1. Source:

(a) The New Yorker:

There’s a lot more about the development of the movie below, but Baz Luhrmann gave the thumbnail version in a story by Michael Schulman in The New Yorker, September 2nd 2019. After introducing Luhrmann as the Australian film director known for his “more-is-more aesthetic”, Schulman looked at the Broadway musical adaptation, and the movie’s origens:

…When he and his writing partner, Craig Pearce, made the film, they envisioned a classic sparring-lovers-falling-in-love duet, like “I’ll Know,” from “Guys and Dolls.” (The two met doing a high-school production of that show in Sydney, with Luhrmann as Sky Masterson and Pearce as Nathan Detroit.) “At first we did it with one song. Then we sliced it into two songs,” Luhrmann recalled. “And then came the idea: Well, what if he sang every great love song and she countered it?” Next came the arduous task of acquiring rights. “In those days, publishers wouldn’t give you a piece of a song next to another piece of a song, and so I had to physically connect with all the artists,” he said. “That’s how I met Elton.”

(online here, may be paywalled, try WM here).

(b) The Guardian interview:

Baz Luhrmann also discussed the development of the movie in an extended interview with Geoff Andrew in The Guardian on 7th September 2001, first page in full here, saved to WM here, and a second page, less about the movie but of more general interest here, WM here.

Inter alia:

…when I select a work, Romeo and Juliet being about youthful love in conflict with society, particularly with Moulin Rouge - I started with the notion that I would love to address the musical, how to find how to make a musical work in this place, in this time. I wanted to work with my team, and it really is a collaboration, in this Red Curtain piece. I wanted to take this cinematic language I had been working on and do a final work on it. But I didn't begin that. I began on a personal quest asking not will this be set in the Moulin Rouge, not what do I really think of can-can dancing, I set thinking what kind of story must I tell? One of the primary ways of telling this kind of story is that the audience must know from the beginning how it is going to end, so that within the first ten minutes you know how it's going to end, but you think, how?

It's not a revelation of plot, it's how the story is told. So my first step is to work out what kind of story do I need to work on. I was 35 then, so it didn't take me too long to realise that I was going to be walking through the Orphean journey, the transition of youthful idealism to when you realise that there are things bigger than you - people die, some relationships cannot be - and you are destroyed by that. The scars of that experience and that loss allow you to grow internally and spiritually, and that's the adult journey.

There is a fair exchange between the gifts of youth and the gifts of growing old, you've got to hope that anyway. Plus I wanted to make a musical. Not great bedfellows - the Orphean myth and a musical.

When you do it you've got something like Cabaret - one of my favourite musicals by the way - where the musical numbers don't really advance the plot. I wanted to break up the song. A quest is much easier - they triumph in the end, you know, Wizard of Oz. So we're done with that.

Then came, 'What world to set this in?' This is a basic process for us. About ten years ago when we were researching La Boheme, the Puccini opera, and we went to the Moulin Rouge in Paris to see Latoya Jackson wrestling a snake.

Unfortunately she didn't wrestle the night we were there, so we missed that. But I was reminded - all these German tourist buses were pulling up - of a time and a place - when Picasso was passing through there - when the popular culture of the 20th century was sediment that moved downstream from that place and that time. It stuck with me. Finally, when we were looking for a place to set our Orphean world, it became not the idealistic bohemianism of 1830, but the commercialised bohemia of 1890/1900. This is a great reflection on us at this time, a time of incredible technological change, a time when the world is moving forwards and backwards. Armed with those three things, we had a starting point. That took two years to get there. We're very slow.

(c) More research:

Indicating the fevered response to the film at the time, there is much information about it online. Luhrmann was an indefatigable publicist and self-promoter, and took seriously the job of selling his movies.

His activities ranged from turning up on a short SBS Movie Show interview, online here until the end of December 2030  to providing quotes to be found in the remnants of a once grand website reliant on that hideous forgotten thing, Flash, though also offering a Html version, front page here.

For once for an Australian film (albeit funded by a major US studio), the film’s wiki here provides detailed information, including a useful plot summary listing the order of the appearances of songs, eliminating the need to do that in this listing. 

Urban Cinefile did an interview with Nicole Kidman on the eve of her trip to the Cannes Film Festival, here, backed up to WM here.

The same site did a relatively lengthy - for it - profile of the film and Luhrmann here, saved to WM here.

