Baz Luhrmann is sounding like he's not enjoying the roasting. Here's a Reuters article on the director's perspective on his own film.
"A lot of reviewers like 'Australia.' And we're making people cry; I know because they write to us," he told the Hollywood Reporter during an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel. "But there are those that don't get it. A lot of the film scientists don't get it. And it's not just that that they don't get it, but they hate it and they hate me, and they think I'm the black hole of cinema. They say, 'He shouldn't have made it, and he should die.'"
I think the people are crying because it's more like an onion than a proper tear-jerker. But we'll let that pass.
Asked why he thought the reactions were so passionate, he replied: "I know what it's about."
The movie's detractors, he said, were used to movies that were neatly defined.
"This is not (simply) a romantic comedy for 40-year-old women or action movies for 17-year-old boys, and that's not OK with some people. It's not OK for people to come eat at the same table of cinema. But you look at movies like 'Gone With the Wind' and Old Hollywood classics, and they don't fit in any box.
"Corny Hollywood movies from the '40s freak out (the film scientists)," he added.
It's a real drag that Baz Luhrmann went out and made a very big movie without a target audience, armed with the faith that a retread of a Hollywood movie from the 1940s would transcend the need for defining a genre, all the while he post-Modernistically pilfered cues from the said 1940s film.
While I'm no film scientist, I am at least a student of my craft. When I saw shorts on the Kidman/Letterman interview, I noticed he crossed the line not once but twice in a span of 30seconds. I'm sorry but if you can't get your basics down like that, while working with a professional crew, then should you be entrusted with a $197million budget?
It's not that he's made a very broad, general film with a mixed genre - those things have places in the world, but they tend to have smaller audiences because it takes a lot more effort from the audience to understand how the genres are getting mixed. It is the fact that Luhrmann can't tell a story without throwing his camera around and trying to invent a new angle to shoot a 2-hander scene. Dare I say it, he's actually not properly schooled in how to direct a scene for camera.
This results in his films being nebulous, unfocused and largely confusing. He is the opposite of David Mamet's tenets where you should simply stick to the story as tightly as you can.
Years ago when he suddenly burst on to the world with 'Strictly Ballroom', I was a student at AFTRS. The 'Strictly Ballroom' promotional tour rolled into the school cinema and got its screen to much adulation from the teaching staff. I was struck by several things:
- How poorly directed Strictly Ballroom actually was.
- How the teachers and admin staff embraced it anyway because the story was good enough and simple enough.
- How the AFTRS staff embraced the film, even though Luhrman was from NIDA and not the AFTRS. The guy had nothing to do with AFTRS.
Now, the third thing was possibly the weirdest thing, because it relates back to the first. One of the things that film school inevitably does to you is give you a grounding in the basic needs of directing for camera. If it didn't/doesn't, you should burn it down and start again. Certainly, in my time, as wobbly as it was, that culture lived and breathed at AFTRS.
So here was a film that failed to meet the kind of technical standards that second year novices were meeting, getting critical acclaim. Worse still, the AFTRS educators were willing to turn a blind eye to all these faults for which they would have roasted their own students and praise the film to the sky. It was a surreal moment. Yes, I'm talking about you, John O'Hara, Paul Thompson, Helen Carmichael, Marion Ord, Brian Hannant! - Just in case you're googling your own names.
But it got me thinking: If NIDA could produce successful film makers who didn't know anything about the technical things the AFTRS was imparting to its own students, and the AFTRS's job was just to produce the crew who would work on these films, What EXACTLY WAS THE POINT OF HAVING A DIRECTING DEPARTMENT? What was the point of even having AFTRS? It seemed incredibly self-defeating for AFTRS's teaching body to embrace the success of the film in spite of all its abundantly clear faults. The sort of faults with which it would roast its own students
Understand this: All the students knew (and understood) that it was a deeply flawed film, and yet we all shrugged and furtively caught each other's disbelieving glances as the AFTRS teachers lauded its success. It was one of those. "WHAT THE FUCK?!!!!" moments that make you re-assess everything about what you are doing. What exactly was the point of proper film technique?
What exactly is the point of any technique to do anything? Why bother learning a single-handed backhand? Why bother learning correct finger - position for scales? Why learn how to cast and reel properly? Why learn technique in anything, when the novice world just doesn't notice? Or was it just a case of double standards?
I don't have an answer to this double standard. I have no answer as to how these things happen. But let's face it, there's Baz Luhrmann making his dirty big Hollywood Blockbuster, partly on Australian tax Payers' money - still, clearly ignorant of the basic basics of film making. And the joke is on me (and others), because there is nobody from my year at AFTRS that has directed a Hollywood film. What, exactly, was the point of having AFTRS, if this was going to be the outcome?
Those people should have been quaking in their shoes when Baz Luhrmann emerged, instead of lauding its success; because his very career poses serious questions about Filmmaking in Australia. In my book, the one that I got from AFTRS, it's questionable that Baz Luhrmann should have been allowed to make that film; no, he shouln't have to die except in the box office; and I'm not being mean-spirited when I say that.
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