rm | yay & random stuffs

Damn, after being toast for like weeks Ezboard seems to be working again. Below the cut is an article on Luhrmann I was really pissed to have lost when the thing blew up. I've linked to it before, but now I'm archiving it here. Probably falls into the "shut up already, Rach" category for all of you. Thankfully, we have the cut tag. Pet the cut tag. Love the cut tag. Moving along.

A fitting way to begin a day that involves an audition for Poultrygeist, The Musical! Don't you think? Yeah, not so much. But I try.

found at: www.thisislondon.co.uk/dy..._id=404337

Rocking with the legend of Baz
Sept 5, 2001
by Andrew Billen

Read Andrew Billen every Wednesday in the Evening Standard
The antic genius behind the audacious new movie, Moulin Rouge, is looking good. Baz Luhrmann's unruly hair may have turned monochrome since we met four years ago and is now, stylishly, one swatch lighter than his grey suit.

His face may be sagging after four months of feverish promotional travel. But for someone who was dying 48 hours ago, he looks fantastic.

Dying? "I am going to sound like Woody Allen, but I thought I was dying," he complains in his light Aussie camp as he wriggles about on one of the Dorchester's grander sofas, evidently enjoying a conversation he flatteringly compares to therapy. "I'd flown into Ireland and I had a sore thing in my head ..." He tenderly pats an imaginary tumour. "And jet lag leaves you a bit weird. Also I had a bit of REM sleep."

Bizarre dreams? "Bizarre dreams and waking without energy, but really peaceful. It felt like perfect peace. I thought, 'Am I going to die here?' And then, 'That would be right. Finish Moulin Rouge. The curtain comes down. Yes, I thought, good timing."

And all I'd asked was my standard 'do you ever think about death' question. Luhrmann is one of the most engaging and talented people I've interviewed, but to say he is a self-dramatist understates his dogged self-mythologising. His Lazarus-like restoration in Ireland will doubtless soon find a place in the Legend of Baz as prominent as his story about being rejected for a place by Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Arts and then getting a phone call offering him a movie part.

"That," he says, "was one of the more memorable mythological moments of my life."

Myth-recognition and myth-reinterpretation are Luhrmann's trade, one he learned growing up Down Under in what he regards as the cultural-remix capital of the world, specifically a pig farm in New South Wales, where he spotted the archetypes underlying both BBC classic serials and The Partridge Family.

His first movie, 1991's Strictly Ballroom, was, in a sense, the David and Goliath story with the stuffy Australian Dance Federation playing the giant. Now, and even if you've forgotten that the cancan was originally written for Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, you will feel in your bones the Greek legend throbbing beneath Moulin Rouge: boy descends into the nether-nether to rescue the girl he loves; boy screws up.

To play his Eurydice - in this version a sexy courtesan named Satine - Luhrmann turned to a modern screen legend, Nicole Kidman, "the kind of iconic human being who carries her mythology wherever she goes". I ask if, during a shoot as intense as it was lengthy, he'd got any hint that she was about to split up from Tom Cruise.

"No, Tom came to the set a lot. You see, they live a royal life. They are a royal couple in America and it has all those pressures around it. One day, during post production, she rang me up. I always get these calls from Nicole and I know it is an oh-my-God moment: the rib, the knee." Kidman broke the same rib twice and ruptured a cartilage, costing Luhrmann six weeks' filming. She finished the movie on painkillers, in a wheelchair. So this time? "This time she said: 'There are helicopters around the house and Tom has left me.' It was a big shock."

To her? "I think so. I really believe that. Big shock."

Moulin Rouge is an eye-popping musical spectacular about putting on an eye-popping musical called Spectacular Spectacular. It is very funny but it also takes itself seriously which, since it reflects Luhrmann's highly strung life, it was bound to.

He is a collaborative artist who has worked with the same writers, designers and cinematographers since the late Eighties but his disciples hang back and wait for their prophet to receive his vision before they speak up. To find it, Luhrmann treks into the wilderness, roughing it on anonymous backpacking holidays to foreign lands where, eventually, he divines what is missing from his life. His La BohËme at Sydney Opera House in 1990 thus redressed a romantic deficit. His Hindu-infused interpretation of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream four years later filled a spiritual vacuum.

The pre pre-production stage of Moulin Rouge was a fraught solo-trip to Africa and Egypt. He got into such a state that his wife, Catherine Martin or "CM", abandoned her holiday in Portugal to comfort him in Marrakech where he was in the throes of a minibreakdown.

In Alexandria, he became "weepy" again and found himself unable to get out of bed. Salvation came, in this instance, from hiring a horse to ride across the bay. "It was a white horse and I had a red cloth under the saddle. I know it sounds mythological ...

