The Louis Theroux Podcast - S2 EP2: Baz Luhrmann on his iconic ‘Red Curtain’ Trilogy, living in Graceland, and his enduring love of clubbing

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

In this episode, Louis meets Baz Luhrmann, the iconic director, auteur and self-described ‘Stanley Kubrick of Confetti’. Dialling in from the Gold Coast in Australia, Baz tells Louis about his remarkable life and career, including trying to reinvent the musical, living in Graceland whilst making ‘Elvis’, and his enduring love of clubbing. Warnings: Strong language and adult themes.  Links/Attachments:  ‘Strictly Ballroom’ (1992) – Trailer  https://youtu.be/lxprz6gOmpg?feature=shared  ‘Romeo + Juliet’ (1996) – Trailer  https://youtu.be/8VOAxzgq42A?feature=shared  ‘Moulin Rouge!’ (2001) – Trailer https://youtu.be/LVLjp3_MQIw?feature=shared  ‘Australia’ (2008) – Trailer  https://youtu.be/mfI4hK9I2k0?feature=shared  ‘The Great Gatsby’ (2013) – Trailer  https://youtu.be/rARN6agiW7o?feature=shared  ‘The Get Down’ – Trailer  https://youtu.be/FYcVrWDOiao?feature=shared  ‘Elvis’ (2022) – Trailer  https://youtu.be/vzNTHEXlw3o?feature=shared  Faraway Downs (2023) – Trailer  https://youtu.be/uZEbJQ3Kk7U?feature=shared  Adrian Sibley’s 2001 documentary on Baz ‘The Show Must Go On’ – BBC 2  https://adriansibley.com/The-Show-Must-Go-On  ‘Grease’ (1978) – Trailer https://youtu.be/qDKo8DNpwOw?feature=shared  ‘The Prince musical so disastrous it was never revealed: the story of I’ll Do Anything’ – The Independent  https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/ill-do-anything-musical-cut-watch-james-l-brooks-prince-nick-nolte-polly-platt-a9700661.html  ‘Top Hat’ (1935) – Trailer  https://youtu.be/-2KEhDYrVbw?feature=shared  ‘The Sound of Music’ (1965) – Trailer  https://youtu.be/UY6uw3WpPzY?feature=shared  ‘Saturday Night Fever’ (1977) – Trailer  https://youtu.be/i5tBXe0kSLA?feature=shared    Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mya, P!nk – Lady Marmalade – Music video  https://youtu.be/RQa7SvVCdZk?feature=shared  The Mask (A Mime) – David Bowie  https://youtu.be/ss51eLEeJuY?feature=shared  Baz Luhrmann interviews Elvis Presley’s childhood friend Sam Bell – EP Fan Archive https://youtu.be/LrFCyNMvZWk?feature=shared  ‘Alexander’ (2004) – Trailer  https://youtu.be/Bh6LKIdxqCU?feature=shared  Elvis Presley – Are You Lonesome Tonight?  – 1968 Live performance  https://youtu.be/LF5u7b8pAYQ?feature=shared  Credits: Producer: Millie Chu  Assistant Producer: Maan Al-Yasiri  Production Manager: Francesca Bassett  Music: Miguel D’Oliveira  Executive Producer: Arron Fellows     A Mindhouse Production for Spotify  www.mindhouse.co.uk  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi! Too loud? Hi, Louis Theroux here. How are you doing? Welcome to my Spotify podcast called The Louis Theroux Podcast. So today we're speaking to a legend of cinema. Yes, that's no exaggeration. His name is Baz Luhrmann and, well, he's a big name. So it's a privilege to have him on. He's an Australian film director, producer, writer and auteur known for his maximalist, over-the-top style. He is the most

commercially successful Australian director in history. Sit with that. Best known for his so-called Red Curtain Trilogy, which we discussed in the interview, which includes his debut film Strictly Ballroom 1992, his iconic adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, starring a young Leonardo DiCaprio in the titular role, and his remarkable all-singing, all-dancing 2001 spectacle Moulin Rouge. It was while working on Strictly Ballroom that he met his lifelong creative partner and wife, Catherine Martin, or CM. You'll hear Baz referring to her as CM throughout the conversation. you'll hear Baz referring to her as CM throughout the conversation but in addition he's also made The Great Gatsby, Australia with Hugh Jackman and most recently Elvis which if you haven't seen is a lush incredible deeply emotional cinematic adventure in case you don't know, Moulin Rouge follows an English poet, Christian, played by Ewan McGregor, who falls in love with the star of the Moulin Rouge,

cabaret artist and courtesan Satine, played by Nicole Kidman. Nicole Kidman also stars in Baz's historical epic, Australia, which he has reinvented as a six-part series for Disney+. Reinvented or basically recut. In lockdown, he just got all the rushes of which there were like hours and hours. And he decided to recut it as a series, feeling maybe that would do justice to the material in a more complete way. It came out in November of last year, 2023. So that really was the peg for the interview. And he had some familiarity with my programs and was kind enough to say that he enjoyed some of them. We recorded remotely.

I was in the Spotify headquarters in London. Baz was beaming in from his office in the Gold Coast in Australia, or Goldie Wood, as he calls it. He arrives on my screen, appearing behind a green tile, turning his camera off and then appearing suddenly. He's had a bit of work done. I don't think he'd mind me saying that. So I compliment him on his appearance. And I think he looks about 10 years younger than me at this point, which given that he's about at least 10 years older

than me, seems slightly unfair, but there we are. Warnings, strong language and adult themes. Oh, and I have a very croaky voice i think i might have had covid i tested it said negative i don't believe it because it stuck around for about four weeks plus it was 8 a.m i'd come in early because of the time difference but i promise it sort of gets better through the episode i sound like a cross between hen Henry Kissinger and a rusty hinge. Not funny. All of that and much, much more coming up. 1, 2, 1, 2, mic number 1, mic number 1. Okay.

Louis. Hey. Where's that voice coming from? I'm from the green tile. I'm going to fade in. You ready? Boom, boom. Oh, my God. That's incredible. I mean, to fade in. You ready? Boom, boom. Oh, my God.

That's incredible. I mean, cinema magic. Wow. Cinema magic. That was phenomenal. That was like the Wizard of Oz, very appropriately, coming out of a green, out of, well, the Emerald City, isn't it? Yeah, a green.

Well, I'm a bit north of the Emerald City. I think we call Sydney the Emerald City. Is it? Well. You're in the Gold Coast. Yeah, I'm in the Gold Coast, not so Emerald. You look amazing. Cinema lighting, you know.

Sit with that compliment for a bit. Thank you, though. How does that feel? You know, nice. I mean, I'm not sure it's my healthiest day because, you know, a lot going on, but thank you i will simp with that compliment and i thank you for it and i know you've got a lot going on and that's why i appreciate you taking time to do this i'm a huge fan and um you know like the rest of the world and for me to sit down

with you and and also the pleasure of sort of immersing myself in your films as i have done over the last week in preparation for this has been um a privilege and something i've enjoyed and also as you can hear i've got a slight voice i apologize you're okay you've got a cold or something i mean i'm i'm circling the drain as they say like i'm oh i don't know that expression what does that mean i know some a porn star said that to me one time right he goes and you and it time. Right. And it always stuck. Flipping the drain. It always stuck.

Yeah, basically just stuck as a phrase, like a rogue hair going down the plug hole, getting ever closer. That's a good description of my life sometimes. I feel like I'm a rogue hair going down the plug hole. And by the way, so last night I watched a documentary that was made about you in 2001, and it was a BBC documentary directed by a man called Adrian Sibley called The Show Must Go On.

Yeah, I remember Adrian. He was such a fascinating character. And actually, I'll tell you a little anecdote about it, Louis. So Adrian started out, his whole idea was, you know, it was Moulin Rouge time and I'm going to do the story of you and how you got to wanting to reinvent the musical. That was his whole gesture. And he, honestly, he became embedded is the word they use now.

