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it's now time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. there are some film directors who strip things down, shun artifice, and worship at the altar of realism. my guest today sees movie—making through a very different lens. baz luhrmann made his directorial name with a wildly entertaining debut movie, called strictly ballroom, which was theatrical, sentimental and sweet. since then, he's continued to make larger than life films, based on epic stories. so how did this kid from the aussie backwoods get to make his celluloid dreams come true? theme music plays baz luhrmann, welcome to hardtalk.

i'm very happy to be here, stephen. i want to start this interview in herons creek, this tiny little place north of sydney, where you grew up. it was a long way from anywhere, really. how come you, there, developed this incredibly vivid artistic imagination? mmm, you know, some point midway through my journey, i started to get quite self—conscious about — and you do when you're young and you're trying to be someone and be creative — and i gave up on the self—consciousness of going too deep into the "who i am?" and tried to work that outjust by doing. having said that... laughs how do i keep these answers short, because i've never given a short answer in my life?

having said that, it never seemed exceptional, strange or unusual to me. i always imagined, when i was in that tiny little island, which was really a gas station and a restaurant and we had a farm down the road and... and your dad ran the gas station? yeah. my father ran the gas station but what was crazy dad was obsessed that the isolation wouldn't keep us isolated, so we had so many interesting people come and live with us. you know, painters, and he sort of had this idea that we would be the renaissance players of herons creek. was he an australian who felt out of tune with australia? because my perhaps stereotypical and cliched vision of the australia of your youth, particularly, in the non—metropolitan areas, would have been about a very macho culture, pretty much preoccupied with sports and maybe, for the men, beer. and yet, you gravitated to things, including cinema and dance and a whole bunch of other stuff, that were nothing to do with those stereotypes. well, first of all the stereotype, right, because i think you're probably somewhat on point

but i would also proffer that one of the idiosyncratic qualities about australia, which is a tremendous thing, is that it's what i would call a flashes of lightning culture. meaning, you might look at sydney and go well, what a generic bunch of buildings and then suddenly the sydney opera house. you know. and you might go, well, there it is, isolated edge of the world, but along comes a gough whitlam and ourforbearers, who said we must have a drama school, we must have a film school. this is in the 70s and we, the government, will fund it. and had they not done that, that extreme action, i wouldn't be sitting here. all those well—known storytellers that you know wouldn't exist. so let's go back to my father. he was all those things. i mean, he was in the vietnam war, he was the equivalent of a kind of navy seal, that was his job, he was really disciplined, he really pushed us. he was such an... i now realise it was an extreme existence, but he was also a very,

um, he was a romantic, i think. so i suppose when — i'm going to fast forward a little bit — you got into acting, you went to sydney, got into lots of different creative stuff... i was already doing it, stephen, i was making films. were you? yeah, i was always doing it. so it was in you from a very young age... and i was doing ballroom dancing, and ballroom dancing was a kind of for me working—class escape into the theatre. i mean, you dressed up in costume, you performed, we travelled miles, you know, you got very wrapped up with your partner. i mean, it was showbiz. and if you don't mind me saying, and i don't mean this in any... i don't. it's camp, to a certain extent. ballroom dancing is camp? let me think about that. i don't know. it's camp. and i wonder if that appealed to you too, the sort of gender fluidity, as we would now... well, one thing at a time, i think. well, "camp" — let's define that, meaning — and i said this yesterday — i think i said like oscar wilde once said and he probably didn't,

maybe it was said about him — but that camp is dealing with something quite serious but in a very silly, offhanded way, and the idea of using silly or theatrical or "cue the petal drop", as a device to affect an audience so that you are dealing with something quite serious and emotional or a big idea, that mechanism, i guess, is inherent in me, and i think what's so odd is that when i started exploring that — i mean, i went to drama school and did artaud and brecht and minimalism — but when i started being honest with my own gestures and that came into my way of expressing myself, what is so odd about it is that now we live in a world where that particular sensibility, whether it's in fashion, cinema, music, it's kind of de rigueur. it's hugely popular. hugely popular, yeah. so... i tell you what, for people who haven't seen strictly ballroom, let's have a look at just a little clip.

and see if it's camp. yeah. see if it's camp. let's have a flavour if it, let's have a look. that's the future of dance—sport, and no—one but no—one is going to change that. cheering and applause. tango music playing this, we should remember, was your first movie? it was, indeed, my first movie. in fact, that was my first day of shooting, and it was at a break in a real dance competition and we said we's get it done in an hour and it took, as all things do, three, and everyone left — it was a crazy, crazy thing.

