Baz Luhrmann on the 'bonkers' struggle to make Moulin Rouge!: 'My wife said I must be out of my mind'

“I’m addicted to taking things people maybe think are moribund and trying to shake the rust off them – whether it’s ballroom dancing, Shakespeare or a musical,” Baz Luhrmann tells me. “Everything I’ve ever made, I have made to have a future.”

Like it or not, it’s a future you’re living in. Take a step back, and you see Luhrmann’s prints all over our hyper-active, glitterball-entranced world. Without Strictly Ballroom (1992) – the Australian director’s lithe, sexy debut feature about a sweetly determined dancer – would anyone have thought to take the BBC’s antiquated ballroom competition and reinvent it, in a flurry of sequins, as the world-conquering Strictly Come Dancing? When, earlier this year, Bridgerton topped the Netflix charts by pairing period drama with a modern soundtrack, it was repeating a trick Luhrmann had perfected in Moulin Rouge! 20 years earlier. Then there’s & Juliet – the wild “jukebox” musical of Shakespeare’s play that’s attracting young audiences into the West End – picking up where Luhrmann left off in his revolutionary 1996 Romeo+Juliet. As Luhrmann once told the critic John Lahr: “It’s not enough that you move through the world. You must change it to suit your expectation.”

So how did this boy from the back of beyond – the tiny hamlet of Herons Creek in New South Wales – achieve the near-impossible: harness the power of Hollywood to serve his own aesthetic and give an irresistible allure to everything from Chanel ads to his droll 1999 pop hit Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)? He even manages to make our Zoom interview a theatrical event. When I show up, a piece of paper has been propped over his camera lens. “I’m going to do a fancy fade-in,” he teases before whipping away the paper and digitally ushering me into his palatial New York townhouse.

I gawp at the spiral staircase, the epic grey sofa. “That’s from Gatsby,” he says, launching into a mini-lecture on the furniture in his 2013 F Scott Fitzgerald adaptation, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, for which, he says, “we cut the sofa to Carey’s body”. When I suggest that it looks almost too beautiful to lie on, Luhrmann, dressed in black top and pyjama bottoms, hurls himself on to it. “I think you could sleep on it…” he says, simulating a snooze.

I soon understand what American stage director Alex Timbers meant when, during an earlier conversation, he warned me that Luhrmann was “a force of nature” from whose company “you leave spent”. Timbers, in collaboration with James Bond scriptwriter John Logan, has turned Luhrmann’s $179 million-grossing Moulin Rouge! into a Broadway sensation, one that swept the boards at September’s Tony Awards. Now the musical is heading for the West End, in an elaborately tarted-up Piccadilly Theatre. “If you were to put your hand on his head I think it would burn,” Timbers says, “because his mind is whizzing and motoring; he has a thousand ideas a minute.”

“We lived in our own version of the Moulin Rouge,” Luhrmann tells me, looking back to his childhood in rural Australia. The petrol station that his father ran was, he says, “a world of different characters coming and going. It was a show that never closed.” And Luhrmann, who was christened Mark, but while still at school changed his name to Bazmark (after his nickname, Baz, because his hair was like Basil Brush’s) was destined to play the lead role.

“I was always theatrical,” he told Lahr. “I was mythologising my own existence from the age of 10.” His mother, Barbara, was a ballroom dancer; his father had been a Naval photographer in the Vietnam War. It was “a world that had drama, comedy, humour, all of that going on,” says Luhrmann. As a consequence, he and his three siblings “had to learn ballroom dancing – and commando training!”

That eccentric grounding paved the way for Strictly Ballroom, which in 1992 catapulted Luhrmann from unknown to the toast of Cannes. How does he feel about its legacy of Strictly-mania, a show deemed by the Guinness World Records to be the world’s most successful reality TV format? “I don’t know whether I’m proud,” he says, “but I do remember being told by a prominent American financier, ‘Ballroom dancing will never be popular in the United States.’ Cut to some years later, and… still going!”

His follow-up, Romeo+Juliet, made more than 10 times its $14 million (£10 million) budget and multiplied the surprise factor. Given a modern setting and shot on location in Mexico City, it starred DiCaprio in a breakthrough performance opposite Claire Danes. The film used the original text but pared it down, combining action movie adrenalin with poetic beauty, in an attempt “to pull the curtain back on Shakespeare for a young audience”.

Five years later, Moulin Rouge! completed what has become known as Luhrmann’s “Red Curtain trilogy”. His flamboyance went into overdrive for a fantastical evocation of fin de siècle Paris and its most famous cabaret club. He laughs as he recalls the initial scepticism of his wife and collaborator – the costume, production and set designer Catherine Martin. “She said, ‘You must be out of your mind doing a can-can movie. There’s nothing more uncool than turn of the century Paris – it’s like part of the tourist trail.’” But Luhrmann was driven by a desire to “reinvent the movie musical – I always thought it could be done,” he says. He saw the Moulin Rouge as the “birthplace of modern popular culture. There was a collision of high and low culture, a staggering breakthrough.”

He went “research-crazy” in Paris, he says, hanging out at the club and devouring French literature. When he returned to Sydney, he had a storyline that combined elements of classical myth (especially Orpheus) and 19th-century masterpieces such as Alexandre Dumas’s Camille, with its tale of a consumptive courtesan; Zola’s Nana, its heroine a prostitute; and La bohème, which immortalised the French garret.