Literally. Like you were in bed. That's not a metaphor. I forgot that. You gave him access, the kind of documentary person such as myself. I'm like, holy cow. Like you didn't roll out the red carpet. You rolled out the red pajamas

well you know who wants to be in bed with bazzy but the point is that if you knew adrian he he was kind of like in a charming way and you should know something about this by the way i didn't say i'm a fan of yours and one of the things i really love about the work you have done in your series is that you do these really compelling, fascinating worlds. I'm interested in worlds. And you do the characters in them. But you find a kind of empathetic way of connecting with them.

You know, so we're not getting the, you know, here is the tropey or they're all nasty people. You kind of, I always think with anything that you find distaste for, you can't agree with, trying to understand where the character's coming from. Like, what are they, why? Why do they think like that? So you do a wonderful job of that. Adrian sort of was more, his whole thing was kind of like the journey,

but he became so fascinated by the act of selling the film, like what you went through. And remember with my films, maybe a little less now, but then it always began with reinvent the musical. You've got to be kidding. That'll never work, you know? And I mean, Moulin Rouge was kind of DOA, you know, there was a skit on SNL about what a preposterous idea it was. Very funny by the way, I have to say it was hilarious hilarious. Before it came out, you know, so, you know, normally I do these things when the film comes out. So, you know, you can see in that documentary I'm basically fighting tooth

and nail to get an audience in. And he became really fascinated by this and obsessed with it. And he stayed with this right to the end. There was a period, I think, in the story where Fox won't fund us to go into Texas. And I said, well, we're going, you know. And he comes along and all that stuff. So he became really wrapped up in the whole PR quest.

And in those days, they were vast. Elvis was quite vast, but in those days, they were just like 15 cities in 15 days, you know. Well, your work ethic, as evidenced in the documentary, is extraordinary. You're endlessly getting up at sort of 3 evidenced in the documentary is extraordinary you're endlessly getting up at sort of three or four in the morning doing these junkets where you are doing back-to-back interviews just to get some energy behind this beautiful film that you've made that you're

worried no one will go and see and as you say in the film which you just referred to like this feeling of like each time i come out there's these doubters like they say like that'll never work you know you can't do Shakespeare, ballroom dancing. Forget it. Right, right. And so you're starting from a standing start. And I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I was really impressed with how personally staked you were.

It wasn't like, I've made my film, my movie. If they don't get it, they can fuck off. You know what I mean? I admire that, by the way. I admire French auteurs. I love the way they say, well, I've made it, so they can fuck off. You know what I mean? I admire that, by the way. I admire French auteurs. I love the way they say, well, admit it, then you can fuck off. But, I mean, I wish I had the – I don't know. You know what?

In truth, I don't really wish that. You are who you are, and you communicate the way you do. And I'm not faking it. I mean, I do like people. I think in that part of it, it's almost like therapy. You're talking to 100 people, and I really make the effort to try and find something to connect with. I picked up on that and it made me feel encouraged about our conversation, which naturally I'd been thinking about, oh, I hope it goes okay. And

you know, I wonder if Baz will feel like I've understood his movies and all the rest of it. And then I thought, actually, that seems like someone who he tries to get something out of the encounter right yeah like he's actually looking to connect with someone i really do which i think is the best place to come to a conversation from well louis think about it i mean when you make things and i make things so rarely and they take years and then you come out and it's a bit like a baby and you're out there trying to make sure the baby isn't like clubbed to death like a baby seal by commentators who don't get it you know and i don't really have personal anger against that i just am aware you know like you can say not my cup of tea but this is what i'm seeing but i i have to leap over that and get to the audience and um it's so intense

and it happens for such a long time that if you weren't getting something out of it, you're going to end up wasting three months of your life. Yeah. And I like people. I'm interested in people. I always have been. I grew up in this tiny, isolated place. And on the gas station, you know, people just used to come in and go out.

It was like a bit like living on an island. And I think from that moment on just being the gas kid serving the petrol and I've always found even today you know there are a lot of thrilling things that go with the work but I think the thing I still find becoming is actually just watching people in a street like if it's in Paris or somewhere or whatever, coffee, watch, becomes me. Do you remember saying during the making of that documentary, I honestly think by the end of doing this film, I could stop this now.

Yeah. You say, I've committed to becoming a recluse in seven years. That's right. It's over. It's finished. I'm gone. Yeah. And I'm behind schedule, Louis.

I'm behind schedule because that was 20 years ago. What was that all about? Oh, well, when you're making them, I'm always thinking, I guess it's a paradox. They're so absorbing and you're only in that world you've built your own universe and generally i'm making a film about a creative world you know an immaculate reality as kurosawa would describe a world and i paradoxically kind of love the escape into it but towards the end and particularly in the selling part of it you do lose your center a bit in the communication part of it because when you're talking about it or

sharing the story when you're making it that's one thing when you're just talking about it and over and over again it is a bit maddening I mean you and you have the jet lag and you're a bit crazy and I do think to myself this is it I always make it with the attitude of this is the last one I'm going to do. I don't have the attitude. I just feel like that. And I really believe it. I really believe it. But not to be obtuse about it. But like, if it's the selling that's most draining, could you not sort of do Stanley Kubrick and just sort of make the films. By the way, your level of investment in every aspect of filmmaking is reminiscent of Kubrick a bit. And also the demands that it makes on your time being such that you're not as productive as like some guy like Steven Soderbergh or whatever,

who's kind of putting a movie out a year, right? But I just wondered whether you could just make the films and then say, pat him on the bum and send him out into the world. Yeah. Well, by the way, I think I might've have said it but at some point on the eldest tour the phrase was coined the stanley kubrick of confetti that's who i am i love that um yeah i think i might have said it but um but but actually lou, to answer your question, I think the works which have their language and their subjects are always unlikely subjects to be successful. Like even Elvis, there was a lot of prediction by those that predict that it would fail and no one would see it because, you know, Elvis was a dead, pop-culturally dead as a subject.

Young people weren't interested and so on and so forth. And this doesn't really worry me because I see that as my job is to decode these subjects that are maybe seen as cheesy or not that interesting or not that present in popular culture and to make them, to sort of flip them over, shake the rust off them and make them live again. That's a lot of my drive. So once I've done it, though, I don't think I can leave the normal mechanisms

to getting it out there and getting through the always divided critical response. I mean, there's no middle ground. There's always very extreme one way, very extreme the other. So I've always felt that responsibility of doing that. I truly believe it's not over, as they like to say, probably an inappropriate catchphrase now, but let's say it's not over till the soprano sings. Okay, I love that.

It's not over till it's over. Like one thing I do is when I, and you might have seen it in Siblings documentary, I can't remember because it's 20 20 years old but I mean I do sort of road shows you know I do these kind of eventized them and put the films out there and we'll put some of the music there's always a lot of music in it so I bring the music to the eventizing and and we're involved in the development of the campaigns even like before I make the films because I always thought coming from a cinema background and a theater background the first time you see a poster or a one sheet or hear a piece of music before you've gone to the film that compels you to go into the theater to take that risk on a Friday or Saturday night or whenever you go I always feel that's when the show actually starts because the beckoning, the symbol,

the lodestone, these things that draw you towards it, it's the beginning of the experience. I'm always personally involved in that very early on. That's interesting. So it's not just about a movie. It's about a meta narrative around a movie that's a production in its own right that gets people excited, gets their juices flowing. I mean, you know what? It's an interesting thing you say that because I would have sort of denied it completely some years ago. Oh, no, no, no.

