Baz Luhrmann

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:45

My castaway this week is the director Baz Luhrmann. He describes his films as an emotional banquet. Spectacle, theatre, and big bold ideas are his calling card, but he developed his outsize aesthetic appetite somewhere very small, a town called Heron's Creek, two hundred miles north of Sydney.

Presenter1:03

Growing up there, his family ran numerous enterprises, including the local cinema, and in a bid to counter their rural isolation, his father encouraged Baz and his siblings to sign up for every activity going: scuba diving, painting, commando training, and ballroom dancing. The vicissitudes he encountered in that competitive world inspired his debut film, Strictly Ballroom. The local movie industry was sceptical, but it turned into one of the most successful Australian films ever. He is, he says, obsessed with giving misunderstood or moribund concepts a new life. Strictly made ballroom dancing cool. He followed it up by taking Shakespeare to the top of the American box office chart with Romeo and Juliet and reviving the fortunes of the big screen musical with Moulin Rouge. He saw his home country with fresh eyes in Australia and brought jazz age excess to the great Gatsby. More recently, he reassessed an American icon, Elvis, for a new generation. As for his motivation, he says, I'm from the planet Audience. I'm far away, gazing at everything, and it all looks amazing to me. Still, Baz Luhrman, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

Baz Luhrmann2:08

Mm-hmm.

Baz Luhrmann2:11

Well, I mean listening you describe me growing up on a small gas station on the side of a highway, I guess I did come from a desert island.

Presenter2:20

Exactly. A tundra. A tundra of sorts. Well, you're the perfect guest today for all sorts of reasons, and that is among them, Barz. But let's start with the romance that is at the heart of so much of your work. Why is that such a creative driver for you?

Baz Luhrmann2:22

Well it's

Baz Luhrmann2:25

Uh

Baz Luhrmann2:31

Yeah.

Baz Luhrmann2:34

I have to admit that I am a romantic, and romanticism just means that you kind of want or see things better than they actually can or are. It's a heightened sense of the world and of life and of love.

Presenter2:50

When you come to create these universes on screen, they are enormous. I mean, does the scale of what you're trying to achieve ever daunt you?

Baz Luhrmann2:56

Scale

Baz Luhrmann3:01

No, I'm not daunted by it. I always think, like when I did Raymond Juliet, I was thinking like, oh, I really believe the musical can work again, but I'll do that really easy one. What would Shakespeare do if he was directing a movie, Raymond and Juliet? That should be quite small and easy to do. Cut to me in Mexico with a young actor no one had heard of, you know, helicopters and people shooting, and you know, and I recognize at some point there's some scale, but I'm so in the middle of it, I never think like that.

Presenter3:27

But you never doubt yourself. You never feel unsure because you you are in control of so much of this aesthetic.

Baz Luhrmann3:32

I have insecurity and I people say oh you're so fearless and that's not true. I get the heebie jeebies and I get my fear but I see my job as packing my fear away. I always say remember it's called a screen play. We are but players. When kids play they can't play if they're scared and we all play for a living. So keeping fear away is my job.

Presenter3:52

Mm.

Presenter3:55

One of the many aspects of your films that you take great pains to make sure is perfect is the soundtrack. And of course, today's you're sharing your discs with us. What do you get out of sharing music and choosing music that you don't get from looking through a lens?

Baz Luhrmann4:02

Oh I love music

Baz Luhrmann4:11

I see music as the fabric of storytelling, not background. It's not wallpaper, it's not an afterthought. If you go into the world of, say, Gatsby, the first thing you're going to do is absorb every piece of jazz, every kind of musical influence around. To me it's like the same as reading text.

Presenter4:15

Solana.

Presenter4:27

Baz, it's time for your first disc. What are we going to hear and why?