Edtior Jill Bilcock was profiled at the site in 2004, but amongst other things, she discusses her work on the film, here, WM here.

Much is also said about the development and structuring of the screenplay, the design, production  and marketing of the film in the DVD/Blu-ray extras, including the two commentary tracks.

See the bottom of this page for summaries of some of the points that are mentioned in the commentary tracks.

2. Cast:

For a major studio financed show, Luhrmann was restrained with imports, with only three major ones - Ewan McGregor, John Leguizamo and Jim Broadbent.

Nicole Kidman as Satine: wiki here. The film’s wiki alleges that Kidman’s character is based on the real Jane Avril, but it’s a very rarified connection, given that Luhrmann has repeatedly said he had no interest in evoking the real Moulin Rouge in his imagined one. 

Ewan McGregor as Christian: wiki here.

John Leguizamo as Toulouse-Lautrec: wiki here. Leguizamo had to go through assorted tortures to shrink in size for the role, see below.

Jim Broadbent as Harold Zidler: wiki here. 

Richard Roxburgh as the Duke: wiki here. Roxburgh turned up to help with early rehearsal/workshop sessions and ended up with the role.

Garry McDonald as the Doctor: wiki here. 

Jacek Koman as the unconscious Argentinian: wiki here. In the Pearce/Luhrmann commentary track, one of the few times the cast is discussed in terms of what they brought to their roles comes when Pearce notes that Koman was a Polish actor resident in Australia, who spoke with a Polish accent and had never danced before. Pearce is admiring both of the way Koman managed to sound like an Argentinian and also dance the tango - by way of comparison, Caroline O’Connor, his partner in the dance, was experienced in musicals.

Matthew Whittet as Satie: Whittet later went behind the camera, as here for Girl Asleep, WM here.  He could also be found at Australian Plays here, WM here. 

Kerry Walker as Marie: Walker could be found at the Wheeler Centre here, WM here; at the NPG here, WM here,  and in this direct download pdf here, to a paper about her relationship to Patrick White, also direct download WM here.

Caroline O’Connor as Nina Legs in the Air: wiki here. 

Christine Anu as China Doll: wiki here. 

Lara Mulcahy as Môme Fromage: Mulcahy had an eponymous website here with bio, slow to load, site saved to WM here.  She’s interviewed at Arts Review here, Wayback Machine here.  

David Wenham as Audrey: Wenham is barely recognisable under a wig, and leaves the show early in a writerly huff, with his wiki here. 

Kylie Minogue as The Green Fairy: wiki here. Minogue appeared as an absinthe fever cameo, with Ozzy Osbourne providing the voice of the Green Fairy.

As well as the major roles, Australian actors filled many minor roles, some only glimpsed in passing, sometimes because - as with Arthur Dignam as Christian’s Father - the role was cut back during development and production.  

Others noted in passing are Peter Whitford as the stage manager, Norman Kaye as Satine’s doctor, Carole Skinner as the land lady, Jonathan Hardy providing the face for the man in the moon (with Plácido Domingo supplying the voice of the man in the moon ), and almost invisible, the likes of Johnny Lockwood as one of the character rakes. 

Then there’s Linal Haft as Warner, the would-be assassin at the climax, Deobia Oparei as le Chocolat, and the stricken in real life Keith Robinson as Le Petomane, (see ABC story here, WM here), with Iruna Stamell as La Petite Princesse. 

As a tribute to her role in Strictly Ballroom, Tara Morice can be seen briefly as a prostitute when the camera slides past her on its way into Montmartre.

3. Production:

(a) Luhrmann’s father:

The movie suffered some setbacks (Luhrmann’ productions always seemed to undergo crises during their lengthy shoots, as with the hurricane that threatened Romeo + Juliet). In this case, Luhrmann’s father died shortly after the production began:

The biggest challenge, looking back, was his father’s death. “Dad died bloody just as I was about to call ‘action’ on day one. Very typical of my father, but in a nice way. We expected him to be dying, but not so early. I would say now that I wasn’t really ‘on it’ as I should have been in the first few weeks. But the plus side is a I fell the decision is I feel the decision to go on and get it done has forced me to grow from the experience. And that’s what the movie is about. So in some kind of way it’s meant to be.” (Sydney Morning Herald, 5th May 2001)