Only because I think my self-consciousness about the way I go about telling stories and the way I go about building these worlds and, you know, can really undermine you. But I think what you're getting at is someone said, for the first time, I said on this tour I did before the Oscars, right? They said, oh, you were like a method director. And I sort of laughed it off. But I think if I'm really honest, part of the reason i do this is to completely escape into the world of the film and to make the world of the film i build a creative world around me where i like to think my job is to keep fear out of that environment so that the actors and every artist involved and everyone involved can flourish and do their best at telling the story. And I see that as my responsibility. The other quote, I'm going to stop throwing quotes at you in a second,

but since we're on this, half of America want this film dead, half the critical forces in America want this film burnt because it confronts the current religion of cinema. I mean, I was a pretty intense, I mean, I say I'm a young thing, I was probably 40 then, but I was, you know, intense at 40, probably more intense at 20. But there's some truth in that. You know, for the general audience, I should sketch in the fact that you were promoting Moulin Rouge, an amazing kind of bonkers over the top cinematic spectacle that's

a musical, and which as we're reminded in the documentary there'd been no successful musical in cinemas since greece in 19 like 76 or 77 yeah and in fact there'd been a high profile flop when james l brooks had released a movie called i'll do anything oh yeah where it tested so badly they had prince's. They took all the songs out of it and then released it as a musical with no music. So you're coming into this environment where it's like, you know, someone's just tried to fly to the moon with homemade wings and failed.

And you're like, okay, but I think I can do it. Do you know what I mean? That sounds like a great idea. The moon, no wings. Yeah, yeah. He just wasn't flapping hard enough. Exactly. So in that sense, yeah.

But why did that mean? I mean, if you expand beyond that, though, it was confronting the religion of cinema, not just that you can't do musicals. It was something obviously bigger than that, right? Yeah, I think I mean the religion of cinema at that time. I mean, people I really trusted, people who know something about musicals,

who were big in L. in LA were going like, I don't think you can make them work again. They were just a construct of that period. And it wasn't that I was arrogant. I just from the get-go went, no, if you look at the archaeological dig on musicals, they fit their language, their cinematic language to the period they're in so if you go back to the 30s fred and ginger are in venice in top hat and it's a gloss floor and some drapes and the

orchestra just kicks up and they sing so that's the 30s when you start to move towards the 50s it's that but there's a bit more realism there's's a bit more ins and outs. You get to the 60s, Sound of Music, one of the biggest musicals of all time. You know, there are some scenes shot outdoors in the real world. You know, Julie Andrews runs to the top of a real hill and sings The Hills Are Alive with Sound of Music. You know, there are even Nazis in that film. If you get to the 70s, now the music has to be, unless it's an ironic piece of irony like Grease, the music has to be in a realist setting, like cabaret. That's a Greek chorus. The music on stage comments on the action that's taking place in the story. In the same period, and I

was just revisiting this for different reasons the other night but saturday night fever which i consider to be a musical people think of that as like oh yeah john travolta and his amazing dance sequences but actually if you look at the film it's incredibly shocking i mean they use the c word in it there's a gang reign travolta and his friends are not particularly likable people there's stuff in it you just would not have in a movie today. And they just happen to go to the local disco and for a few hours they're peeled up drunken heroes, you know. That's the 70s.

So I was trying to find through my own studies and my own explorations and with my collaborators, you know, from the get-go with Craig Pierce and writing it and, you know, with CM, Catherine Martin. I developed the music language and the visual language along with writing the script to do it at the same time, a language that could work for this time and this place. But what I never thought ever was that the musical could not work again i just thought that was a no-brainer the question was how did you make it work but have you answered the question probably not which was

in this i'm good by the way that was that was fascinating but i just wondered whether if it was a sense from the critical community that he's violating what we consider to be acceptable cinema, right? What would that be? Just that it was too camp to top to camp. All that. I mean, all of those things.

And I lean into it. Like when I'm doing a Milan Rouge, I kind of do put on a top app. I mean, not literally, but I lean into the energy and something of the world of the show. Cause I'm living it, but I'm also communicating it.

It was a bit like with Elvis, I got a bit more sparkly shirts on, you know, but the thing is that back then, actually, Louis, you're reminding me of something. Check this out. This might explain it to you. Do you know that there was such a division when Moulin Rouge came out? And, I mean, I'm always in a tussle. I'm not usually. I can be in real simpatico with

the studio in terms of how we communicate the film but i got into a bit of a tussle with the then head of the studio or the person and i think you'll find the trailer to monroge has no singing in it and the other thing was there can be no hats and no beers which is pretty hard in the you know turn of the century musical in the 1890s. Everyone had a hat and a beard. Are you serious? They said you can't have hats and beards in the what? In the trailer?

Yeah. No hats and no beards. No singing. That's insane. So I'm just pointing that out to try and put your head in just how divisive Moulin Rouge was. And then what really happened, we came out, we did pretty good in the US. We were solid. But then we drive towards Oscar and

we really get heavily nominated. And that brings it back. So by the time in those days, it came out on Blu-ray. It really blew up. Like we did great internationally. And the soundtrack was, I was i mean you know we put that track together jimmy iban was the head of the label then and he was like you know about this guy basler i'm just gonna do this musical and you know i love jimmy and jimmy said i'm throwing the dice and said i'm spending real money with the vision he's got for the music and we put together those four young artists i mean christ Christina Aguilera was known, no one had really heard of Pink, Maya and Lil' Kim and that record played all summer and that drove the movie.

I do remember that. That was Lady Marmalade, which became the sound of the summer, didn't it? It really did. It still played to this day. I got to work with some of my icons. Elton John led the charge before we were filming, played to this day. And, you know, I got to work with some of my icons. I mean, Elton John led the charge before we were filming,

giving us permission to do things with music no one had ever done before. Like this whole conceit, the preposterous conceit that Christian. The Ewan McGregor, the protagonist, yep. Who has a genius for writing poetry, right, who sings all the numbers himself. But when he opens his mouth, out come popular songs. And we all go, oh, that song, isn't it funny? Now, the films are constructed to be a bit silly in the beginning, and that is a disarming device.

Whether you like it or not, I'm trying to be silly and fast. So you're sort of trying to catch up and you're disorientated a little bit so that when the contract signing moment comes, which is in Moulinan rouge i think it's when they dance across the sky and he says you know you're going to be bad for business and she falls in love with him you're either 100 into that movie or you're not you're going to buy in or you're not and they all have this what i call contract signing moment for the audience um we've referred to this but you know each film is distinctive you know your first film which i saw at the time i watched it again yesterday

is uh strictly ballroom yeah which was a quirky i hate that word quirky but it's quirky a beautiful film about ballroom dancing in an area of australia and sort of camp and very funny and then you came back to a few years ago with Romeo and Juliet a Shakespeare kind of reversioning and then Moulin Rouge and then we've you know in no particular order Gatsby and Australia and Elvis and but each one feels like something different while being infused with a unique sensibility that's all yours but I just wonder if you had to identify what gets you excited about a project you know what is it that makes you think this is worth spending five years on well louis you've got me at a very interesting moment because i'm going through

what i call my process and i've always got ideas and shows and pieces somewhat developed or treated or scribbled away in a drawer i mean mean, that's a bit of a metaphor. And then I look for two parts. One is I kind of go on these journeys of washing off, if you like, or disconnecting from the world and the work that I do to try and reconnect with what the audience is and what's going on in the world. In the old days, I would have made a joke about it and pretended it didn't really happen, but it actually really needs to

happen. Unless I'm actually on my own for a while, having to get my own train ticket, finding myself in a little bit of trouble where I'm going, then I go through a process of going, okay, well, what underlying story, what kind of story do I need to tell that's going to be useful to me? And then I usually start to build a world to set it in, or like in the case of Romeo and Juliet, I just always thought, well, having studied Shakespeare, loved Shakespeare, if Shakespeare was making a movie, how would he do that? What would he go about doing? And I was just trying to translate Shakespearean mechanics and devices into a cinematic form. Strictly Borum is slightly different.

