I feel bad for Baz Luhrmann. His new film, Australia, isn’t terrible. It’s sort of audacious and it does things that modern film audiences simply won’t accept, which is a bummer. The movie is creaking along, and I think it deserves better. So does he; poor guy is saying that people wish he would die. That’s harsh.
But he’s not sitting still. Luhrmann has acquired the rights to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book about the wild days before the First Great Depression. This would be the FIFTH film version of the book.
Luhrmann thinks it will work gangbusters today.
“If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, ‘You’ve been
drunk on money,’ they’re not going to want to see it. But if you
reflected that mirror on another time they’d be willing to.”
He added, “People will need an explanation of where we are and
where we’ve been, and ‘The Great Gatsby’ can provide that
explanation.”
Luhrmann promises to get this one out in theaters before the end of the current Depression, saying he doesn’t think that it’ll be seven years between pictures this time. He doesn’t know what studio will get it, but he claims that all of them are interested. Even Fox, who may or may not have given him a hard time.