold, a man’s fantasy and then on the other hand, the girl next door. And I think she really got there. You appreciate actors who fill the vessel, who don’t come in to say, ‘I’m an empty vessel, fill me.’ She was not a walk in the park on the set, but she was fun.”
Luhrmann went on, “Nicole embodies the idea of the film, that the show must go on. Impeccable professional and gutsy. Just a ballsy human being, just kind of like, pick yourself up and go on. For all her elegance and her sophistication, she’s like, ‘Baz, I’ve seen worse.’ She’s been through it. She was knocked out by [the separation to Tom Cruise], don’t get me wrong. And she still is. But she went out and did it and she should be proud of the movie. Because whether people love it or not, it’s the best performance I think she’s given. It’s so complicated, yet so simple.”
Besides Moulin Rouge, their favorite film musicals
Luhrmann: Ultimately as a kid, I loved musical cinema. They made me laugh. They made me cry. I love them all. I love Top Hat, I love Cabaret, West Side Story. I love this thing of using an artificial world, an artificial style to make you feel. To wake you up, to make you feel, so that as long as you can buy into it, you can have a heightened experience. And when you unify music and story, as the rare well-staged operas do, when it actually works, it can blow your head off! You’re spirit can soar. That’s the ideal of that art form.
Martin: There’s so many. I really like Guys and Dolls and of course, Singin’ in the Rain. But probably out of all of them, The Wizard of Oz is my favorite musical. It’s so amazing because it has such a broad audience from the youngest child to adults.
Monsted: Well, for a Broadway musical, that’s easy. I saw The Lion King a few years ago and it just seemed to have magic woven right through it. It was absolutely one of the most amazing live theater experiences I’ve ever seen. In terms of film musicals, that’s a hard question. I might say Saturday Night Fever, not really because it’s a film musical but because it relies on music and dance as the basis of storytelling. I love the fact that in that film you have the two parallel worlds. The world of the dance floor and the disco and then the gritty every day world of the working class in Brooklyn. The film really works for me.
What’s next?
“I’m doing La Boheme on Broadway. Then I’ll take two months to sort out what I’ll do next for the cinema.” Luhrmann said. Maybe Shakespeare again?
“Not in the movies, not yet. But eventually, yes. Maybe as a television event. Or maybe as a theatrical experience. I mean, next would be the life-determining ones: next being Hamlet then MacBeth then King Lear. The thing about great works is that they are there to be interpreted in different times and places and find new meaning. I only choose them based on what I need to explore. I’ve been through the Hamlet period. Now, I’m moving towards Macbeth.
How about Hamlet as a musical?
“Right, Hamlet in Miami!”