And then I did it, devised it with a group of other students as a very short play while I was at the drama school at NIDA. Believe it or not, when we did that, it was about the Cold War. That's how long ago it was, more than 30 years ago. Actually, we took it to Czechoslovakia before Glasnost. It was before the Soviet Union had dissolved and we had all these kind of Brechtian moments in it. And actually, we won the competition. At some point, Bulgaria and all these satellite countries ran on stage and said, you know, bravo, Brickley-Borin, bravo, Bulgaria,

because they could sort of read the metaphor in it that was about throwing off oppression. And when you say Brickley-Borin, just to pick your... Oh, my God, what's that? Is that you, Louis? Is that me? A test of the fire alarm system will now be conducted. Oh, my God. Louis, this...

You're so theatrical, Louis. This, my God. Louis. You're so theatrical, Louis. This concludes the test. Don't help. Thank you for your attention. How about that? And then the screen melted, the microphone plopped off, there was smoke, and that was the last I saw of you. Tributes to the documentary maker Louis Theroux

being led by Baz Luhrmann, the last man to speak to him as he perished in a fire at the Spotify headquarters. Thank you for having me here today. It's a very special moment. I mean, if the world's going to end, what better way to do it than to be speaking to a genius auteur, filmmaker. When you said Brechtian moments, see, I haven't missed a beat. I've been listening, even though...

With a fire raging. The flames were licking the door. I know. With a fire raging, I was going to pick you up on the phrase Brechtian moments. Yeah. What does that mean? What I meant was that during the play, I was in it actually. And we would stop in the middle of the play, which was about overcoming oppression, you know, and about creative oppression. There's

an all powerful president. He's saying there's only one way to cha-cha-cha. And, you know, there's a talented guy and he has to step outside the world. He meets the ultimate outsider, and together they find their own form of dance, and they have a sort of dance revolution. Right? But in the play, we used to stop and play, and I had these – this is so crazy. I used to have tapes in it, audio tapes, and they were of, like,

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and Reagan would go, Semper Fi. And then we'd suddenly stop and go, fuck the Federation. We actually would turn to the audience and go, fuck the Federation. Everyone would applaud like, oh, I get it. How meta. You stepped outside the world within the world

and you're making a Brechtian comment. It's a sort of Brechtian device. And we took that out of the movie, but you know. I mean, that was super helpful, but I'm just wondering whether, I don't know if that's really answered the question, which is, so you've got sort of desk drawer of ideas, concepts, you go out in the world, you get back in touch with just daily life. Are we kind of talking about the daily struggles, the grit of day--to-day reality how do you know that an idea is really worth committing to yeah well okay i hear you stay on the point that you see i try to do that with my movies i try to do that with my movies i struggle um well i'm not i'm not trying to get back into daily life

look when you do what i do and when you're in the place i am in my journey you know when you're making a movie you don't open a door you know it's not that you're lazy it's just that there's so many people around you that do everything and you're just committed to helping tell the story get the shots get the actors to be within you know help them help everyone and to sort of drive the process on every level. You know, they are round the clock experiences. You lose touch with some of the most basic things that you need to do. You just do because they take so long to make. And so getting out there and going, okay, I'm going to take a backpack and a credit card and I'm going to turn

up the airport and buy the next ticket and deal with wherever I go. I've actually done that, you know, because, you know, I'm not that visually recognizable. My name is, I'm not getting a free ride on everything, you know, so I have to work stuff out myself. So I sort of get back to that. Also, I'm left alone with my thoughts and my feelings and I have music and stuff like that. For example, after Moulin Rouge, I went on the Trans-Siberian Express out of Beijing, and it wasn't the fancy one. It was this tin box. And I'm going through Manchuria, Mongolia, not Ulaanbaatar, which is kind of touristy, but there was nobody on that train.

And the first few days, I was like, what was I thinking? And there was like this, you know, rattling air conditioner, and this babushka goes, you know, you use rubber hose, go have a shower down there. You know, I'm like, this is not what I was looking for. And I thought, hang on, I can, I got this. I got, I'm stuck. So I fixed the air conditioner. a new technology called an iPod that had speakers, a bottle of Aussie red wine.

And I opened the red wine and I put on the iPod and there were two talking books and one of them was The Great Gatsby. And I put it on and I pour the wine. I get in bed, I'm warm now and I'm looking at Siberia flicking by. You know, in my younger and more blah, blah, blah days and three hours go by and I'm thinking, wow, I really think this could be a film. I'd love to do this as a film. And I tucked that away in my mind,

and I think probably the next one I do is Australia for various reasons because I was working on Alexander the Great, and trouble came with that, and we were having children. And then I do Australia so the kids have some Australian roots, and that's when I returned to Gatsby afterwards. Is that answering the question, Louis? I feel like I'm still off the point. You didn't really answer it, but I find it interesting that you struggle to answer it.

I think you're so inside your process that it's almost instinctive with you in terms of what the material is that you connect with. I mean, what I noticed about your films is that perhaps the most successful ones are almost about filmmaking in a funny way, or at least they're about this. I'm going to get in trouble. I'm on thin ice with this. But I see certain overlaps in terms of how you approach the stories, but also the grammar of them and how you seem to have the most fun when you're dealing with multiple layers of reality. Yes. Where this Elvis is on stage, but he's also in his hotel room struggling, but he's also as a young man discovering music for the first time.

And so he's performing himself. He's discovering himself. And you're able to intercut these different experiences of reality, but also these different representations of reality. And it's of in strictly ballroom as well it's sort of in gatsby as well where you have so much fun with the performances and and i think you said earlier about talking about connecting with worlds there's this evocation of very lush worlds where um you allow you to operate in different idioms at the same time whether it it's sort of flappers dancing to Jay-Z's music on top of... Anyway, I don't know if any of that kind of resonates with you.

No, no, Louis, it completely makes sense. I mean, to me, it's... I wouldn't say prosaic, but it's absolutely, I guess, what I'm going for. Because, first of all, you take Romeo and Juliet. I'm quite often, not that I expect everyone to get it, but I'm quoting different periods of movies in it. So there's always pop cultural quotations to help decode for the widest possible audience, something that might be considered boring to them or not interesting. The one selfish job I do is choose something that I think is going

to be useful to me. And then that's the last selfish thing I do. After that, it's only about how will this connect with the audience? How can I make sure I don't exclude anyone from the journey? To the best of my ability, you're going to exclude someone. And all of that layering, you're absolutely right. That's the right word. And I make the movies without question so that they can be seen more than once. And if you look at most of them, in fact, all of them, you pretty much know how they're going to end when they begin. It isn't that we hide the ending. It isn't that I aren't flipping

or playing with melodrama. I'm taking all sorts of old mechanisms and old storytellings and old tropes, and I like to sort of flip them and layer with them. And whether that's right or wrong, I don't do it to annoy scholars. I do it because I think that's a way of taking something that may not immediately seem exciting and exciting an audience with it and engaging an audience with it. And also all of them have a larger point to them, whether you can intellectually grasp that or you just feel it. And I see that as my job.

I hope that makes sense, Luke. That made perfect sense. But now I have to ask, what do you think the larger point is? Sure. Is that something that you've formulated to yourself? Or is that across the films or in each individual film? Each individual film has a larger point to it. Go on.