Baz Luhrmann4:32

You know, my dad was in the Vietnam War. He was very anti-hippie. He was very anti-the alternates. And we had very short hair. We were beaten up for it. It was a really big difficulty for us to be socially accepted. So one day we go to these friends' house, and they lived in Port Macquarie, and they were surfers, and they were downstairs, and they were probably smoking weed. And I remember it was really dark and gloomy. And dad was upstairs speaking to, you know, the parents, and they were all huddled in the corner. And I heard the opening bars of this track you're about to hear and this voice, and it scared me. And yet, I was compelled towards it. And of course, it was David Bowie's changes, his influence on an entire generation. Because what he said to our generation was, you didn't have to be one person. You could continue to experiment with your hair, your look, how you felt. You could go into different characters. That was new. That was different.

Speaker 25:25

Turn and face the strange change it

Speaker 25:31

You wanna be a richer man

Baz Luhrmann5:39

Yeah.

Speaker 25:41

It's gonna have to be a different man. Time may change me, but I can't trace time.

Presenter5:54

Changes by David Bowie. Baz Lerman, you were born Mark Andrew Luhrmann in Sydney in nineteen sixty two. You actually acquired the nickname Baz at school because your friends thought you had hair like Basil Brush. When you were five, the family moved to Heron's Creek. Why did they move there?

Baz Luhrmann6:10

Dad loved the Navy life, but the trauma of Vietnam and all of that, he drank a lot. And I don't know, I mean, whether it's a myth or not, they want to get away from it all. And they go to try and move up and have their own business. And they end up trying to buy one thing, but they find this tiny, absolutely ramshackled, like, you can't imagine. It looked like out of a horror movie, you know, like this sort of one.

Baz Luhrmann6:33

Like, sort of, gas station, and it said for sale for $2,000 or whatever. They buy the gas station. They're so industrious, they were still in the Navy, but they transformed it into this caravansia. And I'm not kidding, there's a restaurant, and then we had a supermarket, and then he had flowers, and then all the brothers grew corn, and then we had the pig farm, and then we had the horses. But we all had our own business. And I bred tropical fish and my younger birds and blah, blah, blah. This could go on forever.

Presenter6:57

So the whole family, you were kind of these, I think you've described yourself as the Renaissance players.

Baz Luhrmann7:02

Players of Heron's Creed. It's kinda true. Like this escaping into your imagination because of the constraint of being on a desert island. I mean, it really was isolated. It took us two hours to go to school, and the first hour on the bus, there was nobody on the bus, just us three.

Presenter7:03

It's kind of

Presenter7:18

It sounds like your dad was creating his own world in a way.

Baz Luhrmann7:22

You absolutely did that. And mum, she was also quite the star. She was like the star of Heron's Creek. And then she had a dress shop and, you know, it was pretty non-stop. And like building worlds and fantasies and doing magic shows, making films. Like dad taught me very early on how to process a box brownie footage. I was an unstoppable photographer and filmmaker.

Presenter7:46

But he your dad also sounds like he had this extraordinary drive. I mean, he's you've said he was a military man and that that discipline was something he he absolutely handed down.

Baz Luhrmann7:49

You've said

Baz Luhrmann7:52

Disappear.

Baz Luhrmann7:54

He had huge discipline and also a ridiculously soft heart. It was a funny combo. The drive was nuts. Like 5 a.m. in the morning, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. We had to wash our own clothes and work. Just work before school. Like, empty the garbage and clean the thing, la da da, da, blah, blah, blah. But there was also, like, when I found the ballroom dancing flyer on the on the bottom of the bus, two hours every night, every second night he'd drive us to the bottom. So he was supporting.

Presenter8:19

So he was support hugely supportive.

Baz Luhrmann8:20

Yeah, anything that was like

Baz Luhrmann8:23

developmental or possible or

Baz Luhrmann8:26

You know, we believed in it.

Presenter8:28

So then tell me about the drama in Heron's Creek. Where did the drama come from? You're in this small place, but it's this world that your dad's created.

Baz Luhrmann8:33

This this world

Baz Luhrmann8:36

I mean, like, there were accidents. Like, people were killed in front of us. There was a whole system we had for when we heard the kthump of a car. There was a bridge, a faulty bridge, falling into the river. And my older brother's job was to run with dad. I had to get on the phone and call the local policeman. It was only one policeman. My younger brother had the torch. That was full of adventure.

