Baz Luhrmann

Baz Luhrmann (birthname: Mark Anthony Luhrmann) has carved a distinctive path as an Australian filmmaker with an overtly theatrical style, interested in lush visuals, grand gestures, and big thematic statements. Because of his deep involvement in every aspect of his projects, plus the production demands that each requires, Luhrmann has made only six features in 30 years, including his latest, Elvis (2022), a biopic on Elvis Presley, starring Tom Hanks, Austin Butler, and Olivia DeJonge. 

Luhrmann borrowed from his childhood experiences with his mother, a ballroom dance teacher, to make the indie breakout hit, Strictly Ballroom (1992), which won a prize at the Cannes film festival. It was the first of Luhrmann’s so-called “Red Curtain Trilogy,” which explored various aspects of the theatrical world. In 1996, Luhrmann made his first film with a foot in Hollywood, a highly stylized and modern Romeo + Juliet, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, John Leguizamo, and Harold Perrineau. Baz Luhrmann exceeded expectations with his third audacious movie, the elaborately designed and staged Moulin Rouge! (2001), with Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, Jim Broadbent, and Leguizamo.

It marked Luhrmann’s most artistically accomplished film to date, scoring a Best Picture Oscar nomination (Luhrmann’s only such nomination). Luhrmann shifted to history for his next epic, a Down Under Western titled Simply Australia (2008), starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, and while the move away from his theatrical flourishes bothered some observers, the movie was a box-office hit in Europe and is the second-highest grossing film in Australia after Crocodile Dundee (1986). 

As usual, Baz Luhrmann took his time between feature projects and chose another adaptation, a third—and largely successful—attempt to bring F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (2013), to the screen. The cast was his finest to date, led by DiCaprio’s Gatsby (ensuring an eventual box-office haul above $350 million worldwide), with Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Tobey Maguire, Jason Clarke, and in an audacious piece of casting, India megastar Amitabh Bachchan. Nine years passed between this and Luhrmann’s next, highly anticipated feature project on the life of Elvis Presley, Elvis.

In between, Baz Luhrmann was co-creator (with Stephen Adly Guirgis) of the Netflix miniseries, The Get Down (2017), set in The Bronx in the 1970s, with Yahya Abdul-Mateen, Jimmy Smits, Giancarlo Esposito, Daveed Diggs, as well as several ad campaigns for luxury brands and opera productions in major companies around the world, including Los Angeles Opera.