We'll pick one. What's the larger point of Elvis? Oh, I think the thing with Elvis is while we're using a real life as a canvas, using a real life as a canvas, I would say that we are exploring the underlying Greek myth of flying too close to the sun. And that is born of incredible humiliation and a feeling of being not worthy because his father goes to jail. because his father goes to jail. He finds his gift, his superpower,

and he invents the character of Elvis Presley. And then when he meets the colonel, the colonel amplifies this and they fly together, both of them, until there's no cap on their achievement. I mean, when he becomes the highest paid actor in Hollywood and the colonel says, I'll deliver that to you. The only problem is that when you fly too close to the Sun your wings melt. What goes up must come down and it's a curious thing. I don't really talk about it much but because we always want our icons to be eternal,

eternally youthful, just one more album. You know, it's very hard, as Elvis says, to be an image of a man as opposed to being a man. We don't want them to have flaws, you know. And that kind of eats itself. I mean, Elvis isn't just a singer or a popular singer, or Michael Jackson or Prince. There's a few of them that are just culture. You know, they're bigger than being a pop icon. And when you're at that level, you can't really peel your face off. You know, the character of Elvis ends up becoming something you cannot escape. Is it also, though, that thinking about stories in terms of protagonists and antagonists and in The Colonel, you have this devious, machinating, dark, ugly, sort of vampiric person who's preying upon Elvis and Elvis, who has all the talent. And this almost transcendent ability to connect with audiences is nevertheless sort of enslaved, you know, without him fully realizing it.

is nevertheless sort of enslaved, you know, without him fully realizing it. So there's, I mean, just in terms of how I react to it as just one member of the audience among millions, but this feeling of, wow, I hope the good guy triumphs. Like I hope Elvis gets his revenge. And he sort of does, but in this ambiguous way, which is that everyone loves Elvis and everyone hates Colonel Tom Parker. But them as a dyad, the two of them, and allowing Parker to frame the film, I found that a very compelling tension at the heart of the film,

at the risk of stating the obvious. No, you know, Louis, one thing you say there, which is really, really important. I mean, you might have known who Colonel Tom Parker was, but I can tell you anyone in the street before I made this movie, I'd go Elvis, I'd go, oh, I know, the guy in the white suit. It doesn't matter how old they were. You just know he's that guy. He's important, like Marilyn Monroe.

Colonel Tom Parker, not so much. But from Parker's point of view, they were equal. And so I guess you're right, like right up to the end, as sad as it is, even though the body is corrupt, the voice still soars, and the voice and the song continues in some way through eternity. It stays with us. But Parker just dissolved away into kind of a footnote in show business. So when he's telling it, he's in the court of public opinion, morphed out in his head, he's arguing and by the way

all of that comes from like as much as the film seems somewhat fantastical it's all rooted in intense research and there's anything in that film i can point to a realist reference like i i had a space in graceland for 18 months you know i've got telegrams of Parker saying, if you don't sing a Christmas song in this special, you're over. So, you know, there's references to everything there. But it is that. And you know what's funny, Louis? Like in all the movies I made, it kind of occurs to me halfway

through them, but you could almost cast all the movies out of the same cast. There's always a Colonel or a Zeebler or a Barry Fife, you know, in there. There's this kind of Svengali control. Barry Fife, he's the corrupt. He was the president of the Whorem Dancing Federation. Yeah. There you go.

I mean, you know, Les, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You know, implausible toupee that he wears that starts flapping. Yeah. Too much. Louis, should i recut that bit that was perfect that was so good it was so good but that's really interesting what you said you could use the same cast because these are primal what do we say like primary myths they're underlying primary myths yeah that's the one sometimes i miss splice underneath like

i'll take like in strictly boring it's really the hero's journey so it's kind of the triumph of overcoming oppression it's spliced with the ugly duckling which is obviously a hans christian anderson fairy tale but people misunderstand that underlying story because it's not about going oh i take off my glasses and i become a swan. It's about self-revelation. Who are you really? But a lot of the pieces recently have been very Orphean. They're sort of Orphean journeys, you know? Oh, wow.

The idea of a gifted going into an underworld. The king of the underworld would be your Zedla, would be your colonel. Zedla is the Jim Broadbent character? Yeah. Who doesn't seem malevolent in the way that Curl Tom... The thing about Ziedler is he goes, oh, we're creatures of the underworld. We can't afford to love.

And I think that, like he is, he doesn't seem malevolent. But in the end, what he really cares about is the Moulin Rouge, you know? Right. Not about love. There's no room for love in here, lovey, you know. Hi, I'm Louis Theroux, and you're listening to the Louis Theroux Podcast. And now, back to my conversation with Bez Luhrmann. Let's talk about you growing up. You mentioned a gas station in this remote area, not too far from Sydney, I guess.

Was it that general? Yeah, it was many hours, but it was... Was it? Oh, yeah. It would have taken all day and maybe a part of a night to get to Sydney by car. So you were out in the boondocks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, it was a very tiny country town of about seven houses and it was absolutely minuscule. But at a certain point, my parents were very industrious and dad was like always, he built a restaurant and my mum had a dress shop. It was kind of bonkers. I mean, it was like,

in a way, a sort of caravan sire, which is, you know, where the camels would stop in the Sahara and there'd be all sorts of different things. And at some stage, I was selling tropical fish. I had my own shop and I was about 10. My older brother, he was selling, you know, horticulture flowers and things and my younger brother sold birds. And I mean, we did crazy stuff. Like now I think of it, five in the morning, we'd get up with dad

and we'd, you know, get the gas station going and then we'd go water skiing and, you know, there'd be like commando training and ballroom dancing. We went ballroom dancing. This is the big thing.

And he'd travel as like hours and hours at night to go and do ballroom dancing lessons. And that's where I got into the world of ballroom dancing as a very young kid. And it always stuck with me in my back of my head

as a great world. The town was called heron's creek is that right yeah heron's creek we now i think of it it was very popular road stop and people would stop in and dad built this small snack bar called len's international snack bar and we probably served burgers and some real international dessert like banana split you know and there was a supermarket you know and it it was kind of a little bit fantastical so i sort of imagine this idea of world building may just have naturally been in me anyway it was probably what i knew build your own

world were you watching a lot of cinema were you listening what was your cultural diet yeah yeah a lot a lot well mom was into the theatre. She used to go into the next biggest town and do the theatre. But dad was so about us not missing out on education. But we also, for a short time, ran the local cinema. So we had two things. Dad taught me how to use a photographer. He met my mother through photography.

So I had a straight-A Bolex and he taught me how to use a box brownie and i printed and started making movies when i was extremely young i mean i was just like 11 or something and dad knew how to thread a projector from the vietnam war so we ran the cinema and i'd be sitting there in the bio box like cinema paradisio you know heron's creek style um watching movies like law of Arabia and Hello Dolly and these things leave an imprint on you, you know? Were those particularly revelatory? Like when you identify moments, I mean, it's always dangerous in hindsight.

When I saw Citizen Kane, you know, scales fell from my eyes. But what were the things you kept going back to or that you felt like, this is mine, you know, this is my special thing that speaks to me well when i saw citizen kane scales fell from my eyes um oh jesus well i'm sorry louis you know you shouldn't put it in my mind that was one of them but i'll tell you something that's a bit of an anomaly. So we had black and white television. It was such cheap. It was one channel, maybe two, ABC like the BBC, and one other channel.

Very, very cheap movie packages were given to this channel in the 70s, and they were considered films that nobody wanted. And they were, in fact, great films of the 50s. They would be films like The red shoes or citizen kane and these films which we now revere or musicals old musicals so i saw a lot of it on television and then when i went to the cinema like i mean there'd be things like frogs the horror movie or a biker film chrome and hot leather yeah you're probably not really those classics. But like Hello Dolly or Sound and Music, every Sunday we had an Elvis musical. Really? Yeah, and I think, look, I'm so not about self-analysis.

I'm going to do that in a film one day because there was so much more that happened in that small town. But I will tell you, years later when I was exploring Alexander the Great and to sit with Steven Spielberg, name got made up, but, you know, good friend and really has all those directors of that era, from Francis to Steven to Marty Scorsese, incredibly supportive of We Were Then the New Generation, so supportive. So Steven projected his restored 70mm print that he did with David Lean.

You know what I mean? So think like a film you love and sing it like that, like the romance of the movies. Do you see yourself as being part of a peer group? Are there peers of yours that you think, oh, he's in a different lane, she's in a different lane, but I like it? Yeah. I mean, interestingly enough, when I did Strictly Ballroom,

we made the movie, we had one exhibitor, one cinema. And the guy who saw it, he was the first person to see a rough cut, left before it finished. He said, that is the worst movie I've ever seen. And we were just, of course, devastated. It was like straight to video. And I went with CM and a guy called Bill Marin who was in our team and we went up the coast. I'm cutting off my hair.