it's kind of an outrageous success that making your first movie, you make something that not only breaks the bounds of australian cinema but gets shown at international awards, cannes, it becomes big in america. it's just a massive international hit. that sounds great but, and we have not got time to go into the real story, but the real story begins with making the film, committing at some point to the knowledge, to the idea that i had to make a cinematic language that somehow reflected what it was as a play. i did it — i devised it as a play. you's written it as a play. i devised it with a group of actors i was working with at the national institute of dramatic art, where we were experimenting with how you make plays, and i took a subject i knew — the world of ballroom dancing — and i also took the hero's triumph myth, and i was very interested in this idea of splicing mythologies and the ugly duckling myth, and then it was political. we took it to a drama school

in czechoslovakia during glasnost against all the soviet state theatres, thinking, oh, this will be ridiculous, but at some point in that production, it was a bit more brechtian, we used to have tapes of like ronald reagan and, you know, maggie thatcher in it, and so it did have this sort of underlying political idea in it... again, this is important because we're going to talk about other movies and the way you developed your career. it's sort of about the message. one message in the movie is about breaking the rules, not being a conformist. because the australian dance commission had its own rules and the girl in the movie says no, i want to do something different and she persuades the boy to sign up to just doing things differently, breaking the rules, being yourself. correct. and, hilariously, you could apply that undercarriage of that story to a popular revolution. i mean, overthrowing the incumbent generation and leaders who say there's only one way to cha—cha—cha. i've got the rulebook, i'll give you the ticks, you know, i'll let you know whether you're right or not, and then the youth say, no,

we're going to step outside that rulebook and we're going to go up against it. and you meet another youth that says that and then you go on and it's a popular revolution. sounds heavy, but that's where we're coming from. what's interesting is, you say it sounds heavy, it sounds fascinating, but what it doesn't sound like to some people, i think, is a baz luhrmann movie because you've become so associated with the sort of over the top, grandiose, epic scale and the glitz and the glamour and whatnot. sure. do you feel that a lot of people haven't taken your movies seriously enough? yes, sure. and certainly critically, but what's so strange — ‘cause i'm quite old now, stephen and i've seen the miracle of like, one of the great critics, owen gleiberman — a huge critic in the states — who absolutely slayed moulin rouge. like just went, here we go again. and there was a time when you could take the reviews for strictly ballroom and apply them pretty much to moulin rouge and so on and so forth. but owen gleiberman,

i've never seen this happen before, in his book, he rewrote his review for moulin rouge ten years later and there's a bit in his book, and i actually met him and i was really... i mean of course, you're happy that someone finally went like... he decided 10 years on that actually he'd missed the point? his language was, there was a method to the madness and i could see that, actually, this wasn'tjust kind of camp for the sake of it — it was employed in the pursuit of a slightly bigger idea. but i suppose my question then would be, do you ever reflect and think, you know what, many i got a little bit seduced by the fact that hollywood was flinging money at me so that by the time you made the great gatsby, i don't know how much that cost but probably $100 million? yeah, around that. roughly, give or take $10 million. i'm not great with numbers. check with the studio. but you see where i'm going. you were spending more and more money, you were using the biggest stars from hollywood, making an enormous splash, taking — i think i'm right in saying — years to make these movies, maybe you got a bit sort

of overwhelmed by the money, the glitz, the glamour and the power? maybe. it sounds like that, but that didn't happen. i mean, in no way does someone come at you, nobody in hollywood comes to you and says, you know that 100—year—old book, the great gatsby, you know that period piece, in fact, they say the opposite. look, can't you... when i made strictly ballroom, and then i wanted to do a modern day shakespeare, and i was in an overall deal with fox, and they're like, can't you just do, like, strictly ballroom ii, more of that? and then when i did moulin rouge, it was like, why would you want to do the gatsby, please. so there is no, hey, here's $100 million, go do gatsby. there's cajoling, convincing, convincing yourself, convincing others. leonardo being a great partner in that process, toby being a great partner in that process. dicaprio and maguire, we should say. we're talking a—list hollywood people. yeah, but also artists that want to make sure they're making something different

and so what i'm saying is, i mean, you know, let me just say, all that stuff you identified, i mean, gatsby, rightly, whether you like it or you don't, and whether i made the right choices or not, it's a very quiet internal narration about a very noisy time. about a very brightly coloured, noisy time so, i rightly or wrongly, i exploited that. which is a great cue to just have a little look, another flavour of your movie—making, by having a look at one of the memorable scenes from the great gatsby. i cannot find anyone who knows anything real about mr gatsby. well, i don't care. he gives large parties and i like large parties, they're so intimate. small parties, there isn't any privacy. but if that's true, what's all this for? that, my dear fellow, is the question. are you ready? # a little party never killed nobody. ..#

