Is this Nicole Kidman’s last movie?
NEW YORKñNicole Kidman isn’t sure whether she will ever make another movie. But if she doesn’t, it’s fitting that her final screen role should be in Australia, the epic $130 million romantic adventure that reunites her with her Moulin Rouge! director Baz Luhrmann and filmed in their homeland with an all-Australian cast and crew.
“I wanted to make a film for my country since I was a little girl,” she said. “I grew up on Australian cinema, and the films created my aspirations and my dreams. This film represents that for me. Baz wanted to do a Gone With The Wind-type film for Australia, mixing high comedy and intense drama with references to many different films and somehow put them together in an homage to old movies, and I think it’s wonderful.”
Kidman, 41, portrays an English aristocrat who travels to Australia where she meets a rough, tough drover (Hugh Jackman) and they reluctantly join forces to save the land she inherited. Luhrmann’s sweeping story includes villainous cattlemen, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the plight of part-Aboriginal children who were taken from their families and placed in state institutions.
Luhrmann wrote 19 drafts of the script and then filmed for nine months, mostly in Australia’s Outback, shooting four different endings before he was satisfied.
“I saw far more of the country while making this film than I ever did before,” said Kidman. “Even though it was really tough and difficult at times, I’m so glad we travelled around and filmed in so many different locations. To feel the air and see the wonderful sunsets and be ravished by the elements was exquisite.”
She learned how to ride a horse like a ranch hand while herding cattle, and it made such an impression on her that she and her husband of two years, country star Keith Urban, have bought a rural cattle ranch in Australia.
“I love the film and I loved the cows, so when we’re in Australia we’re going to spend a lot of time on the property,” she said.
After Moulin Rouge! in 2001, Kidman and Luhrmann had often talked about working together again and were set to team up on Alexander; but when Oliver Stone beat them to it with his own version in 2004, Luhrmann began thinking about Australia.
He went to see Kidman in Nashville, where she lives with Urban. “He never gives you a script; he just tells you his ideas,” she said.
“He’s very, very different to anyone I have ever worked with.
“Baz is such an unusual filmmaker and obviously the process to get the film made is unusual, as well. He’s completely original … he whispers things to me.
“He has ways in which he accesses my emotional life.”
Kidman and Luhrmann, 46, were talking in a New York hotel room not far from an apartment where Kidman is temporarily staying with her baby, Sunday Rose, who was born five months ago.
She and Luhrmann had just flown in from the Australia premiere in Sydney and she looked glamorous in a grey, low-cut tweed suit and diamond-drop earrings.
She and the director are clearly close friends.
“She wasn’t just an actor in this; she was my partner,” said Luhrmann. “At times the shoot was very hard and difficult, and when some people thought they couldn’t go on Nicole was the one who led the charge. When things are at their very worst, that is when she is at her very best.”
But he doesn’t think they could ever work together again.
“So many life-transforming things happen when we work together,” he said reflectively. “On Moulin Rouge! she was breaking up with Tom Cruise and my father died. Then six weeks before we finished filming Australia, she told me she was pregnant and we both burst into tears because I knew that was what she had wanted more than anything else. We both said we can’t make another movie together because there are only so many life-transforming events we can go through.”
Luhrmann has no projects lined up for the future, although he says: “One day I’ll take that James Bond film. That’ll be fun.”
Kidman, too, has nothing planned now that she has finished a two-week stint filming a small role in the musical Nine, due out next year. And she is not seeking any more work.
“I have to say I’m not that interested in making films any more,” she said.
“I know I’m not meant to say that, but that’s where it is for me now. I’m 41 years old and very happy being in Tennessee with my baby and with my husband. I just don’t have that burning desire any more.”
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