Presenter8:59

Alright Baz, we're going to go to the music now. It's disc number two. What have you got for us and why are you taking it to the desert island today?

Baz Luhrmann9:04

Oh, well, dad had an Akai reel to reel, so he was really big on music and sound. He was really big on music. So I rigged up the speakers and I had my own radio station. I'd be like, Welcome to Radio M-O-B-I-L. I was about seven, you know, and there'd be people getting their gas pumped. And yep, let's hear that great John Farnum track. It's one is the loneliest number. And the only problem was I only had one record, it was a 45.

Baz Luhrmann9:27

And I got my brother to actually read the news and he was so oh, poor Chris, you know, but he was a young one. He wasn't a great reader and it was like, Hi, this is Chris Luhrmann. I'm going to tell you the sports news today. It would go on for like two hours. I'd say, Well, enough with the sports. Back to that great hip poet, John Farnham.

Speaker 29:42

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do.

Speaker 29:50

Two can be as bad as one. It's the loneliest number since the number one

Speaker 210:05

No is the saddest experience you'll ever know

Baz Luhrmann10:13

When is the lonely number? And now let's go to the sports.

Presenter10:17

John Farnum and one. So Bas Lehman, as you've said, you started going to ballroom dancing classes as a kid. Did you love it straight away?

Baz Luhrmann10:26

I was immediately hooked. And it was kind of a working class theater really, because you'd dress up, you'd wear a tuxedo.

Presenter10:33

And you did competitions and everything.

Baz Luhrmann10:34

Yeah, oh, yeah. I mean, I was pretty good. There's pictures of me with lots of trophies, and it was romantic and.

Presenter10:39

Yeah.

Baz Luhrmann10:42

It was really heightened too, not to mention all those, you know, sequence and sparkles.

Presenter10:44

It's her

Baz Luhrmann10:49

Which never hurts. Yeah, well, you know, I'm the Stanley Kubrick of, you know, sequins. But, um.

Presenter10:49

Which never

Baz Luhrmann10:54

Yeah, it was a world. Yeah. Again, it was a world and it was escaping into a world and it was losing yourself in a world. So n as I talk to you, Doctor, I feel like we're getting to the to the heart of the the matter. Why does he

Presenter11:07

I certainly feel like I'm starting to come to an understanding myself. Your world changed though when you were twelve. Your your parents divorced, your your mother returned to Sydney with your sister and and you and your two brothers stayed with your father in in Herons Creek. That must have been a very tough time for you.

Baz Luhrmann11:15

Do you Uh

Speaker 211:17

Uh

Baz Luhrmann11:17

Yeah.

Baz Luhrmann11:21

That must be

Baz Luhrmann11:22

It was

Baz Luhrmann11:24

Truly traumatic. Our world was ripped in two. Because your reality is defined by your parents, the solidness of that. And it was very acrimonious. Because dad then had a relationship with this other woman. Like he found another partner after the breakup. She had two daughters. So this disrupted our world even more because even though dad was tough, it was a moral universe that was absolutely clear. You understood it. Now he was in love and sort of, you know, there's nothing weirder than when you're a kid and your dad's going, look, I bought her some earrings. Would you tell her they're great? You'll be like, oh, God.

Presenter11:48

You understood it.

Speaker 211:49

Now he was

Presenter11:59

So yeah, what what kind of effect did did that have on you? How did you deal with that?

Baz Luhrmann12:00

Gamble

Baz Luhrmann12:03

Well, I think from that moment the show look, I always felt I was always going to go down that yellow brick road to the Emerald City, and that's what they used to call Sydney. I don't ever remember having a cap on my belief that I would be where sort of where I am today, like maybe better. I never thought I'd stay in Erins Creek. The world that I imagined or saw in the movies or created, I just was always heading towards. It was sort of the catalyst for going right, I'm on the way down the road. And I don't think I've ever stopped, actually. I went past the Emerald City and just kept going.

Presenter12:35

Mm.

Presenter12:39

It's time to take a moment for some more music, Baslerman. Your third choice today, what is it and why have you gone for it?

