Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness: Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom Musical: Dance Is In The Air

This sounds great! "Strictly Ballroom" was a wonderful movie, and I also loved "Moulin Rouge" and "The Great Gatsby".

It was great to see a revival of Aussie Rock legend John Paul Young's song "Love Is In The Air" in "Strictly Ballroom" too!

BAZ Luhrmann likes to call his first movie, Strictly Ballroom, "the little film that could". But it could easily have been "the little film that wasn't". As a novice director, Luhrmann struggled to win the confidence of funding bodies and investors so he could make his stylised romantic comedy about a young ballroom dancer who outrages the old guard by creating his own funky, heel-clicking, butt-wiggling moves.

Then, shortly before the film's release in 1992, came a setback that shattered his confidence: Strictly Ballroom was pulled from the only mainstream cinema screen its producers had secured (alongside the usual art-house venues). A distribution executive disliked the film so much, he ditched it.

Luhrmann, still in his 20s, was crushed. It seemed the destiny of his debut movie was being sealed even before the public had had a chance to see it. "When they dumped us, honestly, I've only had a few of those moments in my life where I went, 'It's over'," he says candidly.

Arguably Australia's greatest living showman, Luhrmann, now 51, is talking to Review in an inner-Sydney rehearsal studio so shabby (chipped floors, bare concrete walls, scuffed chairs) it could feature in a documentary about wannabe dancers from the wrong side of the tracks.

He is here to spruik Strictly Ballroom: The Musical, a multi-million-dollar stage adaptation of his debut film, which opens in Sydney in April, and to finalise auditions for the production's child actors. "It'll be tricky," he says of the auditions, his unease palpable. For although the pint-sized performers, brimming with bright confidence, are treated with kid gloves, the harsh reality is two of them will be cut from the line-up today.

The auteur is dressed in a studiedly casual way, in a creaseless denim shirt and tailored pants with no socks. Judging by recent media images, he has sworn off socks for some months. Legs crossed, he leans back in his chair as languid as a cat basking in the sun, and recalls that grim autumn when the film Strictly Ballroom lost its only mainstream venue.

He took refuge in a Queensland caravan park with his then-collaborator (now his wife) Catherine Martin, and another colleague. "And it was over," he reiterates. He remembers, oddly enough, having his hair cut and asking himself, "What now? We put all our hearts and souls into this." (He told an American journalist last year that he had suffered bouts of depression that left him feeling almost suicidal several times during his career. This, apparently, was one of them.)

Then, out of the blue, came a phone call from the Cannes film festival that would change everything, not just for the $3.5 million debut feature but for the filmmaker who would go on to become this country's most successful movie director, as defined by his uncanny ability to attract mass audiences across class, cultures and generations. He has directed four of the 10 highest-grossing films at the Australian box office that were either homegrown (the bombastically titled Australia and Strictly Ballroom) or had significant local input (The Great Gatsby, which was filmed in NSW, and Romeo + Juliet).

Luhrmann took that phone call from Cannes at the caravan park and the news was like something out of a, well, feelgood film. He was invited to premiere Strictly Ballroom at the world's most famous film festival in May 1992. Within weeks, he and Martin would go from wondering whether their film would find an audience in Australia to being feted on the Croisette. "Honestly, that first screening [at Cannes], only half full," Luhrmann reminisces. "End of the screening, an ovation." The following night, it was screened again "and there was, like, a riot to get in. After that, our feet didn't really touch the ground."

The film won the Prix de la Jeunesse (youth prize) and, after a bidding war, was sold around the world.

It eventually took $80m at the box office, making it one of our most lucrative and loved local movies. Featuring trunk-loads of sequins, feathers and spangly catsuits (and that was just for the male dancers!), it is also credited with inspiring the Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing with the Stars television juggernauts, and has featured on school and university curriculums. "You've got to start thinking when you're doing the same number of shows as Star Wars, you're feeling pretty good," says Luhrmann of his film's extraordinary box office appeal.

Twenty-two years on, he is hoping that appeal will be replicated in the theatre. He agrees staging any new musical is daunting, even though he is familiar with taking huge budget gambles: in 2011, cost overruns imperilled the Gatsby film and he had to do some fast talking to convince Warner Bros executives to raise the budget of his studio-backed spectacle from $80m to $105m. "We have one great thing on our side," he says of the Strictly Ballroom musical, "which is that we already have a hugely developed story and structure which has played universally in many forms in many countries."