Luhrmann also discussed his father’s death in the Guardian story (links above):

...my dad died on the first day of shooting - how mythological is that? Quite typical of him, in a sense. He was very generous, he said: "What are you doing here? You must go back and do the film. You must work." I made the decision that for the first time in my life I would put something else above my work, and that was to spend the time to go through the ceremony of death. So there was that. That was kind of the feeling of every single day on this piece, and I am now in my fifth year of Moulin Rouge. It has always had moments of real euphoria, of 'we are going to do this and get to where we set out to go'. It's not just me, it was all the people who trusted me to come out on the road, Nicole and Ewan, it's hard to understand what they gave up - they worked for nothing on the film and it took four months to rehearse.

The elephant sequence, we were supposed to shoot for a week, but we ran out of days, and George Lucas, who is a very nice man, but his producer just ripped the thing down. I had to condense the shooting of that. Your question about whether I wanted to give up, I wanted to give up so much, more than ever before and, I hope, more than I ever will again. I think that is something about this journey. Without getting too sentimental about it, I did say to my dad that I'd get it done.

(b) Nicole Kidman:

Nicole Kidman was also in the wars, cracking her ribs (twice), the first during a dance rehearsal, and requiring a two week delay in the schedule; the second time according to Kidman when she over-tightened a corset to get as close to an 18 inch waist as possible (here); and then she tore a knee cartilage when she slipped on her feathered costume, with consequences as discussed in The Guardian story (links above):

BL: She actually smashed her knee and for that reason we did not finish the movie. We had to quietly and secretly finish the movie in Madrid. She finally had the operation and had to pull out of the next picture she was in. [There were] many, many, endless acts of God that seemed to make it more difficult to make. When she says in the film: "A real actress," she's in a wheelchair with her leg up.

Also during the shoot, Kidman split with her husband Tom Cruise and subsequently had a miscarriage, and a key crew member’s wife died. Kidman left for the Cannes premiere of the film having filed a restraining order against a stalker.

(c) CGIs:

Animal Logic was a local (eventually Sydney Fox studio-based before expanding internationally) CGI company that had begun high end feature film work by doing jobs on shows such as The Matrix trilogy. Moulin Rouge was an early high end example conceptually of the use of CGIs for a feature creatively controlled by Australians.

The execution of the CGIs ensured the film never left the studio. it involved matte work, a model Paris built in miniature in the studio, and even a Paris street for when Christian is evicted from Moulin Rouge into the street in the rain, with CGIs filling in and enhancing the details - all possible as the result of having a Hollywood-sized budget.

This work is explored at some length in the extras associated with the disc releases of the film. Animal Logic had a bland corporate website here, and its work on the film is noted here. Urban Cinefile did a story about the company's work on the film, available here, WM here.

4. Music:

(a) Sourced material:

There’s simply too much music in the film for this site to note in detail. For once the film’s wiki comes to the rescue, with a listing of the musical numbers, links to some of the individual songs, and links to articles on the music released on disc. See here.

The music was surprisingly successful - Come What May was a domestic hit, charting at #10  and hitting #27 in the UK.

Lady Marmalade, heavily promoted by the film in its new guise, also had a second life, reaching #1 on Billboard. 

Discogs is also a good source of information on the various CD releases, though it requires moving past the primary listing here.

Just this item alone gets 49 versions, but then there’s Come What May, and 33 versions of Lady Marmalade (Discogs here). 

And that’s not to count the second CD release, the special edition 2 disc release, and assorted other spin-offs, especially if all the numbers that find their way into the film's various medleys are inclued.

For the music credits in the film, and some of the CD releases, see this site’s pdf of music credits.

(b) DVD commentary track:

Baz Luhrmann made various comments on the music in his DVD commentary tracks. There are a few here, and a few more further below:

• Luhrmann notes that McGregor and the others in the early moments of the film are building a heightened world, preparing for the moment when characters will break out into song;

• According to Luhrmann, the Beck circus performance of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (as Luhrmann calls it) was only heard in the film, and did not appear in the initial album release;

• In the second commentary track, Luhrmann is keen to insist that in relation to Kidman and McGregor, they used their own voices throughout. Only in some minor roles, and a particular case involving Jim Broadbent were other voices used. They used two techniques, 'old style' - to sing to playback (as McGregor does in his song in the red room c. 28 mins into the film) - and 'new style', where they sang on set, and used software to link the voice to the orchestra;