Baz Luhrmann12:44

My musical DNA came when dad went off to the Vietnam War. He brought back what was called an Akai reel to reel. Now this is a large machine and it had reel to reel tapes in it and quadraphonic sound and you could record on it. You can't imagine what that piece of tech meant to us, how that just seemed like from 2001 a Space Odyssey. And it had a tape that came with it though. And part of it was the Akai recording. The sound of the bullet train.

Baz Luhrmann13:12

You know, instrophonic. But one thing it had on it was Herb Albert's Tijuana Bras. When we moved to the country, the Yakai came with us and we ran it in our little restaurant. And I was kind of the waiter. We had sizzle plates. I was like this like precocious, probably 11-year-old waiter going, now, will that be with, you know, mushrooms on the side? And but Tijuana Bras played a lot.

Baz Luhrmann13:37

Yes, Spanish flea.

Speaker 313:40

Baby.

Presenter14:10

Spanish Flea by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Bas Loman, when you were fifteen, you left your dad in Herons Creek and ran away to Sydney. Why did you go?

Baz Luhrmann14:21

There was this flashpoint where dad, new wife, probably wasn't cleaning up my room enough, and he locked away all my precious photography stuff in boxes. It was kind of a punishment. And then I wrote dad a note. That was so dramatic. I wrote that note, left it in a sort of a pottery bottle that I made. You know, I'm sad about it to this day because we didn't speak for 10 years or something. Then I got on a bus, apparently, to go on a holiday, but I didn't. And then I never returned. And mum said, look, I've got a flat out the back of my house, which was this self-contained flat. As long as you go back to school, which I did, and I went to Christian Brothers College to begin with, which is an all-boys, which was a shock from the school I was going to, because ours was really innovative and it was mixed to a sort of, can you imagine, a very British-like school. You know, you wore a uniform and it was like horrendous. That was just like darkness. In fact, in Gatsby, Gatsby's mansion is the basis of the building of the school, that big castley place. Anyway, I had my own flat, come back with mum, and I was away with, like, I was spent more time.

Speaker 215:07

Yeah.

Speaker 315:07

Uh

Speaker 215:07

Yeah.

Baz Luhrmann15:31

Doing theater and stuff in the city than I did actually at school. And then.

Baz Luhrmann15:36

this miraculous thing happens where I say to mum, I'm going no, I will get into the National Institute of Dramatic Art. And she goes, sure, sure, sure. So I go and audition. I was in high school.

Baz Luhrmann15:49

And I didn't get in.

Baz Luhrmann15:51

And I'm like, wow, this is not going, something's wrong. Because I sort of sing.

Presenter15:56

You were so singular and you were sort of

Baz Luhrmann15:57

Things sort of go like the way my movie and my head do, you know, and I'm not very good with plot twists.

Presenter16:02

Uh

Speaker 216:02

Mm-hmm.

Baz Luhrmann16:02

Uh Anyway, I'd also audition for this thing and I come home and I get a phone call. This is actually on the day of coming home from high school and said, you know, you came in and read for this role opposite Judy Davis. And Judy Davis was an she'd just been in a David Lean movie and she's an acting god in Australia. Well, you've got the role. So within a week later I was.

Baz Luhrmann16:24

on the set in a movie.

Presenter16:26

Baz, as you've said, you didn't speak to your dad for many years, but you were later reconciled. By then he'd moved to an island off Queensland. So what happened?

Baz Luhrmann16:35

I just had this hankering to see Dad and I just one day went to the island and walked in and it was as if we'd never a day had passed and he was white ashen. Shocked to see me. Shocked. And it was just a fantastic rapperchement.

Presenter16:45

Shocked to see you.

Baz Luhrmann16:51

But he pretty quickly started to get cancer melanomas. And actually dad was trying to hang on to see Melan Rouge, but on the first day of shooting I saw the mobile phone and I knew that what that meant. So for the first time in my life I actually just

Baz Luhrmann17:06

stopped working to

Baz Luhrmann17:08

stepped through the process of mourning and burying him and all that.

Presenter17:13

Let's have some more music. Your fourth choice today. What is it and why are you taking it with you?