He says that of all his films, Strictly Ballroom is the one "that's been with me all my life and I imagined it as an all-singing, all-dancing musical before I made the film".

Another advantage the Strictly Ballroom team have is Luhrmann's genius for marketing and his eye for the big gesture. An artist for whom more is always more, he will next month direct 4000 dancers outside the Sydney Opera House in the biggest outdoor ballroom dancing event seen in this country. Called Strictly Sydney, this "dance-off" is being billed as a community event but it's obviously a gargantuan plug, backed by the NSW government, for the musical.

In person, Luhrmann is an intriguing hybrid of image-conscious celebrity and proud, former country boy who spent his early childhood in Herons Creek, an 11-house town in northern NSW, learning ballroom dancing and attending a Catholic school with three classrooms. When he arrives, 40 minutes late, for Review's interview and photo shoot, he is worried he is having a "crazy hair day". Before he poses for our photographer, he insists his assistant take his picture with a smartphone. He wants to check his hair, even though the silver coiffure in question looks carefully groomed, with a large wave frozen obligingly in midair. Nonetheless, the smartphone image is enlarged and double-checked; only then does he allow the snapper to proceed. "Hair is emotional," he says with a perfectly straight face. It's hard to tell whether he is being serious or seriously self-deprecating. (It's a bit of both, I suspect.)

Despite the Hollywood hair moment, when he auditions the child actors for the stage show, he is in his element as a director and dad (he has two children) who knows how to put kids at ease. "Where'd you get those cool pants?" he asks one boy dressed in jodhpur-style dance trousers, declaring his son would love to own a pair. He prowls the room with a handheld video camera and tweaks the script as he goes. Along one wall are eight members of the production team, or "gang", who watch his every move intently and virtually intuit his requests before they're uttered.

He will direct and co-produce the show with Global Creatures, the company behind King Kong the musical and the Walking with Dinosaurs and How to Train Your Dragon arena shows. (The O'Farrell state government is subsidising the venture, but will not say how much money it is investing.) Luhrmann denies a press report that some members of the Strictly Ballroom team are concerned about delays in casting and the sort of cost blowouts that have dogged some of his films.

"The two leads were in place way, way, way before we announced them," he responds. The fresh-faced leads, Thomas Lacey and Phoebe Panaretos, are relative newcomers (as were Paul Mercurio and Tara Morice in the film).

Nevertheless, the musical was meant to open last year and will now premiere in April. It will involve many of the artists who worked on the movie, from co-writer Craig Pearce (another Hollywood success story) to Martin - a dual Oscar-winning designer - and choreographer John O'Connell. The score will include new music as well as the chart-topping pop numbers, notably John Paul Young's Love is in the Air, that helped make the original film such a crowd pleaser.

Strictly Ballroom started out in 1984 as a group-devised student production at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, with a $50 budget. Luhrmann admits there was a time when reconceiving the play-turned-film as a musical would have seemed a "retreat", but says the time is right now, for family reasons. "At 51, I have children and I have a really good reason to come back home to be with all those great collaborators we've worked with over the years - a homegrown musical show whose roots are singularly planted in this country, and our children can be here with us and participate. They're old enough to enjoy the journey of that." (His daughter, Lillian, is 10, and his son, William, is eight.)

Another reason Strictly Ballroom is so close to his heart is those childhood ballroom dancing lessons, complete with long-distance trips to competitions in the big smoke - Newcastle. "It was my entry, I think, into the theatre in many regards," he reflects. "It was really a wonderment to be putting on a costume; to make it yourself. My grandmother made our costumes, based largely on what Elvis was wearing."

His energetic father, Leonard, was determined the Luhrmann offspring would also paint, do commando training and be "the renaissance boys of Herons Creek", says Baz, flashing an ultra-white grin.

Luhrmann is entertaining company - a witty, if meandering, raconteur and a talented mimic. One minute he is imitating Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, the next conjuring the 1970s milieu of Rotary Club members from country NSW. His father, who died in 1999, ran a petrol station, then a cinema and was a committed Rotarian. In what Luhrmann calls "this curious miracle moment", Len once talked other Rotary Club members into providing a free ballroom dancing lesson to the local, rural kids - Baz was already having lessons and his dad considered them "character-building".

