Out of Australia

SYDNEY, Australia – The most recognizable stars of Baz Luhrmann’s cattle-drive drama “Australia” are Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

But on a December day nearly two years ago, even as Kidman flitted about Luhrmann’s creative compound in the hills above Sydney, all of the Australian writer-director’s attention was focused on an actor who is just as important a member of the ensemble: a 10-year-old Aboriginal boy who had never acted in anything.

Luhrmann’s new movie is as ambitious as its weighty title suggests, an unusual amalgam of his heightened, modern theatricality – perhaps best exemplified in his last film, 2001’s mash-up musical “Moulin Rouge” – and classic old-school historical epics such as “Out of Africa,” “Gone With the Wind” and “Lawrence of Arabia.”

He also wanted to dramatize his native country’s less-than-virtuous recent history. One of “Australia’s” central conflicts hinges on the government’s campaign to separate mixed-race children (half-Aboriginal, half-Caucasian) from their parents, a failed “stolen generation” attempt to make the population more white.

In the film, a half-caste child named Nullah comes between, and ultimately helps bring together, the story’s horseback-riding Drover (Jackman) and the English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman), who has traveled to Australia to discover what has become of her husband and their failing cattle station.

If the film was to succeed emotionally, Luhrmann knew on that day in late 2006, Nullah must captivate not only Drover and Lady Ashley, but also the audience.

Luhrmann and his casting department had discovered Brandon Walters among nearly 1,000 hopefuls in the tiny western Australia town of Broome.

As Walters and his family left Luhrmann’s estate, Iona, after a final meeing, the director expressed confidence in his choice, but knew how crucial it would be.

“Is it right for the movie?” he said. “Is it right for the story? Is it right for them?”

Epic challenges

In the end, hiring Walters was among the easiest decisions Luhrmann would face.

The production ultimately would go months over schedule, costing Kidman a chance to star in “The Reader,” an adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel.

Those delays – some caused by weather, some the result of Luhrmann’s shooting a considerable amount of film – would rekindle the fractious relationship between him and 20th Century Fox, which also produced “Moulin Rouge.”

Even though “Australia” would cost well more than $100 million, the production would have to cut its shooting schedule to save money, and buy and later auction several hundred cattle after feuding with Fox over what kind of cows the movie did or didn’t need.

Just days before the film’s scheduled release, Luhrmann was still working on it. A relentless perfectionist (he and his producing partner/production designer wife Catherine Martin held nearly a dozen meetings finalizing their Christmas card), he was adding a scene here, dropping one there, cutting in new music cues.

Having tested a longer, unfinished version of the film earlier this year in Minneapolis, Luhrmann was relieved that American audiences didn’t reject out of hand a Western set in an unfamiliar foreign land.

But he knew too that, just as early skeptics had dismissed his previous movie, they were fretting over “Australia’s” prospects.

“Very, very clever people said to me while I was making ‘Moulin Rouge’ that people will never, ever go for it,” he said.

Fox, which has suffered through a woeful year, very much needs a critical and commercial success.

And “Australia” faces strong competition this season from several other high-profile films, including David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” and Sam Mendes’ “Revolutionary Road.”

“The risk,” Luhrmann said, “is staggering.”

A family affair

This wasn’t supposed to be his next movie. And it wasn’t supposed to star Jackman.

Luhrmann and Martin saw “Moulin Rouge” as the concluding chapter in what they call their “Red Curtain” trilogy: highly stylized productions that emphasized broad theatrics over everyday naturalism.

Those three films – launched with 1992’s giddy “Strictly Ballroom” and 1996’s flamboyant “William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet” – established Luhrmann as a distinctive voice.

While he was winding down “Moulin Rouge,” Luhrmann started preparing “Alexander the Great,” the first in a planned series of historical epics that would reteam him with Leonardo DiCaprio, his “Romeo & Juliet” star.

He spent months putting the movie together, but when Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” started filming, Luhrmann had to retreat.

Still, it was not exactly that project’s collapse that led him to “Australia.” Instead, it was starting a family.

Like so many middle-age parents (Luhrmann is 46, Martin is 43) who have children after launching successful careers, the two had begun to re-evaluate their priorities after their daughter, Lilly, was born in 2003.

“ ‘Alexander’ was about pathos – that too much is never enough,” he said. “And in a way, I found myself reflecting back on making an epic about family – hardly something I would have chosen easily, because it didn’t seem adventurous enough.”

With a son, Will, on the way, Luhrmann began asking himself: “Who are our children? Where are they from? Are they Australian?

“What do I think of my own country? What do I think of the indigenous story, the stolen generation? I wanted to sort that out, while telling this huge romance.”

After Luhrmann sketched out the movie’s basic story of a woman and a man on their own in the wilderness, he worked with four different writers to shape the screenplay. While the characters are fictitious, the 1940s story is grounded in copious research, including the little-known Japanese bombing of Darwin.

Drover and Lady Ashley anchor the romantic conflict. He wants to be left alone, and her love is reserved for horses and fashion, but they are thrown together by circumstances beyond either’s control.

When Lady Ashley arrives in Australia from England, she is taken by Drover to Faraway Downs, the huge, inland cattle station owned by Ashley’s husband, whom they find murdered the minute they arrive.

The death might be part of a plot by land baron King Carney (Bryan Brown) and his henchman Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) to monopolize the livestock business.

Alone in the middle of nowhere, Drover and Lady Ashley decide to push their 1,500 cattle across the empty, rough country to Darwin, with Nullah and several other Aboriginals in tow.

“My first childhood, blown-away experience, was ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ ” says Luhrmann, who grew up in a tiny town in New South Wales, where his father ran a gas station and a movie theater.

“I was struck by the raw power of landscape films, where landscape is used to amplify the emotions of the story.”

When the government comes after Nullah, Drover and Lady Ashley must confront their personal relationship:

Have they become a family?

Are they willing to make a sacrifice for one another and Nullah?

Are their emotional wounds ready to heal?

Casting about

At first, Luhrmann pictured Heath Ledger, who died of a drug overdose earlier this year, as Drover, but decided he was too young.

Fox pushed Brad Pitt; Luhrmann wanted Russell Crowe, only to have the actor leave the movie over his reduced compensation, famously saying, “I don’t do charity work for major studios.”

Jackman initially had been cast as Fletcher. Because the Australian actor’s “X-Men” films had been huge hits for Fox, the studio supported moving him into the lead role.

After test audiences gave mixed verdicts, Luhrmann struggled deciding whether Drover lives or dies at the film’s conclusion.

“It was just relentless and endless and everything was harsh and hard,” Luhrmann said of the production. “Psychologically, it was just really hard to get up every morning and lead, to hold up people’s spirits.”

But the film’s hopeful message, Luhrmann added, is what kept him going. And he’s especially pleased that a movie about half-castes is arriving just weeks after the United States elected a mixed-race man its president.

“The film is ultimately about family, but not a nuclear family,” he said. “And family is defined by those you love and those who love you back.

“That is what it’s about – that in these times, we come together, through love.”