Baz Luhrmann17:18

Well, I have to bring Elvis into it because I've been living in the Elvis world for five years now, 24-7, seven days a week. And one of the big storytelling moments is Colonel Tom Parker, never a Colonel, never a Tom, never a Parker, played by Tony Hanks. And then there's the soul of it, which is this extraordinary person, Elvis. But the song Suspicious Minds, I use it dramatically because when he says, I'm caught in a trap, I can't get out, we see with Colonel Tom Parker signing him into a lifelong contract at the Hilton Hotel because the Colonel can't let him leave the country. Because the Colonel was never a Colonel, never a Tom, never a Parker. Spoiler alert.

Speaker 217:57

We call it a trap

Speaker 218:01

I can't walk out

Speaker 218:05

Because I love you too much, baby.

Speaker 218:13

Why can't you see?

Speaker 218:17

What you doing to me?

Speaker 218:21

When you don't believe a word I say

Presenter18:27

SUSPICIOUS MINDS BY ELVIS PRESLLY. BAS LEMIN, you did eventually go to drama school, and it was there that you devised a play with your fellow students called Strictly Ballroom. Then you wrote a screenplay with your friend Craig Pearce. What happened next?

Baz Luhrmann18:41

It was really hard to get financed. And then, when we finally got financed, tragically, Ted Albert died. And Ted Albert had a little band called ACDC.

Baz Luhrmann18:49

And they actually funded part of Streetly Board in the film.

Presenter18:52

Yeah. Funded strict

Baz Luhrmann18:53

Well, yes, our Albert Records and AC DC was their big money owner. Oh, wow. And they're still there today. And we made the film. Cut to I won't tell you all the bits in the struggle, the struggle, the struggle. We finally screened it to the one

Presenter18:57

Oh wow.

Baz Luhrmann19:06

Guy who's given us one cinematic screen, and I kind of throw up because I'm so nervous. He leaves me, he says, and we hear he says, that is the worst movie I've ever seen, and you've destroyed Pat, who plays the mum's career. She doesn't learn that a year later, because she dies before she learns that she wins best actress for that role. Anyway, terrible. We go up the coast. I'm cutting my hair off. I'm at a trailer park. A guy gets killed by a coconut. The phone rings on a baker-like an old woman says, there's a guy on the phone, and I'm holding a bucket on my hair because I'm going to be killed by a coconut. And I hear a French voice who says, my name is Pierre Rissillon. I'm from the Guinness Film Festival, and I'm going to give you a 12 o'clock screening. The rest is history. We have the first screening, and there's a great reaction, but it's only about two-thirds full. Unprecedented, they come for a second screening, and there's a riot trying to get in. It's on footage. There's people writing to try and get into the movie. And a French security guard grabs me, and he sort of drags me out and he says, Monsieur, from this moment on, your life will never be the same again. And it wasn't really.

Presenter20:10

It's time for your next piece of music. What prompted you to choose this one?

Baz Luhrmann20:14

Actually, I had this experimental theater company and experimental opera company, and I'd done this Labo M production, which was somewhat revered. I was a bit of an enfant terrier by the way. It was controversial at first and then hugely. Well, it was. Yeah, it goes on to be on Broadway and all of that. And my thing was to actually cast Young.

Presenter20:23

It was controversial at first and then hugely successful.

Presenter20:27

Yeah.

Baz Luhrmann20:31

And to actually bring acting into it.

Baz Luhrmann20:33

I mean how I get into these messes I don't know but I remember the Iraq the first Iraq war had broken out and when our production came on which was sort of a stripped down Brechtian kind of version of it with this young singer there were more letters to the Australian which is our big paper about our love oh wim than the Iraq war breaking out you know it was such a controversy um the critic had weighed in and said it was the worst thing that could ever happen to opera but Joan Sutherland who was an icon she's up there with Maria Carlis and saw it everyone says oh don't bring Joan please Joan don't come you hate modern productions and she said I think it's amazing and that was the beginning of my opera career

Speaker 321:45

Yeah.

Speaker 221:56

Yeah.