Forty years later, the younger Luhrmann channels the Rotarians' initial scepticism about his father's proposal in a twanging Aussie accent: "Oh Len, yar jokin' mate. What? You're well-meanin' but it's just throwin' money away. I mean, these longhairs won't turn up to ballroom dancin'!" He captures the idiom and stop-start rhythms of old-school Australia with expert comic timing, and this no doubt reflects how he has once again immersed himself in a provincial subculture of tidy feet and high-rise platinum hair as he finesses the musical.

His dad may have been a big supporter, but the director remains largely unloved by film critics, many of whom complain his movies are too unsubtle, preoccupied with style and bloated with over-the-top effects.

Reviewing Gatsby, The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw said Luhrmann "can't see a nuance without calling security for it to be thrown off his set". The film was "bombastic and excessive, like a 144-minute trailer for itself".

On the other hand, The New York Times's AO Scott declared it "eminently enjoyable", while The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy wrote: "The cast is first-rate" and "most importantly, the core thematic concerns ... are tenaciously addressed". Australian critics were less harsh than their US counterparts, and the big-budget movie has been nominated for 14 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards (the local version of the Oscars), which will be announced this week.

The critics may disagree, but what is not in doubt is that, with party scenes the size of battle zones and a soundtrack overseen by hip-hop star Jay-Z, Luhrmann took to a new generation a psychologically complex story that failed to catch on in Fitzgerald's lifetime. His film took about $350 million at the worldwide box office last year, according to Box Office Mojo, and in Australia it was the fourth highest earner behind Iron Man 3, Despicable Me 2 and The Life of Pi.

Luhrmann agrees the Gatsby reviews were tough, but seems philosophical about them: "If you live outside the box, a lot of great things come with that, but you've got to pay the price," he says. "You look at the analysis of all my films, they're almost identical." He is pleased his Gatsby breathed new life into the novel: "When F. Scott Fitzgerald died, he was buying copies of his own book. He wanted to make something new and intricately patterned, he said, and modern. He thought he was a failure and the book was a failure. Truth is, if Fitzgerald was once buying copies of his book, he sure as hell sold a lot this last year."

He continues, without rancour: "I do mind what people think and it's sad sometimes when a barrage of [critical] negativity might stop audiences connecting with a film. It happened with Moulin Rouge [and] Romeo + Juliet a lot. It wasn't until a lot of audiences saw them on DVD and thought, 'That wasn't what I was told.' "

He likes to work on his own terms - a rarity in Hollywood, especially for an outsider who brings an almost aggressive pop sensibility to his productions, whether it's Shakespeare or a jazz age literary classic. He explains: "There are certain creatives whose job is to stir it up a bit. I respect what they call shooters - the script's already written, and they come along and they direct ... But I've never been able to bring myself to do anything but what I feel I must do."

It has been reported that he is to direct a drama about Napoleon for HBO, but he refuses to confirm this. "I'm not gonna go near it," he says, suddenly wary. "There are multiple things, many, many things and because everything's in play, I just cannot say." It's not just the contractual obligations that worry him, he doesn't want hype and expectation building "and the next thing you find yourself drawn into it. But I didn't decide it, I got sort of bamboozled into it." He says such pressure is "just very real". Here, he may be referring to his involvement in the aborted biopic Alexander the Great about a decade ago.

Luhrmann spent years preparing for it but the project was shelved partly because Oliver Stone beat him to the punch with his own Alexander film. The Australian told The Hollywood Reporter last year the scrapping of this project was "heartbreaking" and "shattering".

While he intends to return to smaller-scale works such as opera and theatre classics at some stage, he notes that if "someone's going to say to you, 'You can use a canvas the size of that wall, you have the resources, you have the backing, you have the belief to do that, you're being a bit churlish not to make use of whatever vitality you've got left to sort of get out there." He says in the future he may "do a small psychological drama, let's say in a country town, that reflects a bit my own life". He finds himself reflecting on his childhood as he gets older; his parents eventually divorced and his mother, Barbara, still teaches ballroom dancing, while his father spent some years breeding orchids.

"He was obsessed with the perfect orchid," says Luhrmann, grinning. "As you get to 50 you start to think about this a little bit more than you do growing up. I think, 'Hang on, he was in pursuit of the perfect orchid. What might that say about my DNA?' "

Strictly Ballroom: The Musical opens in Sydney on April 12.

By ROSEMARY NEILL

With thanks to The Australian