Q&A: Baz Luhrmann interview (part 2)

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The Scene caught up with Baz Luhrmann in Sydney to talk beach culture, board shorts and Leonardo's favorite pancakes...

The Scene: What do you think makes Sydney so special?

Baz Luhrmann: One of the great things about Sydney is that it has a great acceptance of everyone and everything. It's an incredibly tolerant city, a city with a huge multicultural basis. It has this very dynamic relationship with Asia and China and Shanghai, my second favorite city.

One of the biggest events in Sydney is the gay and lesbian Mardi Gras which happens in February every year. Everybody comes out to watch that, it's one of the big showstoppers of the year. When Leonardo takes the magical love potion in "Romeo + Juliet" and you go into "Young hearts run free," the Mardi Gras was a bit of an influence on that. It's a city where you can be anyone you want to be. It's certainly got its own edge.

TS: Tell us a bit about the beach culture.

BL: It's a real spontaneous community. The older folk will meet here probably every morning. All weekend the kids come down and all the surf lifesaving happen on the beach, so you'll see all the competitions. Christmas time you can't sleep around here 'cause they're always having Christmas parties and then there's the surf culture, all the surfer kids all out in the ocean. It's all the layers of society.

You have the very earliest beach characters -- very very old Bondi Icebergs swimmers, old chaps who get out there at 6 am in the winter who were the first ever surfers, old retirees who live by the beach. I often think to myself, at the end of an interesting life it's maybe not such a bad thing to spend your last days with your friends sitting by the blue, blue ocean reliving the story of your life while sitting in the dangerous sun.

TS: You do a lot of walking in Sydney. How does that relate to your work?

BL: I do find walking is fundamental to my creative process. Often CM [Catherine Martin], my wife and creative partner, and I would spend long afternoons walking along the coast path. Sydney has a really naturally beautiful coastline but Australia has some of the most dramatic weather in the world, and when you walk along here and the sea bubbles and is green and angry, it reminds you that there's always something bigger than the troubles which are going on in your life: we've often found that an inspiration.

TS: Sydney is famous for its food -- can you tell us a little about that?

BL: The food in Sydney is an Asian Pacific cuisine. It's eclectic but above all it's fresh, inventive and creative and that's what I love about it. When I was shooting "Romeo + Juliet" very early on, Leonardo came out for some workshops here and he was obsessed with the pancakes that Bill Granger does. Even when I see him now, many years later, he says, "They still do those pancakes?"

TS: What is it about Darlinghurst [where Luhrmann lives] that attracted you to it?

BL: Darlinghurst is the underbelly of Sydney. It's bohemian, it's very creative and above all it's lively. When I was a very young actor/director, this is the area that I lived in. There was a tiny little theatre company at the end of the road here and I remember I saw Mel Gibson do a series of short plays. There wouldn't be more than 50 people in the audience, that's how tiny the theatre was. Anyone who is in the arts in Sydney would probably begin here in Darlinghurst.

TS: Sydney has a very egalitarian feel to it. Where do you think that come from?

BL: In many places you have the town square, the place where people meet no matter what their background or who they are, and they promenade. Australians, to a large extent, tend to promenade on the beach. It's pretty hard to identify your status and who you are when you're wearing a pair of board shorts and there's a nice quality about that. (Of course, it's totally not true, it's not egalitarian at all, status is defined by who can ride that wave the best, and if you can't you're NOTHING!)

TS: Where do you see Sydney's future lying?

BL: I think part of the future for Sydney is as a really exciting place for filmmaking. Sydney is a wonderful environment for filmmakers because it's one of the few places, aside from Los Angeles, of course, which is a full-blown city with a set of sound stages right in the middle of it, technologically one of the best sound stages in the world. For the actors, it's wonderful to wake up in the morning and be just a few minutes away from the studio.

There are a lot of post-production facilities here for doing visual effects, too. The visual effects in Sydney have become really cutting edge -- we made all of "Moulin Rouge!" in Sydney and most of the visual effects were done here, too. There's an incredible new exploding frontier, creatively. So many young people who are truly gifted at it are doing that work around the world, and if you're talented it's a good place to do that kind of thing.

Go back to read Baz's thoughts on sun, sea and his latest movie, "Australia"...

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