as i'm watching that, i'm actually thinking about you, the director, and it seems to me there is something extraordinary about the hollywood director. the amount of resource you can call upon, you know, the hundreds of actors and extras, the vast stage sets. right. there is a power to being a director that interests me. do you think there's something potentially difficult, maybe even potentially dangerous, about the power that comes with being a director? look, i think we're living in a world where the subject of power and the danger of power, and the corruption that comes with, you know, i didn't write that fantastic line about parties, i wish i did. and i didn't write "absolute power corrupts absolutely",

but it is certainly topical right now. when you do what i do, the responsibility of power is absolutely forefront in your mind. i mean, i thought you were going to look at that and go like that must be the friday night dinner at baz‘s place because everyone thinks that is how i live... no, i don't think that's how you live but i am very interested in the answer you have just gave because you have alluded to what we have seen in hollywood and the movie business in recent times. that is the fallout from harvey weinstein. here is what another director, judd apatow, said. in the week of what we learned, he said "people in our industry were and are willing to ignore violent crime to line their own pockets or protect their careers." and that is what this thing is about. that makes it sound like there is something very sick at the heart of this business. i didn't. harvey had strictly ballroom. at the start, i had a powerplay issue with him over the way he handled strictly ballroom.

i think where you are going is this: i do think, when i am directing, what — what i think the big question mark is for me is the entertainment world, but it is notjust entertainment, we are seeing it in every level in governance, everywhere power sits. agreed. what i am very focused on is that when you try to make something like... i mean, who's not attracted to — i mean, you have your attractions. but in this space, the fear and vulnerability of performers, the power that you have, but also yourjob is to remove that fear. it is called playacting. they are players. you are meant to help them be playful. work — yes, work, but to take away their fear and to play. now if, in any way, you are muddying the waters with your own politics or your own sexual desire, and all of that, then you're corrupting the art itself. so — and — and obviously it's wrong.

i mean, it's, you know, profoundly a misuse of power, and i think what we are seeing is — there has probably been an old — let mejump right in there and say i think it is bigger than that. i think we are sitting in a moment where the tectonic plates of history a squeeze on like this, and the old period, and i don'tjust mean old guys — we're old guys — but i mean the old period has its nails and is trying to claw things back to make things the way they are. to quote gatsby, you cannot repeat the past. and the new and the forward and the young want to go that way. i mean this point. i think there is an old school of thought... are you part of that?

pfft, no! are you changing the way you work? i can honestly tell you that when i'm in the room, i am so worried about making it work. and i see it as myjob to take on everybody else's fear. but there's absolutely no way — how i might feel about someone when i am anonymous and i'm in the street, i just can't feel like that about a cast and crew member member. i am just too completely responsible to make sure that everyone does their best and serves the greater thing we're trying to make. you just talk about our age group and ageing, and a new generation of people looking to do things in different ways. just one quick question about your future, and your intent. yeah. you did make one netflix kind of box set style big budget television series, the get down...

i loved doing it. ..and it didn't get recommissioned. did you see yourself moving more into television? that is where a lot of the money and creativity is, but in your mind, are you a movie maker? i have to say two things. one, we could have done another season. but just. .. it cost an awful lot of money, though. yes. and for that reason, it required me to be at the centre of it. and contractually, i had already made arrangements whereby i would creativity somewhere else. ijust wondered whether you needed a big screen, notjust the small screen. i don't see myself as a film maker, television maker, music maker, i have worked one a hotel, and we might do another one. we've made stuff. ideas and storytelling.

affecting culture. leaving an impact on culture. as to the size, the scale, what it might be, what's the right thing, they are such secondary thoughts. it is not like arming — it might sound arrogant, but it's not like we need it, and i'm not not going wow, i need something. i want to bring you do this because it raises a lot of interesting issues to be about — about you as a person, and that is your movie, australia. yes. because it is unusual for a director to make a movie so clearly about where he's from, and then named it australia, and it is epic and it weaves in a lot of australia's recent history. it did pretty well, but some critics like that and some did not like it at all. it was a very personal to you? totally. what was that? a love letter to australia? was i crazy? none of my films, in my

view, are complete. none of them are what i imagine to be. i just get on to a point where i think they are working there. it is like a child. it has to go out in the world... are you telling me was completely finished ? i don't think any of them are finished. there is an old saying that they are not finished, they take them away. i'm one of those parents that's like "oh, they're not ready to go to school yet." but let's come back to why i did it. absolutely, we have our children. we have always lived around the world. australians are great travellers. i wanted to make sure there was an early period when my two kids were connected to our homeland. that, and i also have — yes, i have a great love of my homeland. and it probably was — i don't know if it was a love letter, but it was definitely a way of getting into the myth, but also the facts. one of the things about

