Baz Lurhmann tells Michael Cieply why he chose to release The Great Gatsby in 3-D.
In a daring test of both himself and the movie audience, Baz Luhrmann — the Australian director of films like Australia and Moulin Rouge! — is planning to release a star-packed, big-budget version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby in 3-D next Christmas. The cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan and Tobey Maguire as the narrator, Nick Carraway. Luhrmann’s film will come three years after James Cameron's Avatar which became the biggest hit in movie history with $2.8 billion in worldwide ticket sales. Avatar proved that a new generation of 3-D technology could immerse viewers in the credible fantasy world of the fictional planet Pandora.
But Gatsby — written by Luhrmann with his long-time collaborator Craig Pearce — will prove whether 3-D can actually help actors as they struggle through a complex story set squarely inside the natural world. If Lurhmann succeeds, it may open the door to a new generation of movies that will match the spectacle value of 3-D animations such as Happy Feet Two and The Adventures of Tintin.
“The special effect in this movie is seeing fine actors in the prime of their acting careers tearing each other apart,” Luhrmann explains in a telephone interview. He speaks of using 3-D not to create thrilling vistas or coming-at-you threats, but rather to find a new intimacy in the film. He refers to a climactic scene in which Daisy’s husband, Tom Buchanan (played by Joel Edgerton), confronts DiCaprio’s Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza hotel, all in three dimensions.
Luhrmann’s experiment will have to overcome the ambivalence of viewers who have yet to fully embrace 3-D technology, especially in North America. The success of Avatar not withstanding, 3-D has faltered somewhat in high-profile efforts like Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Consumers needed to be convinced that there is a real reason for using 3-D animation beyond Hollywood’s desire to charge higher prices. As a result, audiences have become increasingly picky about 3-D, although movie-goers overseas — where films now make up to 70 per cent of their profits — have been more enamoured of the technique because it is newer to them.
The idea of filming Gatsby occurred to Lurhmann a decade ago. After listening to a recorded version of the same, he began to wonder why Fitzgerald's novel, which he found “exquisite”, seemed to elude filmmakers. Luhrmann hopes to unlock the movie potential in a small book whose themes — social climbing, prohibition thuggery, faithless marriage and the self-conscious modernism of almost a century ago — are squeezed into a compressed yet strangely operatic plot.
More From This Section
It was a lecture by Cameron, then working on Avatar, that persuaded Luhrmann that 3-D might help him find what had been missing in Gatsby. To examine the potential of actors in 3-D without the gimmickry of contemporary action sequences, Luhrmann turned to Alfred Hitchcock's 3-D version of Dial M for Murder from 1954.
Adult interest in 3-D has “settled into a very, very good place,” says Dan Fellman, Warner's president of domestic distribution. Fellman was sold on the potential of Luhrmann’s film — which was shot in Australia, with a budget of roughly $125 million before government rebates — after viewing scenes that took what he called an almost “subliminal” approach to the medium.
Some will fear, Luhrmann acknowledges, that he is violating a sacred text. After all, he is the director who cast DiCaprio and Claire Danes in the 1996 MTV-style adaptation of Shakespeare, Romeo + Juliet. “Everyone has strong and generally opposing opinions when you mention 3-D or The Great Gatsby or Baz Luhrmann,” he says.
But Fitzgerald, he insists, would have approved.
The New York Times