Baz Luhrmann
Baz Luhrmann is a director, born 1962.
Nobody accuses Luhrmann of restraint. He started as an actor, turning up on the Australian series A Country Practice, and directed his first feature, Strictly Ballroom, in 1992. What followed is one of the most identifiable directorial signatures in modern commercial cinema, built because he involves himself in the writing, the design and the music as deeply as the direction, so the parts never argue with each other.
The method is easiest to see in Romeo and Juliet, where he keeps Shakespeare's text intact and moves absolutely everything else, stamping the word Sword on the handguns so the original lines still parse. Moulin Rouge does the same trick with pop songs, using anachronism as an emotional shortcut rather than a gag. When the underlying material is already heightened, a musical, a Shakespeare tragedy, a rock star, the maximalism is the correct instrument. When it needs patience it curdles: Australia and The Great Gatsby both drown their own quieter scenes.
He has won BAFTAs for direction and for adapted screenplay, and four of his films sit in the top ten highest-grossing Australian pictures ever made, a fact that says as much about the size of that industry as about him. The Get Down took the approach to television. Elvis in 2022 is an unrepentantly loud film about a performer who was himself unrepentantly loud, and he has followed it back into the same subject with a Presley concert documentary.
Movies (9)
TV (6)
Where to start with Baz Luhrmann
Strictly Ballroom is the cheapest, smallest and funniest thing he has made, and it is the correct door in, because the style reads as invention rather than budget when there is no budget.
Move to Romeo + Juliet next. It is his best film, an idea executed with total conviction, and it explains what all the noise is for. Moulin Rouge! is the fullest expression of the method and the one that either converts you permanently or ends the relationship. After that, judge for yourself: Elvis is the most technically accomplished, The Great Gatsby the most misjudged, since a novel about hollowness is a strange target for this much upholstery, and Australia the longest sit. The Get Down is the interesting failure, gorgeous in patches and structurally lost.