So, do you want to be my therapist, or shall we just talk?” It’s late at night and Baz Luhrmann has had to cut short filming on the Gold Coast due to the flooding rain. His crew is scrambling to fly out to LA in the morning and it’s a drama because the film director is close to wrapping his biopic, Elvis. Luhrmann and wife Catherine Martin, the four-time Oscar-winning costume designer, have also been looking back over the Vogue archives. The duo first guest-edited the magazine in 1994, so there is great nostalgia attached to the project, but as it turns out Luhrmann is not one to indulge in sentimentality. We are pushing him to go there.
“I’ve always had an enduring love affair with , and there are two parts to it,” Luhrmann says. “One is that I grew up in this tiny country town; you could count maybe 11 houses. We had a gas station and a farm, and Dad was very inventive,” he explains. “These were fairly extraordinary circumstances, it took me a while to realise it, we were so isolated,and – and they were like a portal to the rest of the world.” Luhrmann carried the inspiration right through to his student days at NIDA in Sydney. “I’d grab a coffee and a , and take it back to my crappy little apartment,” he says. “The magazine was aspirational; you just fell into its world. It allowed you to think anything was possible.”