Instead of an original score, Luhrmann imagined an anachronistic soundtrack of 20th-century pop classics, from Madonna’s Like a Virgin and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit to Randy Crawford’s One Day I’ll Fly Away, memorably sung by Satine, Nicole Kidman’s consumptive showgirl-cum-courtesan, while sitting on a giant elephant (a feature of the actual club, which once housed a small opium den).

For Christian (Ewan McGregor), the impoverished Orpheus-esque writer who falls in love with Satine, Luhrmann needed to denote poetic genius. “He had to open his mouth and out would come beautiful poetry. I tried to write some and it was garbage. So the preposterous conceit we came up with was: what if, when he opens his mouth, one of the great songs of the 20th century comes out? Everyone goes ‘Ha-ha, isn’t that funny.’ They also go, ‘I get it, he’s got an amazing gift.’ ”

The slog then began to secure rights. “It was bonkers,” says Luhrmann. “Sometimes people talk of Moulin Rouge! as a ‘jukebox musical’ but I don’t recall that phrase being much around 21 years ago. And the ‘mash-up’ was not achievable in publishing at the time. All the publishers said: ‘You can’t take a lot of songs and make one song out of it.’ I had to go to all the artists to ask their permission.

“I didn’t know Elton John when I rang him. He said: ‘Darling, that sounds like a great idea… I’m going to help you get this made.’” David Bowie, who provided a rendition of Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy, also gave Luhrmann his boho benediction: “He said: ‘I see what you’re doing, you’re decoding the musical for this generation. From one decoder to another, I want to be involved in any way I can.’”

Final details for the film were cooked up in “a wonderful rambling old house” in Sydney, where Luhrmann gave “amazing Moulin Rouge-themed parties, that went on very long and were seriously bad”, he says. “We explored the properties of the green fairy – or absinthe, as it’s called. That stuff is powerful!

“Everything I’ve made, I try and live it first,” he adds. “To be florid about it, I always wanted to go on a quest down the Yellow Brick Road in search of the Emerald City, the quest has always driven me.”

When it came to the shoot, however, things became stressful. The dance corps had to be on hand for months on end, and some 300 deluxe costumes made from scratch. The ambition was to hurtle between miniature models of Paris and life-size sets, teeming with a cast of hundreds. “It was so technically hard to make, there was no precedent for it,” says Luhrmann. “I lost my dad on the first day of shooting. Nicole was going through what the world now knows was a big break-up [from Tom Cruise].” While Romeo+Juliet had been full of outdoor scenes, Moulin Rouge! was shot entirely “inside dark sheds, day and night. You never saw daylight. There were some joyous moments but psychologically it was very, very hard to make.”

On its release, the film pulled in audiences, but divided critics, sometimes in the same publication – “One critic on Time called it the worst film of the year,” says Luhrmann, “the other called it the second best.” It took a while for some to spot the method in his apparent madness. “I was always confident that the device would work, but I knew it would be controversial,” he tells me. “I have a reputation for making things that should fail – or are suicide missions.”

Is the film too stylised? Not for Luhrmann.“I like a giant lie that tells a fundamental truth,” he says. “It’s theatrical smoke and mirrors, but the underlying human truth is loaded inside that silk glove. I’m a hard-core romantic.”

So how does it work on stage? From my sneak peek at a technical run-through of Moulin Rouge! in London, it’s clear that the show remains studded with opulent and intricate embellishments – but also has added psychological depth provided by Timbers and co, and blessed by Baz. “The movie is virtuosic in the way Baz uses the camera. We don’t have whip-pans, giant crane-moves, special effects,” says Timbers. “In theatre, the lighting designer is the theatrical analogue of the film editor, helping to break the fourth wall and move your eye around the space. When you enter the theatre, you’re going to be inside the Moulin Rouge; it will envelop you.”

Meanwhile, Luhrmann is busy editing his first feature in eight years – a musical biopic of Elvis Presley, which has just finished filming in Queensland. “I went for three months,” he tells me, but was two years away. Covid was the unwanted star attraction on set. Tom Hanks, who plays Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was, Luhrmann says, “the first well-known person to get Covid. You’re never going to forget something so gigantic happening in your life. You’re rehearsing on the first day, Tom Hanks is guarding Austin Butler” – the Californian actor who plays Elvis – “with a bunch of girls kissing him, and someone says, ‘I think Tom has that flu,’ and the next thing there are guys in hazmat suits, everything is shut down and the film is almost lost. I’m just coming out through the other end of that.”

Embodying the artistic magpie who thinks nothing of colliding different influences together, is Luhrmann wary of being damned “an appropriator” as the culture war heats up? Not a bit of it. “It has to happen, it’s healthy,” he says. “Sometimes things get knocked over, that’s par for the course. I want to use my creative power to help the new generation realise their point of view.”

He slips into a rare silence. “I don’t want to be the older generation hanging on by my claws. I might just retire and never make anything again,” he says. “And, you know, take up archaeology.”

Moulin Rouge! The Musical is at the Piccadilly Theatre, London W1, from Friday (moulinrougemusical.co.uk)