“Do those cows like to have sex or what?” Baz Luhrmann marvels.
The Australian filmmaker is not actually referring to Nicole Kidman or Hugh Jackman, the stars of his epic romantic adventure movie Australia, but the 2,000 head of cattle playing supporting roles in a pivotal cattle drive scene shot in the northwestern Australian outback. “I could show you plenty of shots on the monitor where they ruined it because they were always having sex – livestock is quite difficult in general, actually,” he adds with a grin.
The long list of difficulties Luhrmann endured on this film went way beyond horny cows: extreme heat, floods that destroyed sets, horse flu that quarantined equine stars of the film and the logistical nightmare of filming in the remote outback in three states. “We’re dealing with immense scales and having to find very inventive ways of doing it,” Baz acknowledges. “Filmmaking is like war!”
The end result is the riskiest, boldest film Luhrmann has delivered so far, but will it be his most successful? Reuniting him with his Moulin Rouge star Nicole Kidman. Luhrmann is betting on the chemistry between Kidman and X-Men star Hugh Jackman after his original choice, Russell Crowe, pulled out due to a scheduling conflicts. It’s a sweeping period tale inspired by films such as Lawrence of Arabia and Gone with the Wind but set in a truly Down Under landscape with Jackman portraying the manliest man since Clark Gable and John Wayne. If Jackman finally breaks through with an Oscar nomination, he’ll have both Luhrmann and Crowe to thank.
“All the planets are aligning at this moment in Australian film history and I just happen to be in the right place and at the right time,” the genuinely chuffed Jackman says during a break in filming on the more civilized location of a soundstage at Sydney’s Fox Studios. Ironically it’s the same soundstage he would return to a few months later to film his X-men spin-off Wolverine. “To be one of the leads in a film called Australia with Nicole to kiss and Baz to direct me is a dream,” he adds. “If I had to retire after this one, I’d think it was a good place to stop!”
Three years ago, Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe were just weeks away from starting work on another highly anticipated Australian movie, Eucalyptus, to be directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, when production was abruptly cancelled after Crowe and Moorhouse reportedly clashed. In stepped Baz Luhrmann with an idea for an epic film about Australia he would write with Stuart (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl) Beattie, a film which could only be made on a big studio budget which could only be guaranteed with two big Australian stars attached. Kidman recalls, “That film falling apart in Australia weighed heavily on me so I felt it was my duty to come back, especially when it was Baz doing the asking.”
Kidman and Crowe signed on but then came the logistics. Baz explains delicately; “I’ve known Russell since he was being outrageous in the Sydney Theater Company and we talked about doing this film for a long time, but in the end, it was nothing personal so much as just the craziness of bringing everything together and it came down to we were either going to make the movie then or not at all so the thought came up that maybe Hugh could play the Drover.”
Hugh Jackman had approached Luhrmann earlier in the casting process and expressed interest in being involved in the project. The director initially thought he’d be perfect for the role of two-faced cattle station manager Neil Fletcher, but decided to take a chance on Jackman for the lead role when Fox green lit the choice and instead cast David (300) Wenham as Fletcher.
Set in northern Australia just before World War II, ‘Australia’ follows the journey of Lady Sarah Ashley, an English aristocrat (Kidman) who inherits a sprawling ranch in the outback and reluctantly makes a pact with a cattle drover (Jackman) to protect her new property from a takeover plot by cattle baron King Carney (Bryan Brown). Lady Ashley and the drover band together with an unlikely group including her alcoholic accountant (Jack Thompson) and a young Aboriginal boy named Nullah (Brandon Davis) to drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape to Darwin, where they experience firsthand the bombing of that city by Japanese forces.
Luhrmann, whose films also include Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet, has been wanting to make an iconic Australian movie as long as he can remember. “When I was a kid, we’d go to the cinema and see something like Lawrence of Arabia and I always thought the landscape was so powerful but that it comes from such a personal place,” he recalls. He and his wife and co-producer, Oscar-winning costume and production designer Catherine Martin, spent two years researching the locations and history and supervised all 53 sets built for the shoot, which spanned 101 days in four states.
Jackman grows a beard but leaves behind Wolverine for this role, a character known simply as ‘the Drover.’ “In American terms he’d be a cowboy but he’s a cattleman in Australia, and a man’s man who is very honest and not particularly impressed by anyone else’s station in life,” the actor says. “He and Nicole’s character are like chalk and cheese but of course that changes when they get out in the middle of nowhere and go on this journey together.” The Aussie star trained intensively for the horse riding and cattle-driving in the film and watched a compilation of films Luhrmann gave him, including African Queen, Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia and The Searchers. “Baz was very adamant we didn’t look like a western,” he says. “He also gave me a documentary called Journey from the Outback which I watched and it looked like a John Ford movie but it was about the real mailman of the outback and his name was Tom Cruise, which was pretty funny!”
