THE GREAT GATSBY Production Notes - Visual Hollywood

THE GREAT GATSBY (2013)
PRODUCTION NOTES
"Nick represents any person on a journey who's searching for the right path. He's sensitive, artistic...an
observer," says Maguire of his character.
"Nick is stuck between these two worlds, his allegiance to Daisy and Gatsby and this kind of wild
ideal of love that they've got, and also this more traditional tie to Tom as Daisy's husband, though
he's not the nicest guy in the world, nor the most trustworthy," explains Joel Edgerton, who plays
Tom Buchanan.
"Nick is the innocent who comes into this world and is changed—he becomes terribly affected by
the world and by what happens," notes Pearce.
In the end, tragedy strikes, and Nick's proximity to, and involvement with, that tragedy—to Gatsby,
the Buchanans, New York City, the parties, the speakeasies, the "profusion of champagne"*—it all
causes him to crack-up. "He's disgusted by everyone's behavior," Maguire says. "And this is a character
who, in the beginning of the book, is described as someone who reserves all judgments. Essentially,
he still wants to believe that people, at their core, are good, so it breaks his heart to learn
that they are not. And I think his own culpability and indulgence with these people adds to his disgust."
"I don't know if Nick is the moral compass, but he's definitely our moral conductor," Luhrmann
says. "I think he takes us through the moral landscape of the story, and by the end he's ready to find
out who he is and what he wants."
"Early on, Tobey was searching for the real Nick and I think he made an incredible discovery," says
Luhrmann. "Much like Fitzgerald was, Nick is something of an outsider, an awkward goose, an
honest but out-of-his-element Midwestern guy grappling with life in the East. And Tobey took the
grand step of expressing that, at first, in somewhat comic turns, but then, as Nick breaks down and
becomes psychologically distraught, so, too, does Tobey's performance become more psychological
until finally we meet, at the end of the film, the Nick that we met at the beginning, a totally destroyed
human being, not comic at all. This progression was a very brave choice on Tobey's part—
his Nick moves deftly between comic outsider, observer, broken, and, finally, changed man."
"Tobey does such an incredible job of portraying Nick," adds DiCaprio. "Here he is experiencing
life, he's with these people, but he's reflecting because he really is an outsider. He never really belongs."
Comparisons have long been made between Nick and Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald himself famously confessed,
"Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels."
Indeed, Fitzgerald and Nick share a birth year, 1896, a hometown, St. Paul, Minnesota, a temperament,
and a passion for writing—it is, in fact, Nick Carraway who is writing about Gatsby in F.
Scott Fitzgerald's novel.
"We've made no bones about the idea that Nick Carraway is F. Scott Fitzgerald in a way, and so
much of what happens in Gatsby happened to Fitzgerald," acknowledges Luhrmann.
In his collection of autobiographical essays, The Crack Up, Fitzgerald admits, "I have spoken in
these pages how an exceptionally optimistic young man experienced a crack up of all values, a
crack up he scarcely knew of until long after it had occurred." Nick Carraway, in the pages of Gatsby,
undergoes a similar crack up, and then retreats back to St. Paul to write his book.
© 2013 Warner Bros. Pictures
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