A tour of the set at Sydney’s Fox Studios during production showed Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby will be nothing if not stylish, with a lavishly detailed mansion and the famous pier in the vast sound stages, colourful period cars and beautifully crafted costumes for the cast and hundreds of extras.
All suggested the re-creation of 1920s New York will be as impressive as the version of historic Paris in Moulin Rouge, which Luhrmann and his creative partner and wife, designer Catherine Martin, also shot in Sydney.
While F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is an American classic, a drama costing considerably more than $120 million is a financial risk for the Hollywood studio Warner Bros, especially given the film’s release was pushed back from an Oscars-qualifying run late last year to May because of production delays.
What Hollywood calls the summer blockbuster season – our winter – is more a time for comic-book adaptations than literary ones – movies that play to mass young audiences rather than discerning adults.
”It’s a great drama and it’s relevant right now,” said executive producer Barrie Osborne, who noted the similarities between the reckless excesses of the 1920s US in the novel and the lead-up to the global financial crisis.
”It’s something fresh because it’s a Baz Luhrmann telling of a well-known drama.”
Key to the movie’s success will be how well the story works, the performances, the 3D visuals and the music that executive producer Jay-Z has brought to the soundtrack, including songs by Beyonce, the xx, Jack White, Gotye, Fergie, Florence Welch, will.i.am and Bryan Ferry.
Encouraging results from audience testing suggest Gatsby might attract that younger audience, helped by Leonardo DiCaprio looking handsome as Jay Gatsby rather than playing against his looks, as in J. Edgar and Django Unchained.
But fans of the novel will see a darker and more ruthless character. The script, by Craig Pearce and Luhrmann, draws heavily on a rough draft of the novel called Trimalchio, which features a more menacing version of the gilded millionaire, fleshes out his relationship with Daisy Buchanan and has more conflict between Gatsby and her husband, Tom Buchanan.
Fitzgerald’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, thought the title was too obscure – it refers to the freed slave who throws wild parties in the 1st-century Roman story Satyricon – and suggested changes to the draft, resulting in the classic novel that was published in 1925.
”Imperfect as it is, Trimalchio was a great resource for both writers and actors,” Pearce said.
”It gave us a lot of dialogue and character details that were eventually cut as Fitzgerald finally crafted the sublimely elegant prose that ultimately became The Great Gatsby.”
On set, DiCaprio carried a copy of Trimalchio rather than The Great Gatsby.
The novel has already inspired a 1926 silent film, which Fitzgerald thought ”rotten”, a 1949 gangster movie and the famous 1974 version with Robert Redford and Mia Farrowas Gatsby and Daisy.
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Luhrmann’s version, with Tobey Maguire as narrator Nick Carraway, Carey Mulligan as Daisy and Joel Edgerton as Tom, premieres in New York on May 1. After release in the US the following week, it opens the Cannes Film Festival on May 15.
Whether the film is a success will be known by the time it opens in New Zealand on June 6.
– Sydney Morning Herald