"What came out of it was the recognition that the story would have to be Orphean, about the transition from youth to older age, from the loss of the gift of youth to the scarring of age. It would be about coming out the other end changed and able to see an adult life ahead of me.

"I was surrounded by so many dead adults, people walking through life, people whose spiritual life had been killed off through the loss of youth. So I knew I was going to do the Orphean myth, which is about this idealistic young man who has some abilities, goes into the underworld and eventually comes to that moment when he realises some things are bigger than himself.

"People die. Relationships can't be. Love does not conquer all. And you are either destroyed by those scars or you are healed and you grow spiritually and your life continues."

While, therefore, there are parallels to be drawn between Luhrmann and Moulin's bombastic impresario, Harold Zidler (played by Jim Broadbent), the director really identifies with Christian, the love-struck writer played by Ewan McGregor.

His other realisation was that the movie would conclude the trilogy of non-naturalistic films that began with Strictly Ballroom and continued with his brilliant, hip-hopping take on Romeo and Juliet in 1997. When the curtain falls on his "Red Curtain" period, he will say farewell to his loyal company. So Moulin Rouge is a riotous passingout ceremony too, which may help explain why he released that strange hit CD, The Sunscreen Song, a couple of years back, a spoof graduation speech offering the departing millennium such advice as "always wear sunscreen" and "don't mess too much with your hair".

What Baz did not predict was that making a musical about Hell would be so hellish. On the first day of shooting in Sydney, just as he was about to shout "Action!", a mobile phone call told him his father had died from skin cancer (the Sunscreen Song was serious about sunscreen). Then came Kidman's injuries. Worst, he felt awed by the film's technical difficulties. As much as an animated cartoon, it could never risk looking like real life. Keeping Moulin Rouge looking unreal was a real problem.

"I wanted Romeo and Juliet to be my Heart of Darkness (Eleanor Coppola's documentary about her husband's miserable experience making Apocalypse Now). For a young film-maker, what an adventure! I wanted it to be hell, but ultimately, I enjoyed every minute of it. I enjoyed it when bandits kidnapped the hair and makeup people, when storms blew things away. I enjoyed defying the studio, Leonardo (DiCaprio) and those kids racing around in fast cars and helicopters.

Loved it. I just thought it was the Heart of Darkness experience.

"Going back to Australia, building sound-stages and making a musical was meant to be the mature way to make a movie. The truth was every single day was a far greater test. There was great love among those involved but we were all in a very dark, difficult place, me, Ewan, Nicole. There were times when I looked up to the heavens with the hand on the rope saying: 'I cannot go on.' It was the hardest game I ever played and there were times I thought it was beyond me."

I bet he never felt that before. " So there's the adult moment. You realise you can go too far. Things can get too big. I came back from it. I remember the clouds parting just in time, but it damn near wasted my spirit."

So now I know why, at 38, he is prematurely grey.

Some critics, perhaps half of them, feel that he did not, in fact, quite beat the odds, that technique finally got in the way of emotional impact, but no one can accuse him of breaking faith with the sensibility that makes a Baz Luhrmann production unique.

The wilful cultural blindness, the belief that neither time nor geography matter when relating a myth is all pervasive. In Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and Capulets sported automatic weapons brand-named Sword and Rapier. In Moulin Rouge, a 19th century Parisian music hall rocks to lyrics by Elton John and David Bowie.

It can also be in plain bad taste. When I complain about the smutty jokes about McGregor's legendary impressive penis, Baz throws the Bard at me. "Shakespeare's audience would have made the roughest multiplex look positively tame. If, to get their attention, he had to use the bawdiest comment, make a double entendre about Ewan's cock, Shakespeare would have done it. Shock, engage, use crass humour. But the crassness leads you to an odd beauty, I hope."

The third element of Luhrmann's style is, of course, camp and Moulin Rouge, with its top hats and froufrous, often worn by the same (male) actors, is as camp as karaoke. When we met in 1997, I had assumed Baz was gay and was shocked by him telling me he'd just married CM, his devoted production designer.

"There is a whole gay sensibility to the work I do,î he says today. "You can see it in the films, in the evolution of the work. And that is something that should be there both for CM and me. As I said before, I see all sexual possibilities. We are married and are a real couple but we have never denied ourselves any of the possibilities in life."

So she's bisexual too? "Well, I won't speak for her but I think if you delve into her history, let me put it this way, she has seen all the possibilities in life too."

They met - she is a substantial blonde a few years his junior - in 1987 when he interviewed her for a design job with his company. They talked Brecht and Madonna until 10 at night. Becoming a couple was, however, "an ongoing evolution not a blinding wow" and there were "deviations" over the years.

