His second feature film script, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, co-written with Craig Pearce, successfully married Shakespearean verse to modern design, music, and MTV-style filmmaking. Luhrmann told me, “We do a lot of varied things, but it’s all about telling a story.” In the wake of this startling debut, Luhrmann and his company of collaborators took on an eclectic group of projects: mounting the productions of several classic and original operas in Australia, including Puccini’s La Boheme and Benjamin Britten’s operatic version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream producing the signature issue of Australian Vogue and orchestrating the re-election campaign of Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating. His debut film Strictly Ballroom, initially written and directed by Luhrmann as a thirty-minute play, was produced as a feature film on a meager $2.6 million budget, but grossed more than $80 million world-wide and won the Prix de Jeunesse at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival. Growing up on a pig farm in New South Wales, Luhrmann went on to attend the prestigious Australian National Institute of Dramatic Arts. But Baz Luhrmann’s first two films, Strictly Ballroom and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, blasted a path from the remote outpost of Sydney, Australia, all the way to the heart of Hollywood. He is well known for recent box office success with The Great Gatsby, and before that, Moulin Rouge.
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