Presenter22:15

Puccini's Kegellida Manina from La Poem, performed by Luciano Pavarotti with the Berliner Philharmonica, conducted by Herbert von Carrian. Tell me a little bit about your partnership with CM, your wife Catherine Martin, because she's a designer, she's worked with you since you met in the late 80s. I want to try and understand how that creative partnership works.

Speaker 222:27

Yeah.

Baz Luhrmann22:35

I was doing strictly ballroom. I had my own theater company. I was doing all that stuff. When I started that company, I thought, I don't want to inherit older generations. I want to find someone that can grow with me. And there was, I went back to my drama school, and there was the head of the drama school said, Look, there's this girl and a guy, and they're outstanding. And the girl had made a design project, she was a design student, where a fridge ate her. And we're like, fridge eats her, hmm.

Speaker 223:06

Hmm.

Baz Luhrmann23:07

She was meant to come upstairs and we were having an hour meeting and I think four hours later we're still talking about Bertold Brecht and Madonna and that conversation has continued since then. So we start this collaboration and we have our world, we have our relationship, it's very real, it's very particular and I think like all great relationships they're mysterious to everyone else but the people that are in them.

Presenter23:30

So you've got these two extraordinarily creative people full of ideas, sharing a life both professional and personal. I mean, I've I've read that you do need to have your own space, that you've got your your own kind of bedrooms, separate floors so that you can step away when you need to.

Baz Luhrmann23:34

Sharing

Baz Luhrmann23:39

Yeah.

Baz Luhrmann23:43

Yeah, I mean I step away when you need to get together. Look, look, look, everyone's going like, but are they really together? I mean, I'm an insomniac and we live such a big life and we have these two kids. And the Rolling Stones have Rolling Stones time, you know, and then there's everybody else where we have Baz and Sam time. Like every Saturday night we go to a hotel. Our house is not like a normal house. Like it's full of creatives and kids and creativity. And I work in my bedroom. I mean, my bedroom is a large creative space. And I like to grow old disgracefully. So I don't mind admitting, I still like to get out there and club. And, you know, people go like, really? But I can't help it. And so I'm a late-night guy in an insomniac. And she's a very early morning person. And we still are having that conversation. And there is still a great love and romance between us. I mean, love transforms as you grow. Teenage love is champagne love and so on and so forth. But the depth of our relationship and our understanding, I just saw her and very quickly went like, whatever our construct is, I don't ever think I want a day when you're not around. That's how important she is in my life.

Presenter24:51

Time for your next choice, Bars, which I think relates to when you were making the film Romeo and Juliet.

Baz Luhrmann24:56

I was in Miami and Sam was with me. We'd come actually from Verona. She would sleep and I'm an insomniac as I told you and I'd be up all night and I'd just, you know, order up some muggeries. And I was at this one-room hotel called The Colony on Sobey Beach. It was literally like it was so corny, a red flashing neon light. But I always listen to music. I always try and use music to say, what is the vibe of this? And I was listening to Bjork's Venus as a Boy and this other band called Massive Attack. And I keep playing this unfinished sympathy track. I think, who made this music? So when I go to make the movie, I'm going to track this person down. Someone called Nellie Hooper, who I think is a woman and probably from Jamaica. I don't know why. And I go to meet them, I think, like, how does one dress to meet a Nellie Hooper? And of course, the studio were like, no way is this Nellie Hooper doing the score. And I'm like, yes, they are. Anyway, I get out and I meet this guy and he's wearing exactly the same Dior suit that I am that's got kind of stripes in it. He looks a bit like me and about the same age as Nellie Hooper. And he has his two collaborators, Marius DeVries and Craig Armstrong. They both go on to become film composers in their own right. Craig works with me for years. But it was this song that brought us together.

Speaker 226:13

Be with you.

Speaker 226:22

I deal without a night

Speaker 226:25

You're the footstep

Speaker 226:29

And now I've got to know my

Presenter26:39

Massive attack and unfinished sympathy.

Presenter26:42

Bas Lehman, you've talked about going through depression at times. How do you keep your equilibrium?