But it is a monogamous union now? "The contract is deeply personal. All those things that take place between couples are very real and alive for us. We marvel at how great all of that is and at the same time there is a total embracing of ..." I think he is going to say " possibilities" again, but he says instead: "There is a set of rules."

Might they have children? "They are scheduled. They are scheduled for next year."

In seven years' time, he swears, he will forsake the studio so handsomely funded by Fox, withdraw from public life, and become "a recluse". " You know people say, 'I want to go to Pago Pago one day because that would be an interesting country to visit'? Well, I want to go to the world of the recluse one day because that will be an interesting country to visit for me."

I suggest we hum the chorus of that terrible song, "I've been to Paradise but I've never been to meî. "And you know what? That is a great example of our work. We may all think that it's a terrible song, but what a great lyric!"

I've always said he finds the sincerity at the heart of kitsch. "And there is nothing wrong with that."

He thanks me for the "couch session". I congratulate him on his remarkable recollection of our last encounter, which is so detailed that I later berate myself for not realising he must have read the cutting just before seeing me. There is much craft behind Baz's persona. That hair for instance: it turns out that while it has been greying gently for years, he has, of late, been helping the process along by dying it. A healthy head of black hair, you see, just wouldn't fit the Orphean myth of the film-maker who returns from his Hellish soundstage aged and saged. But I don't mind the legerdemain. Luhrmann is the real thing.

-end-

The grace and lack of specificity with which the presumptuous reporter (who is in possession of lovely adjectival instincts, I might add) is brushed aside, yet without a denial. And the fact that there's probably more of Luhrmann's self-directed melodrama in this than most of the other interviews I've read.

Sometimes, I think I think he's so cool because of the way my parents would berate me when I was a kid for being too dramatic. Well clearly it's working for _someone_. Of course, any expression of that, no matter how amused and innocuous, towards my parents would invovle them beng like "no, you remember everything about your childhood wrong" and probably even more horror at my having an actual human role model than they expressed at the comfort I took in horrid things like vampire books as a kid.

Have I mentioned my parents are coming to the play tonight? I am preoccupied.

Meanwhile, I feel so far behind on everything in the sense of I can get it done or I can document, and unfotortunately, documenting is a pretty significant part of my deal.

Today: 1 audition, 1 performance
Tomorrow: 2 auditions
Saturday: 1 audition, 2 performances (a day which is going to suck, _strongly_)
Sunday: 1 audition
Monday: 1 audition
W, Th or F: 1 audition (I've not decided when to go yet)

You'd think that would make me feel productive, but mostly just frazzled.

Also meanwhile, I'm having a lovely time on this film I'm doing. My role is jut a few lines and we've not started shooting yet, but the production team is lovely, communicative and organized, the latest version of the script was mailed to me last night, it's SAG Experimental or Low-budget or one of those things, which does me no good union-wise but makes the whole thing a very efficient operation. Hopefully they'll bother to get the thing listed in IMDB and then I can be there already. That's one of those not important things that obsesses me.

In less pleasant news, I made a mathematical error wrt my bank account, and so have essentially no money until I get paid on Tuesday, unless I get my check from this play or Haddassah between now and then. That would be a great good thing that I'm trying to will into being, mainly by concentrating really hard. Veins should be standing out on my forehead at any moment.

Had a bit of a freakout during our pick up rehearsal last night, because of damn scene six. I can't run the lines without doing the scene (because it's all "hi" "hello" "hi" "see ya" over and over), and I said this when we were running lines in a hallway before we got our room. So then the stage manager said we should do it in the hallway, but we were half speeding through it and half acting, and I just didn't feel okay. The second we got it into a room (after I was like "I _cannot_ do this") it went perfectly fine. But it was interesting to see how accutely I needed the boundary of the rehearsal room or the theater to feel safe, to understand the expectatins in execution, and to not worry I was somehow making a fool out of myself. What could I have done differently? Well, instead of trying to just brave this whole thing out from the beginning, I should have said way back when this started so many weeks ago, that this sort of thing gives me the heebie jeebies, and it's fine, I can do it, but just know sometimes I might be a little jittery. I'd like to think that had I done that, I could have much more calmly addressed why doing it in a hallway was not okay, and in fact the whole thing could have been avoided. Honestly, what shocks me the most was how easily I snapped back into doing it once we had the room.

The great thing about using a monologue from an Australian play that's never been published or performed here, is I can so be wobbly on it, and as long as I look like I know what I'm doing, it's relatively cool. This is a little sneaky, and I don't do it all the time, but today is one of those days.