The greatest Gatsby?

THE first time Baz Luhrmann encountered F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby was on the big screen in remote Heron’s Creek, Australia, where his father ran the gas station and, briefly, the cinema. That was the 1974 version starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

Fast forward 40 years to cold Northern Russia.

The writer-director had just wrapped his movie Moulin Rouge and was on what he calls “a debriefing adventure”, taking the Trans-Siberian Express from Beijing, across Northern Russia, and then on to Paris to meet his wife and newlyborn daughter Lilly.

That’s when he re-encountered Gatsby again, in a sardine-box of a cabin on the train against the clatter of train tracks and flickering light through the frosty window. This time as an audio book. “I poured some wine, looked out and saw Siberia racing by, and started listening. It was four o’clock in the morning before I fell asleep,” he recalls.

“The next day, I couldn’t wait for night to come, to get back in my little box, pour the second bottle of wine, and listen to the last part. At the end of it, I realised three things – one, that I hadn’t really known The Great Gatsby at all; two, that it was structurally really concise; and three, there was a really great film in it.”

The first imaginings of his adaptation of Gatsby were born. This week the 3D film opened the Cannes Film Festival. Leonardo Di Caprio stars as the mysterious, party-giving millionaire Jay Gatsby, with British actress Carey Mulligan as Daisy.

While working on the adaptation Luhrmann knew all along who he’d like to play Jay Gatsby – DiCaprio, with whom the film-maker worked on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

“I’d read the book in junior high school and I was very moved by the story,” says the actor.

“When I picked up the novel again, it was when Baz had handed me a copy and said, ‘I’ve got the rights to this.’ It was a very daunting concept; there was a responsibility to make a memorable film that will be forever connected with one of the greatest novels of all time.”

That novel reveals a world and a story of New York City, the city that Fitzgerald called his “splendid mirage”, the city where he found early success and initial inspiration for the book.

For Luhrmann, that city was the critical first stop because he and his wife, Oscar-winning costume and production designer Catherine Martin, are “research junkies” according to the film-maker.

He began by travelling on the Queen Mary 2, arriving in New York harbour under the Statue of Liberty, just as the Fitzgeralds did. Then he set up shop at various points in the city with “the Bazmark caravan”.

The team included his wife, who has collaborated with him on the distinctive look of all his films and theatre productions for over 20 years, and key collaborators such as executive music supervisor and co-producer Anton Monsted and friend and writing partner Craig Pearce.

Fitzgerald, Luhrmann suggests, sensed a fundamental crack in the moral fabric of the 1920s, that things could not keep going up, up, up, as they were, couldn’t last. That felt very relevant to the global financial crash of 2008.

When he starts working on any project, Luhrmann always begins by collecting. “In terms of a visual language, I’ll just start collecting photographs and making collages and my terrible scribbles,” he says. He even began buying pink suits, which Jay Gatsby wears, three years before filming, to “get an idea of the right colour pink”.

The photographic image, and also film-making, were extremely prevalent in the 1920s, says Martin. “So, the time was captured not only in illustrations and drawings-cartoons of the times, but there are extensive photo archives. It’s very exciting, because you see the birth of our modern, contemporary culture.”

Luhrmann meticulously explored the Gatsby text and Fitzgerald’s other writings, in particular the author’s first draft of The Great Gatsby, titled Trimalchio (a tribute to the famous Roman party-giver who appears in the Roman novel Satyricon).

He wanted to be faithful to the book and the epoch and also to make the story accessible for a new generation. Using contemporary music for the soundtrack – collaborating with groundbreaking artist and executive producer Shawn “Jay Z” Carter – was an integral part of this weave.

“We wanted to allow people to feel what it would have felt like to live in that incredibly modern time, when the world was being born and everyone was so young and so beautiful and so drunk and so crazy and so rich and living like that,” Pearce says.

“We wanted it to feel exactly how it would feel to us to be going to the most amazing nightclub in the world and driving the fastest car you’ve ever driven. We had to make some decisions early on about what music we’d use, and how to present the story using music.”

It was a page out of Fitzgerald’s own storytelling playbook. In Gatsby, he included mroe than 70 popular songs in his writings, including the 1922 number one hit Three O’Clock In The Morning.

Luhrmann recalls one of the highlights of the experience, when he was staying in a suite at the Ace Hotel, where many of the surrounding buildings were built in Fitzgerald’s time. “There was a bay window, New York was outside, and Leonardo sat down in the window, and literally there was someone playing a trumpet somewhere, or something... it was so Fitzgerald,” recalls Luhrmann.

“Leonardo just started reading and Tobey (Maguire) started reading, and then suddenly the sun set and Tobey read Nick’s final line, ‘So we beat on, borne back, ceaselessly into the past’. I remember Leonardo just clapping, and I clapped, and off we all went on this journey, into Fitzgerald and into his story and his time and place, as well as into our own.”

Although much of the research and writing process took place in New York most of the film was shot at Sydney’s Fox Studios in Australia, with 1920s New York carefully recreated in great detail, from the most lavish sets, including the magnificent homes of Gatsby and the Buchanans, to the smallest props.

Luhrmann directed the feature in 3D, in order to bring Gatsby’s world to life in a way that has never been done before.

Martin sees 3D as a very natural progression for the film-maker. “He’s always trying to break down the barrier between the story and the audience, and this is just another way of allowing the audience into the world, of taking down that wall and getting them to feel as if they’re actually in the room with the characters.”

The director believes the author might have approved. “One of the things about Fitzgerald is that in all of his work he was really interested in modern technique. He was interested in cinema, in writing screenplays, in new music, in popular culture – he really gave things a go. He went about making novels in a very different way.”

• The Great Gatsby (12A) is now showing in cinemas