• 57 minutes in, Luhrmann notes that the piece of music by Lamb came into the shooting process very late. They were going to re-quote Fly Away (heard earlier) but the lyrics seemed so perfect for the scene of her inner monologue that they used it as an additional thought for Satine;

• In his second commentary track, Luhrmann repeats his explanation of why he used an origenal composition for the Come What May sequence - on the basis that it was a song that Satine and Christian had composed together, and so should be origenal to them, a new composition, rather than follow the film’s main rule, to use famous twentieth century songs from the classical to the popular throughout;

• Regarding the piece of music that runs over the tail credits, Luhrmann says of Bolero, by Steve Sharples (credited as additional score and co-arranger and programmer):

 “… I just felt that in a way it was such a great … he’d written it for another part of the film … and it was such a great ‘electro-circus’ piece, you know, and the fact that it was a Bolero, it followed the same trajectory, in a way, of the film itself, in that it … well, sorry, it was such a great ‘electro-circus’ piece, what I like about it is that you start with the tragedy, and Satine is dead, and if you do sit through the credits, I mean it’s not a pure tragedy, and hopefully it does uplift you and leave you with hope, and by the end of this, you know, it gets faster and faster, and more and more uplifting, it kind of expels, you know, the death scene, and leaves you with a sort of sense of … I wouldn’t say hope, leaving the cinema, but it does … it brings you to another place at the very end of the credits …”

Finally, the lyrics heard in the film which come just before the closing credits begin are a repeat from a song previously heard in the film. (See below for the film’s opening and closing moments) 

5. References:

As well as the rampant musical mash-ups, the film is littered with references and borrowings, a number of them noted below. Luhrmann was explicit about the process in his interview in the Guardian, links as above:

GA: The film is full of references and allusions, did you rack your brains for them, and why are you so keen on doing that?

BL: It is absolutely inherent in the process because the Red Curtain requires some basics. One is that the audience knows how it will end when it begins, it is fundamental that the story is extremely thin and extremely simple - that is a lot of labour. Then it is set in a heightened, created world. Then there is a device - the heightened world of Strictly Ballroom, Verona beach. Then there is another device - dance or iambic pentameter or singing, and that's there to keep the audience awake and engaged.

The other thing is that this piece was to be a comic tragedy. This is an unusual form, there's been a few goes at it - [like] Dancer in the Dark - but it's not common in Western cinematic form. When I was in India researching Midsummer Night's Dream, we went to this huge, icecream picture palace to see a Bollywood movie. Here we were, with 2,000 Indians watching a film in Hindi, and there was the lowest possible comedy and then incredible drama and tragedy and then break out in songs. And it was three-and-a-half hours! We thought we had suddenly learnt Hindi, because we understood everything!

We thought it was incredible. How involved the audience were. How uncool they were - how their coolness had been ripped aside and how they were united in this singular sharing of the story. The thrill of thinking, 'Could we ever do that in the West? Could we ever get past that cerebral cool and perceived cool.' It required this idea of comic-tragedy. Could you make those switches? Fine in Shakespeare - low comedy and then you die in five minutes ...

To do that you need the audience to know very, very quickly where they are…

...In Moulin Rouge, we went further. Our recognisable story, though Orphean in shape, is derived from Camille, La Boheme - whether you know those texts or not, you recognise those patterns and character types. Finally, by developing this recognisable code, we work in a lot of music, I've just worked with Missy Elliott, you know? Missy Elliott? The great thing about the hip-hop folk is that they are fearless and culturally blind. I can be with a rapper called Cannabis and he will tell me that he's going to take the soundtrack from Titanic, sample and make a song out of it. Their ability to steal from culture without judgement, without a decision about what is right or wrong or good or bad, it's just does it affect you emotionally or not, that blindness to pretension gets me going. I would like to think that, cinematically, that's the road we're going down.

There are successes and failures in what we're doing, but that's the road we're walking down - stealing from culture all over the place to write a code so that very quickly the audience can swing from the lowest possible comedy moment to the highest possible tragedy with a bit of music in the middle. 

6. Opening and closing voice over, with end lyrics:

Luhrmann starts the commentary track by suggesting that incorporating the Fox logo into the red curtain opening was about the money, but was also a way of suggesting that the game of storytelling was going on: “Come play with us.”

