Director Baz Luhrmann talks about what rocks on DVD and his new 2-disc special edition of Moulin Rouge!, the first-ever DVD entirely created by the film's director.

By Craigh Barboza

Baz Luhrmann: I find nothing can quite replace being in the cinema, that's one experience. But the video was always a reduction of it. I'm a fan of DVD because if you have a relationship with a film, it deepens the relationship. I've got Lawrence of Arabia, on DVD and that was amazing. Over the years, you might see a re-release at the cinema but now seeing director David Lean tell you that he kind of saw the white line to the horizon, saw the mirage on which Omar Sheriff appears, deepens your understanding of the story behind the making of the film. Now the next step, interactivity, is a device to engage you again on a deeper level. You could almost say you're having some sort of interaction with this story In terms of Moulin Rouge! I got involved because I think it is a tremendous new form. It's nothing against when Francis [Ford Coppola] comes in and does Apocalypse Now Redux. But you can't endlessly expand depth in a film by just making it 5 hours long. That's a vertical expansion. But you can, and I am fascinated with this, go for horizontal expansion, where you are extending the depth of the piece.

Baz Luhrmann: I grew up in a very isolated place in the middle of nowhere, and some of the early experiences I had of a deepening of cinema was when I first saw those That's Entertainment films. My dad had a cinema for a short time and I saw those sort of scenes that were deleted from Hollywood musicals so I got to understand that there were elements that [didn't serve the development of the story that were left out]. There were extra elements that you could experience. That was a something to me.

 

USA WEEKEND: What was it like working on the Moulin Rouge! DVD?

Baz Luhrmann: I engaged my entire team in the notion of, well, how many ways can we deepen the relationship between the film and the audience? The first thing, and obvious one, is that instead of having a hard fill like [mock voiceover] "Behind the Curtain," come and watch director Baz Luhrmann... we decided to, in a very vulnerable way, let the audience into a genuine experience in what we went through in reinventing the modern musical. Having written musicals and directed opera for a long time, it's a process of draft and redraft. You will often have to subjugate or reduce musical numbers to tell the story. In the movie's opening, we pretty much wanted to say it was a wild, sexy and dangerous place. Bang, move on. But to take the cancan sequence out of context, in full, unfettered by the need to stay within the rhythm of the story, in a very indulgent, completely disconnected way, [from multiple camera angles] is really fulfilling to me. When I think of myself seeing, Heart of Darkness or That's Entertainment, they were lifting the veil, off you like, on the production. But you never really got how great it would have been to actually, in some small way, have been involved or to feel why decisions were being made. What it means.

Baz Luhrmann: I think DVDs are very good for dance, something that you get an immediate reaction to because dance is so expressive that if you see the sequence where we're telling the story through the dance you can really feel the difference between choices you have to make as a director. And you get four cameras to choose from.

The film should exist as it was created... I don't think it's a good idea to be tooling with the Mona Lisa but I think great to learn to mix paints... People want to do it. If I was in the position I was some years ago, as a young lover of movies, I would want to do anything I could. Get out my chemistry set to do the experiments, to feel as involved as possible in film making process. And I see that as a healthy thing.

Baz Luhrmann: I don't think it's the ultimate movie experience. That is a big and interesting discussion. What is a movie? The theatrical experience at the cinema, sound came along, then color, different elements came along... Ultimately, you still enjoy watching Citizen Kane. Yet, it is not benefiting from some of the technologies that came along later. So, I think we still want to see great movies in the classic linear form that run two hours. But I think that we shouldn't in any way fear lateral development, the ability to be actively involved in storytelling.