Production
Originally, Baz Luhrmann was planning to make a film about Alexander the Great starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman, with a screenplay by David Hare. The director had built a studio in the northern Sahara but Alexander made by Oliver Stone was released first and after several years in development, Luhrmann abandoned the project to make a film closer to home.
The visual effects were done by the Animal Logic films and The LaB Sydney.
Luhrmann spent six months researching general Australian history. At one point he considered setting his film during the First Fleet, 11 ships that sailed from Britain in 1787 and set up the first colony in New South Wales. The director wanted to explore Australia's relationship with England and with its indigenous population. He decided to set the film between World Wars I and II in order to merge a historical romance with the Stolen Generations, where thousands of mixed-race Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families by the state and integrated into white society. Luhrmann has said that his film depicts "a mythologised Australia".
Read more about this topic: Australia (2008 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity; and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views; for lies are always detected, sooner or later.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, nor is it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)