Love blossoms in the outback for Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) and Drover (Hugh Jackman); Director-writer Baz Luhrmann (right) with Brandon Walters (as Nullah) and the late David Gulpilil (as King George); Kidman, Luhrmann and Jackman on set.
WHILE MOST PEOPLE’S pandemic projects stretched to breadmaking or breaking their nap record, Baz Luhrmann grappled with something bigger: retooling Australia, which, with its tepid reviews and average box-office takings in the US, proved to be the only flop of his career. In 2020, while Covid suspended filming on Elvis, Luhrmann decided to revisit his 2008 drama.
“We were in lockdown on a beautiful estate and it was kind of fun, but then I was a bit like…‘What can I do?’” Luhrmann tells Empire. Thoughts turned to Australia, with which he had unfinished business. He says he returned to it not to counter the film’s middling reviews — “I’m used to the slings and arrows” — but to tell the story as he’d always intended. Despite the theatrical cut coming in at 165 minutes, he felt he hadn’t given the story the space it deserved. “I shot, like, 2.5 million feet of film… In the back of my head, I went, ‘You never really did the epic version.’”