And I'll tell this quickly, Louis, because I'm getting to the grander point. And I'm in a caravan park up the coast and this woman comes and goes, Matt, there's a man on the phone from France. And I go to pick up the phone. I've got a bucket over my head because the night before a guy had been killed by a coconut that had fallen out of a tree. So I didn't want to get, you know, death by coconut. And on the phone, this guy goes,

Hello, my name is Monsieur Pierre Risson. I'm from the Cannes Film Festival, and I want to put you in in certain regard. And, you know, I said, Hey, I don't need to think about it. I'm there. We go to Cannes. I was on a panel the next day with first-time directors. And I'm pretty sure on that panel, I know that it was Quentin and I. Tarantino. Yeah. I know it was M. Night

Shyamalan, I'm pretty sure. Robert Rodriguez. And I was talking to Quentin about it not that long ago. And I was saying like, we kind of do the same thing same thing but he does he uses violence in a kind of expressionistic way and I do it with kind of musical numbers and confetti and you know that group all kind of had their own language but they did use some heightened language and they did tend to lean into irony and they were high concept they tended to make high concept movies and the new generation you know i was talking to the wonderful daniels who made everything everywhere all at once you know and they were saying like oh when we were setting out to do this we were going like

where are those really high concept movies from the early 2000s and when people say the early 2000s i'm gonna be like what are you talking about that was yesterday you know yeah but for them that was a long time ago so yeah i do have peers right was music important to you growing up yes obsessed and dad had a reel-to-reel tape recorder that he brought back from vietnam war and it had everything on it from like the beatles to tijuana brass to classical music opera. But then very early on, we were collecting vinyl records. I had a radio station, Louis. This is how ludicrous I was.

I mean, what a preposterous child, you know. I set up the radio station at the gas station, and I had two records. One of them was One is the Loneliest Number by John Farnham. And I used to sort of like talk on the radio going, it's Radio M-O-B-I-i-l and in a minute we'll go over to the sports desk and that was probably my younger brother reading from a newspaper about how the local football team lost that week but yeah i'm music crazy about it i'm just thinking that

obviously you're famous for your soundtracks for your attention to detail for loving music having made your own music and you know shout out to the sunscreen song which was an international sensation but generationally i feel as though well you would have been coming up and things like punk would have been in the ether or or you know the new wave and yeah disco or i'm not getting exactly i think you're about eight or nine years older than than me but you're also in a fairly remote area of Australia, so I'm not sure how much of that is getting through to you. Oh, look, 75 through to 77, and think I went on to make The Get Down,

which was the crossover in 77 between the birth of hip-hop. Disco was king. It was the biggest year ever in recorded history. And Flash, who I worked with really on that show, he was such a wealth of knowledge, just so great to be with. Grandmaster Flash, are we talking? Grandmaster Flash, who we worked with, and I loved being with Flash, still love him.

He's amazing. I mean, he invented DJing. He invented the sample. I mean, Herc had a lot to do with that, but he invented how to keep the beats going. But Flash said that the Cure, I think it was the Cure, they kind of thought like, hey, we're like you. We're sort of postmodern.

And Flash was like, what is that? You know? So there was this amazing crossover. So that kind of music. But I'll tell you what was big. I never won anything in my life and I won a cassette player. And they were a brand new invention and in a raffle on a ballroom dancing trip. I had one tape and it was Elton John's Crocodile Rock. And I just played it over and over and over again. So it was always a big soundtrack

in my life. But I'll tell you something, because as I grow up a little bit older, I go to high school and we had to travel two hours by bus to a school that was actually on the surf in Port Macquarie. So you go from the middle of the country to now we're on the surf. And it was an experimental school run by the Catholic church. So I did luck out in terms of it was quite, you lent into creativity in that school a bit or surfing, right? I'm not a good surfer. In fact, I can't surf. So you can imagine where I went. And I remember one night we stayed in town and dad took us to this friend of ours and I went downstairs and playing out and these older kids were there. And I heard this boom, boom, boom. And they were playing this music.

They said, oh, it's, yeah, that's David Bowie, mate. David Bowie. And I looked at the cover and I was kind of a bit frightened. And of course, I just became the greatest, so devoted to Bowie. He was so iconic. And years later, I worked with him. And then years, years later, we became good friends and he was very kind to my kids. And, you know, I was so lucky to have known him and to have worked with him. If there was a sense of fear, what was it? Just the otherness of his? Yeah, I think, well, well, dad had sort of, because he was Vietnam and he was really anti-hippie and anti like this alternate stuff, this punk stuff.

We'd see it in magazines, you know, it'd be like because we had paper rack, you know. We had magazines and comics, beside Buzz as well. So I'd be pouring through and there was like someone with like a safety pin through their mouth and razor blades and spiky hair. And they would be going, oh, my, the world is just going to like, what is that? What has happened?

You know. But I was a bit like, wow, I like that. I want to wear that, you know. And Bowie was just, I was a little bit scared, but I was very quickly into just like, and I think his androgyny and I think his theatricality and then years later you learn, you know, he'd studied with Lindsey Camp. And David does this amazing thing.

I don't know if you ever saw the DNA exhibition. I didn't see it. Oh, it was amazing. And there was one piece in it that i think explains what we were touching on with elvis and icons like that and he's doing mine he says you know when you're a little um a little tucker you know you put a mask on and you know you're very funny and all the adults go isn't he funny he's so funny and then later on you grow up you put the mask on and and they say look we'll give you some money if you do that and then you know more people

want more money and then you put the mask on and then you put the mask on and at the end of it he goes and then he and he can't get the mask off and then he suffocates and then he dies and that i think explains this flying too close to the sun, this success in being a projection of yourself, of being in a character and never breaking character and the character taking you over. And I think one of the wonderful things about David was that he recognized that early. And so he knew that he would get into different characters, that it was always a character. Do you still go out club always a character, you know. Do you still go out clubbing? Oh, a lot.

I grow old disgracefully, Louis. I do love social engagement and I do love the world of, I mean, look at my films. I obviously love the art of the party. You know, it's like Da Vinci, great artist. He really loved the art form of the party and the art form of the party. Leonardo Da Vinci. Yeah, yeah. He loved getting art form of the party. And the art form of the party is to get- Leonardo da Vinci. Yeah.

Yeah. He loved getting- Didn't he? That's news. I didn't know that. No. Big. That, war machines and sewage systems.

Siege engines and- No. Well, he did a bit of everything, didn't he? Yeah. He loved doing- But why would you say that he loved a party? He loved creating parties. But I don't think he went to them.

Really? He loved to create them. And I like that. There's an art form to getting district people to connect and then as far as the clubbing goes i just love music and dancing i mean i'm i'm not a great dancer like that i mean maybe no one wants to see an old chap like me out there dancing with too many sherries but it's my debrief when i'm not working when i'm working don't say that what's your self-taught what you just said nobody wants to see an old chap like myself out there dancing come on who's telling you that myself myself well i'm giving people fair warning but i i will say this i know what you mean though

about myself i sometimes catch a look at myself at a nightclub just that moment where you think i'm killing this everyone's looking at me thinking like he's nailing it like the moves i've got are the moves they wish they had and then you look in a way you catch yourself in i don't know you i'm not putting this on you but you know mirror and you're like who's that old dude who looks like he should be shuffling along the corridor of a memory support facility should i have lifted my arms that high above my shoulder but can i tell you honestly part of it is i do like to keep connected with new music that's coming up i mean i like all kinds of music and i you know i've actually made a lot of music and i've worked with the greatest artists in the world you know and it's such a variety from opera singers i mentioned david bowie

you know to the new like just recently on elvis i worked with a lot of new and up-and-coming artists. Who's on the scene now that you really like? Oh, well, listen, you've got to shout out to Taylor. I mean, yeah, you've just got to shout out to her as an artist. But, I mean, I also love what's happening in the K-pop space. I know a lot of producers in that space. I did a track for Elvis with G-Dragon. I think what JK did recently,

you know, in the song he's just put out there, that's exploded. He quotes Romeo and Juliet in the film clip. So, and he's- Wait, who's this? Who are we talking about? John Cook. John Cook.

