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Eventually Luhrmann joined forces with producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher who, like Luhrmann, had been trying to secure the film rights for some time. “We spent two years trying to get the rights. It was very complicated,” says Fisher. “Then one day there was a knock on our door at the office, and it was Baz Luhrmann saying, ‘I, too, am trying to do The Great Gatsby.’ We were very excited because, in our minds, there could be no better director for it. It was like a dream come true. It was suddenly a way to see and be part of the `20s. When you work with Baz, you take a time machine to a different world.” Securing the rights was the first step, but Luhrmann knew that, ultimately, the project would be pinned on the title character. He needed to find an actor who could express Gatsby’s core complexity, smile “one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it,”* and then, in a flash, look “as if he had killed a man.”* Luhrmann says, “I’d been secretly working on it for some time, knowing all along who I’d like to play Jay Gatsby. Really, it wasn’t difficult to think of someone! Hmmm, I don’t know—complex, romantic, dark, glamorous, great actor…” Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom Luhrmann had worked on “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” and whom Luhrmann counted as a friend and collaborator, was the obvious choice. “I’d read the book in junior high school and I was very moved by the story,” says DiCaprio of the project. “When I picked up the novel again, it was when Baz had handed me a copy and said, ‘I’ve got the rights to this.’ It was a very daunting concept; there was a responsibility to make a memorable film that will be forever connected with one of the greatest novels of all time.” That novel reveals a world and a story of New York City, the city that Fitzgerald called his “splendid mirage,” the city where Fitzgerald found early success and initial inspiration for the book. For Luhrmann and the Bazmark caravan, that city was the critical first stop. At a suite at the Ace Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and then on the corner of Canal and Broadway, on the 24 th and 26 th floors of building number 401, Bazmark set up shop, including: his wife, Oscar ® -winning costume and production designer Catherine Martin, who has collaborated with Luhrmann on the distinctive look of all his films and theatre productions for over 20 years; Anton Monsted, executive music supervisor and co-producer on the film; Craig Pearce, scriptwriter, friend and writing partner on Luhrmann’s “Red Curtain Trilogy”; and the rest of their creative production team. 4
New York City, “the racy, adventurous feel of it at night…the constant flicker of men and women and machines,”* was a source of inspiration. The whole team fed off the energy and the history of the place, in its way its own character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. “While in New York, we did a lot of reading about the time—particularly the financial system, the bond and stock markets,” says Pearce. “We were in the middle of the global financial crisis…or just coming out of it.” “I think The Great Gatsby feels more relevant now than ever,” Wick offers. “In a time with a glittering but unreliable economy, and a prevalent sense that we have lost our way, Gatsby could have been written yesterday. But it wasn’t. The book takes you to another time and place, a lost world of blinding allure, of extravagant hope and crashing dreams, which we knew Baz, more than anyone imaginable, could deliver for an audience.” “Fitzgerald, I think, sensed a fundamental crack in the moral fabric of the 1920s, that things could not keep going up, up, up, as they were, couldn’t last,” says Luhrmann, “and that felt very relevant to the global financial crash of 2008. It felt parallel. If I think about it now, this fact is what told me I had to do Gatsby now and in this way. We came to New York because we had to be in New York to learn about and understand for ourselves those parallels of place, culture and mindset— Jazz Age and today.” “Baz is a very literary director. If he’s going to make a movie based on a book, it’s because he wants to reveal what he believes is the center of the story,” Martin explains. “So, we always start with the descriptions in the book and then we try to make discoveries and, like a detective, unearth certain things.” “When I first start working on any project, I always begin by collecting,” Luhrmann describes his process. “In terms of a visual language, I’ll just start collecting photographs and making collages and my terrible scribbles. This is how I start with CM: terrible scribbles that no one can read, and she’s so lovely. She says, ‘No, they’re full of emotion!’ What she means is only I know what that scribble is, right?” “We’re blessed because the photographic image and also filmmaking was extremely prevalent in the `20s,” adds Martin. “So, the time was captured not only in illustrations and drawings—cartoons of the times—but there are extensive photo archives. It’s very exciting, because you see the birth of our modern contemporary culture.” 5
Page 1 and 2: “I want to write something new, s
Page 3: ABOUT THE PRODUCTION “Is all this
Page 7 and 8: We had to make some decisions early
Page 9 and 10: saw footage of Leonardo as Gatsby,
Page 11 and 12: the beginning, a totally destroyed
Page 13 and 14: “Leonardo was a constant partner
Page 15 and 16: “She’s sort of terrifying,” a
Page 17 and 18: Fitzgerald’s prose in The Great G
Page 19 and 20: From 1920s costumes to New York in
Page 21 and 22: If Gatsby’s wild castle is the ul
Page 23 and 24: “The Valley of Ashes was a real p
Page 25 and 26: Luhrmann, as he did with “Romeo +
Page 27 and 28: “A good example is Lana Del Rey
Page 29 and 30: Born in Hollywood, California, DiCa
Page 31 and 32: Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way an
Page 33 and 34: Snyder, and the Academy Award ® -n
Page 35 and 36: crime. He more recently starred in
Page 37 and 38: DiCaprio; and an Academy Award ® n
Page 39 and 40: two National Board of Review Awards
Page 41 and 42: Wick also garnered a bevy of Academ
Page 43 and 44: Achievement Award. She has also bee
Page 45 and 46: BRUCE BERMAN (Executive Producer) i
Page 47 and 48: JASON BALLANTINE (Editor) was the w
Page 49: Armstrong more recently created the

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