australia, by the way — and by the way, whether it's a good film or not — this is the biggest i have ever had in europe. it was number one for five weeks in spain. and i was a surprise, even to me. it had a different life in the us, where it went nowhere. it has things in it, including the massive injustice done to the aboriginal peoples of australia. yes, and might say, and i have never said this, and i feel i should, i remembered germaine greer, and she spoke — i mean, i never push back on staff, but of course, we did the research, and of course, we lived it. and in everything — there is a justifiable reference to everything in that movie. and when the press and germaine greer came out and attacked an actual stolen generation academic, aboriginal academic, ijust thought, like, you know, i'll let time answer that. but nothing we do we research lightly. but what it put in my head was that the arc of your career

to you away from australia to the united states, where you spend most of your time. but in a funny sort of way, you could make an argument that australia is moving towards you. i don't, obviously, mean geographically... come over here, australia. butjust in terms of what is happening in that country, today. example, we speak just after and nation—wide, non—binding referendum, which has seen australians... about time. but it has seen australians overwhelmingly approve the idea of gay marriage. do you see your australia becoming more tolerant and open? first of all, for the first time i have not been back in my own country for maybe 18 months, or maybe even longer. i go back at christmas. it is very important. i think flashes of lightning. the country has always had tremendous openhearted vision, but it also pulls it back into a sort of conservatism and it jostles between the two things. so, um, i got great...

i'm not in a position to speak with great information. i'm going back to reconnect. but i think australia — and australians — they really believe in a fair go, and they're really openhearted. and i have — i'm looking forward to be energised by their positive uplift. a last and really unfair question, a lot of people, critics, feel that your last movie was your best movie. do you think your best movie is yet to be made? i think probably mickjagger has the same problem with satisfaction. it's like, you know, and i — i think, but the answer to your question, and i'm not good at staying on track — you've seen my movies, right? you have to believe it. otherwise, don't do it. sometimes i think, oh, you know, but recently i've been thinking i would like to do at least one more. and see if i could make it better. great way to end.

baz luhrmann, thanks for being on hardtalk. i really enjoyed it. thanks very much. hello. there's warmer weather on the way for the bank holiday weekend. for most of us, it's looking dry, as well, with increasing sunshine as the weekend goes on. we're not quite there yet, though, this weather front went through on wednesday, with some rain followed by showers. this weather front is coming in from the west thursday, though by no means all of us will get rain from it. but even from the word go, in the morning, that bit of patchy rain for parts of northern ireland and western scotland, whilst for many, particularly

across eastern parts, it'll be clear, it'll be sunny once the sun is up, but it will be chilly, with low single figures in places, and that sunshine will be lost to increasing cloud as we go into the afternoon. from the cloud for northern ireland, for western scotland, some spots in north—west england, and a few in wales, there'll be some patchy rain around, shouldn't amount to too much. and a brisk breeze blowing across the northern half of the uk, moderate to fresh west—south—westerly wind. around 10—14 degrees for most places, as high as 17 in south—east england. even into the afternoon, into the evening, southern and eastern parts of the uk will see a few breaks in that cloud, allowing a bit of sunshine to come through. now, as we go on through thursday night and into friday morning, a lot of cloud around away from east anglia and south—east england, but even here, under clear skies, not as chilly as it will be first thing thursday. so a milder start on friday. a lot of cloud around, misty, murky in places. some outbreaks of rain, particularly affecting the north and north—west of scotland. this little piece of energy runs away northwards.

still a bit of drizzle, i think, parts of western scotland and northern ireland. but for many, friday will be a dry day, if not a particularly sunny day. but, when the sun comes through the cloud, occasionally it is going to feel warmer. notice those temperatures are starting to edge up. and that is the process that accelerates into the weekend, with high pressure for most of us, though the further north—west you are, you're still close to weather fronts. with breeze, it's going to be cooler here compared with elsewhere, particularly north—west scotland. but, for most of the weekend, this includes the bank holiday, it'll be fine, it'll be dry, and it will be getting warmer. just take a look at saturday and sunday for now. so on saturday, i think some cloud to begin the day. rather misty and murky in places, and cloud could increase in northern ireland and western scotland. north—west scotland beginning to see some outbreaks of rain coming in. but for most it'll be dry, and a few spots start to get above 20 celsius. and then for part two of the weekend, on sunday, could be some rain affecting maybe the north of northern ireland, running through central parts of scotland for a time, whereas england and wales are looking dry.

and again that sunshine starting to break out more widely, even more so by the bank holiday, along with that welcome, for many of us, warmth. hello. this is the briefing from bbc news. i'm sally bundock. our top stories: facing bankruptcy. the company at the heart of the facebook data scandal, cambridge analytica, announces it's closing. donald trump suggests north korea could soon release three detained americans. it's reported the us citizens have been moved from a labour camp to a hotel. we have a special report from iraq, where elite security forces are now focusing on gang violence, corruption and drugs in basra. this is the elite force that goes out every night to try and crack down on organised crime in this city. draining the batteries.