Baz Luhrmann26:48

I think artists, well, I don't know if I'm an artist, but I think people who have big holes in their hearts and are trying to fill it with imagination, creativity, or whatever that is, or song, whatever it is, the self-medication is the creative process. I mean, you're medicating because you get lost in a world or you're so absorbed in the impossible that you're really not thinking about yourself.

Speaker 327:08

Mm-hmm.

Baz Luhrmann27:08

But when you come off that

Baz Luhrmann27:10

I mean, there's the sort of decompression process, but it can send you to a place where, whatever it is, you fall back into the hole. So you have to dig yourself out again. When I did it on Moulin Rouge, for example, I went on the Trans-Siberian Express. I sort of take a credit card in a backpack, and I have to deal with myself. And I happen to have a bowl of red Australian wine someone gave me in Beijing and this new invention called the iPod. There was some music on it, and there were two recorded books. One was The Great Gatsby. And I thought, oh, I didn't really get that book at school. Put it on birch trees. You know, oh, that'll make a great movie. Got lost in that world. And so, having cleaned a slate, I think my synapses were ready to go into another world, like a hermit crab to inhabit another shell.

Speaker 327:46

Oh.

Presenter27:58

You do divide critics, one said of your films, They don't talk, they shout. Does that hurt?

Baz Luhrmann28:04

It does hurt, but not me, or it's frustrating, but it's not me, but all the people I've led down the road, particularly like a new actor or even the financiers, they believed in you and they've gone out on a limb. So I have to go out and do hand-to-hand combat to make sure that the film is not beaten to death like a baby seal because some guy who hasn't done his homework or who just isn't his taste, you know, like it shouldn't be about taste. I think there are great critics actually, and they just do their job. And if they do it really well, and there aren't a lot of them who really do it well, but if they do, they really do their homework and they might go, not my taste, but I can see what is going on here. As far as how that goes, I just leave that for history. You know, it's up to history to decide whether the underlying notions or the underlying big ideas have relevance or presence or resonance.

Presenter28:54

Letty, your next piece of music, Baz. What have you got for us, and why are you taking it to the island?

Baz Luhrmann28:59

In Moulin Rouge, there was the preposterous conceit that Christian opens his mouth and out comes 20th century music. But I needed this number. So there was this young powered ballad singer no one heard of called Pink. At the time, Rainy as far as like, you know, was Christian Aguilera. Little Kim was this really edgy rapper, and Maya was this kind of RB star. So we thought, what if we put them together? And Marmalade was a song that I just thought was perfect. And we owned not that summer, but we owned a few summers with that track. It was just one of those things that clicked.

Speaker 329:37

Uh

Speaker 329:38

Funny I'll stop

Speaker 229:40

More street.

Speaker 329:42

Uh

Speaker 229:42

Hello, hey Joe, you wanna give it a go? Get you, get you, yeah, yeah, da-da!

Speaker 229:51

Gets it, gets it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 229:56

Oh good chocolate

Speaker 330:00

I'm letting my law

Presenter30:04

Lady Marmelard, performed by Pink, Christina Aguilera, Maya and Lil Kim from the soundtrack to Moulin Rouge. Baz Luhrmann, you have a hugely demanding international career, but still such a love of your home country as we've seen through the

Baz Luhrmann30:17

You know, you've got to have your use your wings. That's wunder lost, but you've got to have your roots too. If you lose your roots, you probably, I think I did lose them actually in my 50s somewhere. I wasn't quite as planted. And the pandemics brought many silver linings with all the tragedy that it was burdened with. And one of them was actually we found ourselves in the least likely place in Queensland where my father is from. And in different ways, the whole family has fallen in love with the energy and the freshness and the just the vitality. Because as far as I mean, I love Australia, but we live in Australia, we live in New York. I always wanted that balance between New York and Australia, but journeying through the other countries in between. It's this thing of never being an unsettled spirit. You know, I can't be in a place longer than three months, or it's too much.

Presenter31:06

It's too much.

Presenter31:07

Well, this it might get tricky because I'm about to cast you away to a brand new home on the desert island. What are your thoughts about being stranded there?

Baz Luhrmann31:15

I don't think I'm a desert island guy, actually. I grew up on a desert island. What doesn't solve it for me is sitting under a cocoanut tree with the lapping water. I would rather be out diving in the water looking for a sunken treasure.

