Giving your summer movie viewing a requisite dose of literary authority, Baz Luhrmann‘s “The Great Gatsby” is coming with an equal mix of high expectations, quiet rumbling about a troubled production, star power, a Cannes Film Festival opening slot, 3D, Jay-Z and whatever else you can add on the pile. It’s a helluva basket of eggs. And if that weren’t enough, the director is already hinting that the familiar story from the classic book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, could be in for a bit of tweaking.
“One of the big devices in the book is that the story is told from inside the mind of Nick Carraway…[he is] a watcher of and a participator in the story. In fact, in the novel, Fitzgerald very deftly alludes to the fact that Nick is writing a book about Jay Gatsby,” the director told Life & Times. “So [co-writer] Craig [Pearce] and I were looking for a way that we could show, rather than just have disembodied voiceover throughout the whole film, show Nick actually dealing with the writing, dealing with his experience of Gatsby, as he does in the novel.”
And it was in this approach that they found a twist on the tale. “How we do really is the one big difference in the film. I won’t say how. I will let the audience discover that for themselves,” Luhrmann added. Hmm…
Meanwhile, late last summer, chatter surfaced that the director and Warner Bros. were at odds, with Luhrmann eager to do reshoots, and the studio refusing to foot the bill, leaving the Australian filmmaker to try and raise financing himself. And while we’ll never quite know what happened behind the scenes, whatever it was, it resulted in the movie being pushed from last Christmas to this spring, but Luhrmann chalks it up to nothing more than the weather.
“With everything I make, I set out with a very clear plan. We pursue that plan. But of course there will be deus ex machina, acts of God, and in this case it was the weather,” Luhrmann explained. “As we were shooting, Sydney was being drenched day in and day out by La Nina, some of the wettest weather on record, and so we had to shut down shooting and then resume shooting the following year.”
So there you go. The director also credits the delay with allowing him more time to work with Jay-Z on the club bangin’ soundtrack you’ll be hearing, so maybe all’s well that ends well. “The Great Gatsby” shows off its jazz hands on May 10th. [via DigitalSpy and Herald Sun]
