Back in 2005, Australian director Baz Luhrmann enjoyed a very special situation. His most recent film, Moulin Rouge, had been a blockbuster that had multiplied by almost four the 50 million dollars that 20th Century Fox invested in it and he had the support of his executives to embark on doing something much more ambitious.
After abandoning a project to tell the story of Alexander the Great with Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman, he decided that it was time to return home and so he launched Australia, a blockbuster with a budget of 130 million US dollars, and Initially it was going to star the two biggest local stars of the moment, Kidman and Russell Crowe. However, the Oscar winner for Gladiator failed to match his schedule and was eventually replaced by another rising Australian figure, Hugh Jackman.
Filmed in 2007 and released in November of the following year with an eye on the awards race, Australia was Baz’s first stumble in a career that had been since his debut on the big screen in 1992 with Love is in the Air. marked by success. The film failed to gross $50 million in the United States, debuting in fifth place in the week of its release.
And while it eventually managed to recoup its investment, accumulating some 211 million worldwide, it only earned an Oscar nomination for Luhrmann’s wife, Catherine Martin, for costume design. It took five years for the great Australian director to regain his place in Hollywood with the remake of The Great Gatsby starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Luckily, life always gives second chances, and that is precisely what Luhrmann has taken advantage of. When during the pandemic he was forced to stop filming Elvis, he began thinking about recycling what was filmed for Australia as a six-episode miniseries. This is how Faraway Downs, recently arrived at Disney, came about.
In an interview with the weekly The Wrap, the director explained: “I had the idea and I started to look at what I had filmed again. I realized I had enough to tell the story in episodes. It is not necessarily better as a film than Australia but it proposes a variation on its themes. “I used the episodic storytelling structure to strengthen certain things and explore them in a deeper way.”
The plot remains the same, with Kidman playing an elegant and brave British woman who in 1939 decides to travel to a remote corner of Australia to demand that her husband sell their estate called Faraway Downs, but must stay there when upon arrival he He finds that his consort has been murdered. She soon realizes that the only way to stop her cattle from being stolen is to take charge of the establishment with the help of a handsome local cowboy named Drover (Jackman).
But thanks to an additional hour, taken from the 60,000 meters of celluloid that he filmed at the time, Luhrmann found a way to place the Aboriginal boy, Nullah, played by Brandon Walters, as the narrator, telling the story from his perspective.
Thus, it gave a new dimension to a secondary theme in the film, that of the stolen generations, and the children of that origin that the Australian government separated from their families to distance them from their traditions. Plus, she added a totally new soundtrack and a different ending than the one the movie had..