Presenter31:31

Well, I hope you find it. But before that, we've got some more music to listen to. What's your final choice today?

Baz Luhrmann31:36

When I was working on Gatsby, Fitzgerald puts edgy black street music into the book. And a lot of critics go, why are you doing that? It's a fad, you know, it's called jazz. Right? He says, because that's what's making us modern. That's what's in the air. And that's when Jay-Z, I was introduced to Jay-Z. I knew Beyonce, we'd worked together before. And Jay says, we've got to do this. We've got to make it hip-hop. And we're in the Mercer Hotel. He was recording. He had one of these things, just like this. And he starts doing this rap. Into a microphone. He had a microphone. He had this. It was only like the recording system. Jay and I are sitting there and he goes, I've got this beat. And that was Church in the Wild.

Speaker 232:17

Bings in the mind

Speaker 232:19

What's the matter?

Speaker 232:22

What's a king to a god?

Speaker 232:25

What's the guy to an I believe?

Speaker 232:28

Don't believe in

Speaker 232:31

Anything

Speaker 232:36

Make it out now.

Speaker 232:39

Alright, alright No church in the wild Tears on the mausoleum floor Blood stains the Coliseum

Presenter32:47

No Church in the Wild by J. Z. Kaneer West, The Dream, and featuring Frank Ocean. So Baz Lerman, the time has come. I'm going to send you away to the island. I will of course give you the books, the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and one of your choice. What will it be?

Baz Luhrmann33:01

I think I want to read something that I've always wanted to read but was too frightened to read because it'd be too big. Although War and Peace is a cracker of a story.

Baz Luhrmann33:14

I'll take War and Peace.

Presenter33:16

You can also have a luxury item to make life more enjoyable or for sensory stimulation.

Baz Luhrmann33:16

Yeah.

Baz Luhrmann33:22

It would be a very soft and perfectly balanced silk eye mask. I guess I can stick coconut fronds in my ears for the sound, but the eyes a light affects me. I cannot have a crack of light or I can't sleep.

Presenter33:39

Oh no, absolutely. We'll get you one of those nice padded ones with a bit of lavender in. You've been sleeping like a log.

Baz Luhrmann33:42

A bit of lavender in. Been sleeping like a log.

Presenter33:45

And finally, which one track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you rush to save from the waves above all the rest?

Baz Luhrmann33:52

The rest.

Baz Luhrmann33:55

When we finished Elvis we had this impromptu party. We all went down to the ocean and the sun was coming up over the water. I never forget I brought down a boom box and I played Nessodorma by Pavarotti. No sleep tonight. So I would go with the Puccini just because it would suit moonlight and lapping waves. I don't know. Someone might hear me from far away and come and rescue me.

Baz Luhrmann34:19

Bas Loman

Presenter34:19

And thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Baz Luhrmann34:23

I loved it.

Presenter34:24

What a nice island to drop by

Presenter34:40

Hello, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Baz. Fingers crossed, he'll be lulled to sleep by the sound of the lapping waves. We've cast away many directors, including Steve McQueen, Alan Parker, and Asif Gapardia. You can find these episodes in our Desert Island Discs programme archive and through BBC Sounds. The studio manager for today's programme was Donald MacDonald. The assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky, and the producer was Paula McGinley. Next time, my guest will be Edward Enninful, editor-in-chief of British Vogue. I do hope you'll join us.

Speaker 235:25

What happens when you combine dog shows? The Kennel Club is not overdoing it when they say it's the greatest dog show on earth. And poison. The world of dog breeding has been rocked by claims that a prize winner at Crafts was poisoned.

Speaker 235:40

Extraordinary behaviour. It is. Some people are ruthless. The fear was real. People were much more protected. They didn't leave their dog for a second. New podcast, Dead Competitive. Presented by me, Kerry Godlyman. Wow, look at that dog on the floor. It looks like a rug. No, I'm not a real detective. Craftswear every dog has its day. But I will try my best. Quite moving, that isn't it.

Speaker 236:04

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