I don't know John Cook. Well, he's got like a gigantuan smash album worldwide. I mean, you know, that's the sort of case, babe. Billy, do you know John Cook? Oh, jeez. Cut that bit out where I don't. I'll pretend that I know who he is. Where's he from?

Let's do it again. He's from BTS. We'll do it again. Ready? I love that new track by John. And you need to go. Oh, Standing Next To You is my favorite. No, it's not Standing Next To You.

I really love that. Ready? Wait there. Stand by. Wait there. Stand by. Stand by. And action. Oh, I love the way that new track by John Cook. I really love that. Ready? Wait there. Stand by. Wait there. Stand by. Stand by. And action.

Oh, I love the way that new track by John Cook. I think that's really cool. Oh, yeah. Standing Next To You is my favorite. Cut. That's embarrassing. I think we might have to. Is he Korean?

Yes. I mean, it's K-pop. It doesn't sound like a Korean name. Louis. John Cook, though. John Cook sounds. John Cook, yeah. Or JK.

They all do him JK. Oh, John Cook. I thought you were saying John Cook, like James Cook. sounds... John Cook, yeah. Or JK. They all put him JK. Oh, John Cook. I thought you were saying John Cook, like James Cook. Not John. It's June. It's actually J-U-N. It's J-U-N-K. It's one word.

J-U-N-G-K-O-O-K. Yeah, John Cook. John Cook, yeah. Oh, why didn't you say that? I know John Cook. I thought you were talking about someone else. Yeah, I know, I know. But I was just seeing if...

I wanted to sort of put you on the spot and to get you... I was discombobulating you louis i just love that like some artists can be maybe it's different for directors but some artists can be um insular right they're off doing their own thing they're almost threatened by other people's creativity or they feel like it'll interfere with their ability to talk to their muse but with you i get the feeling you're just whatever's happening in the culture that's exciting. You gravitate towards and you've got this evergreen love for creation. Yeah. You know what, Louis? I think this is it. I love artists and I think I have no prejudice when it comes to genre. There's just good music and not such great music and anything great,

music and not such great music and anything great i want to engage with it wow okay so i want to talk about this gingerly and you i want to totally respect your comfort level in this part of the conversation you talked about bowie and his androgyny you've described your sensibilities have as a gay sensibility at times yeah you also happily married man with cm yeah your wife you married in 87 you've got two kids yeah so i'm just wondering like do you ever describe your sexuality like do you just consider yourself a regular straight dude or you know i know louis i was asked this back in the 90s i've always been amazed about this because i i asked this back in the 90s and i said look i see all see all possibilities. I always have, you know. So and I think that I think my films have a real, I mean,

I don't know if I've ever said gay sensibility, but certainly they have a tragic emotion to them and they're very loved by women. But I also, I'm always surprised about who can be really, really passionate about them. So, for example, I remember meeting Bill Clinton for the first time, you know, and he was having an argument with a very well-known person at a friend's place. He was not then president.

And there was a lot of… By the way, that was a major name drop. If we're going to keep tabs on the name drops, you just drop one on my foot. Yeah. You know what a sim says. She has this thing. And my life is somewhat populated by artists and interesting people,

as Gatsby would say, celebrated people. But anyway, the point is I'm in this room and I'm never Southwark. I was quite Southwark. He was not then president and there was someone else in the room going, you know, who do you want to meet? I said, oh, okay. Anyway, he was in the middle of this argument, very intense, and this other person was going, oh, Mr. President, Mr. President.

And Bill was arguing, and I thought, that must be a joke. I didn't realize you called someone Mr. President, right? And I was thinking, what would my joke be? And I heard my name, Baz Luhrmann, because I thought, oh, you don't know who I am. And the next thing he landed And I heard my name, Baz Luhrmann, because I thought, oh, you know who I am. And the next thing he landed, he goes, Baz, you know, we really enjoyed Moulin Rouge. But I got to tell you, Street in the Ballroom, I mean, we must have played that film six times at the White House.

I mean, what about that mother? I mean, she is a piece of work. I'll tell you what, I think I know something about that. Anyway She is a piece of work. I'll tell you what. I think I know something about that. Anyway, we love the movies. And he went straight back to arguing, you know. And he just could. Really?

Yeah. And, like, if you'd have told me, do I think Bill Clinton would have liked Strictly Boring? I would have gone, you know, probably not. So you never quite know who will connect. And I think in terms of myself and the films and the way I see myself is I hope that they don't exclude anyone. I think the energy and the color and the movement and the camp sensibility that I utilize sometimes, I don't use it cynically. They're a true representation of the way I tell stories. That makes perfect sense.

And I'd like to acknowledge your impression of Bill Clinton because I found that very plausible. I mean, it's a bit rusty. No, I thought that was good. Louis, don't you think that all my impressions are the same? People say I only have one, which is Marlon Brando, and I just sort of adjust it, you know? I've heard at least two.

The Bowie was maybe needed a little fine-tuning. But you dance very lightly over the phrase, open to all possibilities. We can unpack that if you want, or should we just leave that there as a definition of your inclinations? I mean, I think that, I mean, you can unpack it if you want. I think if we get into it, then it becomes like, what's the clickbait story? But I don't, I, you know, I just think lightly, I mean, you can unpack it if you want. I think if we get into it, then it becomes like, what's the clickbait story?

But I don't, I, you know, I just think like, Louis, like back in the 90s, people used to ask me all the time. I said, look, I'm open to everything, you know, but, you know, Sima and I have a wonderful marriage and it's our marriage, you know, and she's a pretty remarkable human being and, you know, I love her. And she's a person I often turn to first when I realize what

i'm going to make and she turns to me on all sorts of things and she does she's done all the heavy lifting with the kids who are now not kids anymore right and you know i would never sit here and certainly talking to you louis i mean i might do it over a glass of wine, but not in front of a large audience. I'll consider that an invitation, if you don't mind. Well, I'm assuming you drink wine, Louis. Now, if you really want to get the hot stuff out of me, open that bottle there. The End Hi, me again, Louis Theroux. Just to remind you, you're listening to the Louis Theroux podcast.

And now, back to my conversation with Baz Luhrmann. How's your energy? I feel like we've covered so much ground, and I don't want to take the piss as they say no no my energy's fine i mean i'm cool you know should we talk like should we kind of get into something a little tiny bit more gritty like go for it so so i suppose given the times we live in like increasingly racial questions like representation of non-white people and different races is like a very present issue and you've

navigated that terrain yeah not without attracting like the odd bit of criticism some comments were to do with elvis and i don't know about australia so much but this sort of centering of the and i don't want i'm not putting this hanging this on you i'm just introducing it as a the centering of the white narrative if you like yeah and the idea that in elvis we've got elvis at the heart of the story and and bb king and little richard and other foundational black artists sort of serving his story right which i guess you know the film's called elvis like what are you expecting but on the other hand i guess the question if i'm landing so it's like does it affect you do you think any of that criticism is valid is it annoying what do you think about all of that well one thing i don't want to come to far away downs after it because one thing i mean i am the ultimate outsider like i grew up in such an

isolated place i can't really make major works about heron's creek all my life you know so i go into worlds and whether that's the worlds of 19th century fin de salle france or it's the world of elvis where i lived i had that space in graceland for 18 months and absorbed myself in that world but i mean little richard for example is one of the most incredible stories and his story must be told but i am not probably the person to tell that story. You know, but in terms of telling the journey of Elvis, I mean, that story when you see Elvis and those little boys and they go off to the juke joint and then they go to the gospel tent,