For two months, the cast shot in the remote town of Kununurra at the northern tip of Western Australia in the Kimberley region - three times the size of the United Kingdom with only three towns that had a population over 2000! An hour outside Kununurra was the set for ‘Faraway Downs’, the ranch where Lady Ashley lives. Nestled below a stunning red rock vista spotted with unusual Balboa trees found only in Africa and the Kimberley region, the wooden house surrounded by a verandah deck was built from scratch by Luhrmann’s team. While Kidman made the drive to and from set every day and stayed in town, Jackman and Luhrmann set up their dressing room trailers on the edge of the remote set and never left. “I’d been out there when I was nine or ten and just loved it so was looking forward to going back,” says Jackman. “I slept in my trailer and really loved being in the outback with a campfire outside my trailer every night and a little cliff overlooking a river full of crocodiles.”
As for naming the movie after an entire country, Jackman admits he feels the pressure. “We are setting ourselves up to try and be the definitive Australian movie and I’d be lying if I said we weren’t all wanting to do our best work,” he says. But Luhrmann is also mindful of the fact he has to get people outside Australia to want to see this film. “There is a lot of Australian spirit in this film but it’s a universal story about family and love and land,” the quintessential showman begins his pitch. “I call it Australia because for this woman it is a far away and exotic place and it reminds me of Meryl Streep in Out of Africa when she goes, ‘I’m going to run away to Africa, I’ll go anywhere, even Australia – well maybe not Australia.’ So even Meryl Streep said Australia was too far away and too hard! So, while I know people in my country are rooting for it and really care and hope it succeeds,” he adds, “I’m really dealing with the story and the place from the perspective of an Englishwoman so it’s really made for the rest of the world as a canvas for a bigger idea.”
Back in Sydney on the Fox Studios lot where five of the eight soundstages are being used for this film, Hugh Jackman sits on the sidelines and points to his adopted African American son Oscar standing in front of a line of extras playing indigenous children waiting to be evacuated from Darwin in the next scene. “I’m trying to keep him out of films so he can have a normal childhood but he really wanted to be in this one and I’m very proud of him,” he says. Jackman isn’t working today but sheepishly admits he has snuck past the other stage parents to get a better view of the scene. “I had this high idea I would not pull rank and sit up front in my chair but be with the other parents of the extras and when I realized they didn’t even get to see a monitor, I gave up on being egalitarian and came up here to watch!”
The scene Total Film is watching features hundreds of soldiers helping women and children evacuate Darwin on to a ship at the wharf in anticipation of the Japanese attack. Against a giant blue screen is the side of a ship and Kidman is shooting a heart-breaking scene where she and her surrogate Aboriginal son Nullah (Brandon Davis) are torn apart because indigenous children are not allowed to board the ship. Luhrmann is wearing a stylish blue shirt, tie and beret and wears headsets and carries a microphone. He is shouting direction over the crowd in the middle of the scene like a mad man. “It’s chaos out there, panic!” he yells, prompting the soldiers to scurry along a little faster. “Nullah! Nullah!” Kidman screams in agony as the boy is taken away from her. After several takes, even her watching husband, Keith Urban, quietly excuses himself and says he can’t take it anymore. When the scene is finished, Kidman hugs Nullah and leaves the set. She returns ten minutes later for a promised chat with Total Film but admits, “I had to go back to my trailer and meditate to come down. It’s a bit odd and painful to come out of that emotional intensity but Baz is so good, he watches me and breathes with me and that’s why I love working with him so much, because he’s so tender.”
Kidman admits she was embarrassed when she first heard the idea for this movie because she had to admit she did not know the Japanese had dropped bombs on Australia during World War II. “I must have been asleep in history class but I’ve educated myself a lot since then,” she says. “Even my father, who is incredibly brilliant, came on set and saw footage and said he wasn’t aware the Japanese actually came onto Australian soil so we had to get Baz to convince him!”
Luhrmann is quite passionate about the convincing, it turns out. “It’s a pocket of Australian history that is very unknown even to a lot of Australians, that the Japanese did come in submarines and it was the same attack force that hit Pearl Harbor and more bombs were dropped on Darwin than Pearl Harbor,” he says excitedly. “So part of my motive for doing this film was to give my own funded personal history of Australia which I found life-changing!”
NK, as Luhrmann only refers to Kidman, is later recovered enough from her emotional scene to continue talking about her beloved director. “He’s incredibly unique, huh?” she asks. “If you liken it to another style which I’ve read about and from talking to other directors, I would say – and he’s going to get embarrassed reading this – but Fellini would be someone that you would compare because he used to create images and pictures and piece them together and a lot of it was what he could see, what he could feel, and out of that it was like a painting being colored in.”
Later Luhrmann is uncharacteristically stuck for words when told of her comparison. “I don’t know about Fellini,” he pauses, “but I do identify with filmmakers like Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen because I’m in control of the text and I can change it overnight or rewrite it and I’ve done a lot of that on this film. Sometimes you think something will never work and all of a sudden the most unexpected serendipitous moment of fusion will happen and something will be born.”
And both Luhrmann and Fox are betting everything on Australia being his most serendipitous moment yet.
