It was one of Baz Luhrmann's most controversial movies. Set in his homeland, Australia was a sprawling, three-hour epic that received at best a mixed critical reaction, following a production plagued with difficulties.
The director's response, 15 years later? Remake it into an even longer "banquet" of event television, he tells Newsweek—no matter what people might think.
The Oscar-nominated director, known for such genre-busting movies as Moulin Rouge, Elvis and Romeo + Juliet, has reworked Australia into a six-part series for Hulu called Faraway Downs and radically transformed the story, including the ending.
It stars Hugh Jackman as a no-nonsense cattle drover and Nicole Kidman as an uptight British aristocrat who form an unlikely romantic pairing when they team up to save her late husband's cattle farm, against the backdrop of World War II. It also highlights Australia's very real racist policies of forcibly removing "half-caste" or "creamy" Aboriginal children away from their families to raise them in Christian missions, known as the Stolen Generations.
"The big idea was of flipping a Gone With the Wind epic and telling it from the perspective of a First Nations child who sees this control freak of a woman that thinks she's going to solve everything but in the end learns you can't own land, you can't own a child and you can't own a relationship," Luhrmann tells Newsweek in an exclusive chat.
Luhrmann explains that Faraway Downs is a "film in chapters" and nothing like a director's cut, but more a melodrama that suits episodic storytelling.
"There's a lot of tragedy and it naturally gives you these chapters," he says.
'You Can Control The Rhythm'
Critics slammed the 2008 film for being too long, in what Luhrmann describes as an "aggressive" response, but Faraway Downs is even longer. He shot up to 2.5 million feet of footage when making Australia, not because he thought he might "need an extra shot," but because he wanted to make an epic film that could be consumed in one sitting.
Switching over to a serialized format allowed him not only to include scenes not in the movie, but to give the audience more control of how they watch Faraway Downs.
"Australia was a meal and this [Faraway Downs] is a banquet of a telling in which you can control the the rhythm. This is the big difference," Luhrmann says.
"I love the cinema. I'll always love the cinema, but in the cinema whether it's 90 minutes or three hours, at a certain point you've got to bring it to a conclusion, but you decide what that ending means."
'The Bitter Pill Is Really Bitter'
Another theme which divided critics at the time of Australia's release was its portrayal of Aboriginal Australians, also referred to as First Nations or Indigenous people. Some critics praised the film for highlighting racist policies and bringing them to the mainstream, while others accused the main characters of having a white savior complex.
Flipping the story to now be told from the perspective of Nullah (Brandon Walters), the young Indigenous boy at the heart of Faraway Downs, gave Luhrmann an opportunity to collaborate with young Indigenous artists on the Hulu series.
He even took the finished product to remote communities in the Kimberly, in the Western Australia Outback—receiving positive feedback—and incorporated First Nations people into the production. However, he says the reality of Australia's historical and even recent attitudes towards its Indigenous people is a "bitter pill" to swallow.
One standout scene shows mixed-race Aboriginal children being shipped to an island off the coast of Darwin, which would be one of the first targets for incoming Japanese fighter pilots. The children were being sent to their deaths.
A year after Australia was released, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued an unprecedented official apology to the Stolen Generations in federal parliament. But just weeks before Faraway Downs premiered, Australians voted a resounding 'no' in a referendum to change the constitution to recognize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, which would have paved the way for a Voice to Parliament: a non-binding representative body to advise government on behalf of diverse Indigenous populations.
"The romance and the sweeping nature, the entertainment of it, is absolutely authentic, but it's there for the bitter pill, but the bitter pill is really bitter," Luhrmann says of shining a light on Australia's relationship with its First Nations people.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Shannon Power is a Greek-Australian reporter, but now calls London home. They have worked as across three continents in print, ... Read more
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