I took a year to find this guy, a much older man. He told me that story verbatim. I eventually found him. And I just put it in the movie. So my job is just to put the stories in there. But I mean, the story is about Elvis and, you know, his life is the canvas. I chose to do the tension between Elvis and Colonel Tom Harkin, you know, the soul and the cell and tell that story. And, you know, I had to compress it into two and a half hours. You know what I mean? So there's not, I mean, there's all sorts of things that I leaned into and shot

and I couldn't lean into it in one sitting. That brings us to Far Away Downs. Far Away Downs, indeed. It's upcoming, in fact, it'll be out probably by the time this comes out, reversioning or supersizing of Australia and the storylines. Yeah, and when i made australia i shot it epically but i had to do it into one sitting and there was a lot of consternation and complexity about when i was finishing that and getting it out and all of that you know and

when i went back in a pandemic i was like like, oh, wow, Elvis is over. And I was in lockdown in this kind of white estate on a river in Queensland. I started to think, gee, what can I do? And I started to look at the footage. Now I have the record for shooting. I'm not necessarily proud of this, but we have the record for shooting the most amount of footage ever shot on a film, two and a half million feet. And then I started to go back in old drafts and realized that I had set out to take something like Gone With The Wind, you know, a melodrama, and flip it over and tell it from an Indigenous point of view,

from this Indigenous child's point of view. And what I really wanted to show, put light on, was this horrendous scar in the history of our country of forcibly taking mixed race children from their families and locking them up to, there's a nasty way of saying it, but essentially reprogram them. And it was a massive destruction on First Nations culture. So I wanted to throw light on that. What I found was that by re-looking at the storytelling, and I think, I mean, I know you're being fun about it. It's not really supersizing because I was able to re-look at it as episodic storytelling. I mean, what was so good is I could lean into the story of Nala,

the young Indigenous boy and his telling of the story. And I was able to look at the music and engage this really thrilling, youthful, First Nations pop music scene. And they wrote all this new music. They wrote all this new music. Now, what was really interesting is if you look at someone like Dickens, you know, he wrote episodically.

And I just adopted that kind of attitude. I will tell you, Louis, that it isn't just like the director's cut. It's a bit like variations on a pre-existing composition i think australia is like a meal and far away downs is like a banquet well i full disclosure i've watched the first episode of far away downs and and so i can't kind of give a verdict on how successful it is but i find it exciting like i think it's a very cool thing to sort of try and do, whether it's a more perfect or just a different version of a narrative that you were aiming to do.

But am I right in thinking you shot three endings for Australia? Well, really two, but very different. And without getting into spoiler alerts, I think what I discovered in working, and we collaborated with First Nation directors that were young then, now they're very well known. What I was really clear about was the whole underlying theme of the piece is that, you know, you really can't own land.

You can curate it. You can't own a child. You can't own a relationship. You can't say, I want to control that. The only thing, as Drover, the character played by Hugh Jackman, says, the only thing you can really own is your story, so you better try and live, not tell a good one, but live a good one. And I think that's what I hope Lady Sarah Ashley is left with

at the end of it. She goes, I've just got to live a good life no matter what. It can't be defined by someone else or by controlling things because goodness knows Louis we do not in this moment that we are living need to be reminded that we cannot control things we can only live as deeply and as in the moment as we possibly can. That was a nice sentiment. Maybe we've come to a natural ending.

What do you think? I think, as they say, it wasn't a bad button. Thank you, Baz. All right, Lou. Hey, I really enjoyed talking to you. That's good. We covered all the bases. Listen, Millie, do we need to do anything else?

Does Baz need to press end recording? You just need to leave your laptop open. Yes, I'm here with Jazz, and she told me just stand up and walk away. Stand up and walk away. Thank you again, Baz. Great, Louis. Real pleasure. I really enjoyed it.

I'd love to have a glass of wine with you before our paths cross again. Yeah, when we get in England, I'm there for a while. Reach out to me and we'll do the wine, okay? I love it. Thanks so much. Take care. Cheers. Standing up and walking away.

Ciao. Bye-bye okay here i am back again louis on my own. I hope you enjoyed that chat. I really liked Baz. He's one of those guests you have and you think, oh, I think we could be friends. And then you catch yourself and think, that's not why I'm in this, Louis. Stay professional. But I would like to be friends and take him up on the glass of wine offer. He has a habit of going off on tangents, which I think is just his natural enthusiasm and maybe also functions intentionally or not as a kind of deflection technique. But he's an enthusiast for life and art, and so he kind of canters away. And I suppose when you've been in the limelight that long and your

and your emotional life is in various ways not completely straightforward like why would you want to put it all out there like i thought the point he made about not wanting to create a clickbait headline was very well taken right maybe that's advice I could live by it was funny like listening back to the chat and hearing me trying to explain to Baz like what was interesting about his work and I don't know if he was being polite or whether he took that on board but I am a fan and in a way obviously I'm in the documentary genre and his stuff couldn't be more different in some ways especially the later work which is just slick and every camera angle every part of the production and the set design has been interrogated and has incredible set creative decisions behind it and i

just sort of turn up when i work on tv and just film stuff but i really admire you know how holistic his vision is holistic in the sense of total control of everything, much like Kubrick, although with Kubrick, he almost tipped into pathology and he became obsessive and was paralyzing. His musical taste as well, and his knowledge of K-pop. I mean, well, he knew one K-pop artist, which is one more than, well, I've heard of, oh shit. well i've heard of oh shit no stop it bts bts which is a k-pop group i always have to say bts not btk who is a serial killer because it stood for bind torture kill bts is a k-pop artist group pop group and it stands for find torture sing that's in bad taste they tie you up and they sing to you so you can't escape too much he referred briefly to alexander the great and the

troubles he had it was around the time that i think there were rival projects and oliver stone was doing an alexander the great movie and in fact that came out as alexander starring colin farrell and angelina jolie is a terrible film if you've ever seen it i mean i speak as as a fan of oliver stone but that is a big mess so we'll never know what baz would have done with it kind Kind of intriguing to think about. Maybe enough time has elapsed and he can make that now. Alexander died at what, 33 or 35. He was in his 30s and famously he cried, I think after he conquered India because there were no more worlds to conquer. There were no more worlds to conquer.

I can well relate. I can also relate to the enthusiasm for Elvis. I grew up in the 70s, and my mom had a double album called, I think, Elvis' 40 Golden Greats. So all of those songs were well known to me. And what I didn't do, who was it? Somebody once said, all the world's a stage, and every man must play his part. I can do more or less the whole of the spoken interlude of Are You Lonesome Tonight? And I can play it anyway.

You know, no one cares. Afterwards, I was thinking, sometimes I get asked, if there was anyone dead who you wish you could have made a documentary about, right? A kind of when Louis met style documentary. And after the chat with Baz, I was like, well, Elvis, he would have been perfect. Can you imagine in those twilight years when he was kind of losing the plot, addicted to prescription drugs, doing his show at Caesars, taking pills to go to sleep, taking pills to wake up. That ship has sailed, but it would have been an extraordinary thing to observe. And it's a sad story, but the talent was immense. I mean, you have to, if you'd heard that the karaoke and you'd had a few drinks, that wouldn't sound as bad as it just did that's probably plenty do you want to do the credits oh credits there's another page okay

should i do credits in the office voice oh produced no i'm not getting produced by millie chiu no this is getting old the assistant no the assistant producer was man al yazari the production manager was francesca bassett and the executive producer is aaron No, this is getting old. The assistant producer was Man Al-Yaziri. The production manager was Francesca Bassett. And the executive producer is Aaron Fellows. The music in this series is by Miguel de Oliveira. Oh, that was Morrissey, just to keep you on your toes. This is a Mindhouse production for Spotify. Elvis has left the building.