“It’s Saturday night, c’mon, it’s a party!” Noted writer Nelson George could have been pumping up the crowd at a two A.M. DJ set, but these words introduced celebrated filmmaker (and George’s co-creator on The Get Down, an upcoming Netflix series about the birth of hip-hop in New York during the ’70s) Baz Luhrmann. The bombastic Aussie cineaste has risen to household-name status on the merit of his unmistakable, over-the-top spectacles that combine the kinetic energy of the cinematic form with the larger-than-life quality of theatre and opera. He laid claim to date night with his supercharged rework of Romeo + Juliet, revived the musical with the jukebox fantasy Moulin Rouge, and gave Leonardo DiCaprio yet another classic role with The Great Gatsby in 2012. All of these films share the maximalist’s hunger for more, for louder, for bigger, more amusement-park rides than mere movies.
All this and plenty more — to wit: whether he’d ever try his hand at adapting Wicked, the particulars of proto-rap, and his boyhood radio show — came up during a Tribeca Film Festival talk between Luhrmann and Nelson on Saturday night at New York’s SVA Theater. Read on for the selected highlights from the evening’s proceedings, including Grandmaster Flash’s definitive statement on the vital importance of learning your history.
1. Even when Luhrmann’s working in film, he still directs like he’s in the theatre.
Luhrmann got his start in the world of theatre and opera, and it shows, but he carries that sensibility over to his process in addition to the look and feel of his finished products. He found inspiration in every part of olden-times theatre when formulating his vision for Romeo + Juliet, beginning the film with “the Elizabethan equivalent of stand-up” just as they would’ve done during Shakespeare’s era. For his modern projects, he’s taken a collaborative and spontaneous approach in the tradition of experimental theatre directors, treating the script as a “map” through which he discovers what ends up being the film. In his estimation, the script is a starting point that evolves and changes shape all during the production process.
2. He’s loyal to the spirit of a text, not the letter.
George asked Luhrmann about his filmmaking ethic of expressionistic emotionality, making a tactful reference to the director’s oft-criticized practice of taking liberties with the seminal works he adapts. After a characteristically sarcastic joke (when asked why he diverged from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing so radically on The Great Gatsby, he laughed, “I didn’t notice that!”), he explained himself with ease. “I love psychological dramas, just for the record,” he began. He explained that his primary objective when making a film is to convey the emotional and mental content of the story and its characters rather than the concrete details of the text, remolding a novel or play without losing its essence.
3. He likes to start with the music and work outward from there.
Luhrmann’s commitment to music runs deeper than the needle-drops he’s sprinkled liberally across his filmography. He informed the audience that he structures most of his scripts around the music he plans on incorporating, directly writing the soundtrack cuts into his stage direction, an unusual habit in scriptwriting. He had no shortage of loose factoids and anecdotes: he worked with recently deceased rock deity Prince on a new version of “Love, Thy Will Be Done” for the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack that was never used, brought on rap godfather Nas to collaborate on The Get Down, and has flirted with the idea of adapting Broadway smash Wicked on numerous occasions. (He’s passed every time, confident that someone else will do a fine job.) As a boy, he even ran his own DIY radio show using a turntable and a rig of speakers at his father’s petrol station.
4. The Get Down‘s street-cred pedigree is nigh-on unassailable.
The event featured a sizzle reel of Luhrmann’s Netflix series set to debut on August 12, and it looks like another colorful showstopper teeming with life — business as usual for the director. But his stories from behind the scenes make the set sound like a veritable G5 summit of hip-hop greats: such elder statesmen of the rap game as Grandmaster Flash and his Furious Five colleague Rahiem, DJ Kool Herc, and Nas rubbed shoulders with young stars Jaden Smith and Shameik Moore during the process, teaching the the upstarts how they rolled back in the day. Luhrmann laid out the extensive old-skool boot camp his actors went through, learning how to properly grip a mic, assume a B-boy stance, and in Luhrmann’s words, “get reprogrammed.”
In addition to being an electrifying gulp of cinematic Red Bull, The Get Down will also be a testament to a significant but underserved chapter of musical history. Luhrmann echoed Grandmaster Flash’s sentiments about the original get-downs, explaining how they were conceived as a safe, fun alternative to getting into trouble out on the streets. “They made the dancers feel like they were somebody,” Luhrmann said. But his most powerful quote of the night came from Flash. When bemoaning mainstream society’s love of hip-hop despite a general disinterest in the conditions from which it evolved, he dispensed a zen koan: “Everyone loves the cake, nobody wants to know about the recipe.”
