THE GREAT GATSBY Production Notes - Visual Hollywood

THE GREAT GATSBY (2013)
PRODUCTION NOTES
"I felt really excited about the film," says Tobey Maguire, who plays Nick Carraway. "I think it's
certainly got a lot of beauty and spectacle, but it's very grounded in character stories."
Luhrmann recalls one of the highlights of the experience, when he and Pearce had just installed
themselves in the suite at the Ace Hotel, where many of the surrounding buildings were built in
Fitzgerald's time. "There was a bay window, New York was outside, and Leonardo sat down in the
window, and literally there was someone playing a trumpet somewhere, or something...it was so
Fitzgerald," recalls Luhrmann. "Leonardo just started reading and Tobey started reading, and then
suddenly the sun set and Tobey read Nick's final line, 'So we beat on, borne back, ceaselessly into
the past.' I remember Leonardo just clapping, and I clapped, and off we all went on this journey,
into Fitzgerald and into his story and his time and place, as well as into our own."
CASTING A CLASSIC
"My life has got to be like this... It has got to keep going up."
—Jay Gatsby
"I'll bet he killed a man."
"It's more that he was a German spy during the war."
"He doesn't want any trouble with anybody."
"I'm scared of him. I'd hate to have him get anything on me."
At first, everything we know about Gatsby is drawn from "the bizarre accusations that flavored the
conversations in his halls"*—he is the fabulous but mysterious party-giver, the man who drifted
"coolly out of nowhere to buy a palace on Long Island,"* who opens the towering doors to that palace
each and every weekend to anyone and everyone, but who no one has actually met. That is, until
he invites his new neighbor and the narrator of the story, Nick Carraway, to one of his lavish parties.
This begins a chain of events through which Gatsby will ultimately reveal and be ruined by his
romantic obsession, Nick's cousin, "the golden girl"* Daisy Buchanan.
"What is eventually revealed is that Gatsby grew up poor. When he was younger, Gatsby had this
grand vision for his life. And then, one day, he happens to fall in love with this girl, Daisy," says
Luhrmann. "He'd known other women, so he thought he might just take what he could get from her
and go off to the war, and that it'd be nothing. But she's this extraordinary girl and he gets hooked.
He goes away to the war, and she promised to wait for his return, but then the rich and powerful
Tom Buchanan sweeps in and steals her away. Gatsby loses his girl, comes back from the war penniless,
and so begins his quest to erase and then repeat the past more in line with that grand vision
he has always had for himself."
Gatsby hopes to win Daisy back by "making something of himself." His entire existence—the ostentatious
mansion, the extravagant parties, the library full of books he's never read, the hundreds of
silk shirts he's never worn, the flashy fast car—is an accumulation for which he cares not, but with
which he intends to recapture Daisy's heart.
"Gatsby is an incredible character to play," acknowledges DiCaprio. "I think he's very much the
manifestation of the American dream, of imagining who you can become... and he does it all for the
love of a woman. But even that is open to interpretation: Is Daisy just the manifestation of his
dreams Or is he really in love with this woman I think that he's a hopeless romantic but he's also
an incredibly empty individual searching for something to fill a void in his life."
© 2013 Warner Bros. Pictures
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