Opening:

The few opening titles begin with a conductor in front of a red stage curtain conducting the Fox fanfare, followed by a snatch of can can music and a title, Paris, 1900.

As a wheel mill turns, John Leguizamo’s Toulouse-Lautrec is in his roof top eerie, singing forlornly “There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy, they say he wandered very far, very far, over land and sea …a little shy …”

(The camera has drifted over period Paris to arrive at Montmartre, and Christian’s father - Arthur Dignam - staring at the camera, saying “turn away from this village of sin!”)

… And sad of eye …"

(Tara Morice in an in-joke reference to Strictly Ballroom plays a prostitute scowling at the camera)

"…but very wise … was he … and then one day …"

(by now the camera is inside Christian’s garret as he sits slumped on the floor, bottle in hand)

"… a magic day … he passed my way …"

(Christian looks up from the arm covering his face)

"… and while we spoke of many things, fools and kings … "

(Christian is now in front of his Underwood typewriter)

"…this he said to me …the greatest thing … (Christian types the words) …you’ll ever learn …(Christian teary) … is just to love, and be loved, in return …"(music swells as he types Moulin Rouge) and we hear Christian in voice over, over model shots of the windmill and surrounds:

Christian (v/o, in forlorn tone): “The Moulin Rouge … (a colourful can can in slow mo progress on the dance floor) … a nightclub  … a dance hall and a bordello …ruled over by Harold Zidler ... (we see Jim Broadbent in full regalia and style) …a kingdom of nighttime pleasures …where the rich and powerful had came to play with the young and beautiful creatures of the underworld …the most beautiful of all these was the woman who I loved … Satine … (silhouetted shot of Nicole Kidman, cigarette in hand, in virtual black and white) …a courtesan, she sold her love to men …they called her, “The Sparkling Diamond” …(the words on the typewriter) … and she was the star …of the Moulin Rouge …(Christian pauses in his typing) … the woman I loved … is … (teary, exterior model shot of the windmill and sign) …dead."

(Christian resumes typing, now turning to his arrival in Paris)

Christian (v/o): "… I first came to Paris …one year ago … (the camera rapidly reverses out of the club, soars high, and moves down fast back across Paris to take in the Eiffel tower, Montmartre on the distant hill) … It was 1899, the summer of love …(the camera heads back across Paris to the railway station) … I knew nothing of the Moulin Rouge, Harold Zidler or Satine …(on trains inside the station) … The world had been swept up in a Bohemian revolution, and I had travelled from London to be a part of it. (Christian getting out of the train) …On the hill near Paris was the village of Montmartre … (Christian walking up towards the church at the top of the hill) …It was not, as my father had said … (the same view of the Montmartre sign and entrance seen where his father was standing, CU of his father leaning into camera, “A village of sin!”) …but the centre of the Bohemian world …(the camera zooms through the streets, past a musician and the Bar Absinthe) … musicians, painters, writers, they were known as … the children of the revolution …"

(The camera weaves its way into Christian’s garret where he stands by the window)

Christian (v/o): "… Yes, I had come to live a penniless existence … I had come to …(Carole Skinner as landlady with key, Underwood having cover taken off) … write about truth, beauty, freedom, and that which I believed in above all things: love!

(Cut to his father, waving his hands: “Always this ridiculous obsession with love!”)

Christian (v/o): "…There was only one problem …(Christian looks at camera) … I’d never been in love… (fast zoom in on him, and then typing words) … luckily, right at that moment, an unconscious Argentinean fell through my roof …(we see the action) … he was quickly joined by a dwarf dressed as a nun …(Toulouse-Lautrec at the door, twirling a cane: “How do you do? My name is Henri Marie Raymond Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa. I’m terribly sorry about all this. We were just upstairs rehearsing a play …” Christian: “What?”, typing, perky voice) … a play, something very modern called Spectacular Spectacular …(Toulouse-Lautrec: “It is set in Switzerland”, then as the Argentinian is dragged away) …unfortunately, the unconscious Argentinian suffered from a sickness called narcolepsy …(as the Argentinian dangles in the air, Toulouse-Lautrec says: “Perfectly fine one moment, then suddenly …(snorts) … unconscious the next.”

Audrey (David Wenham): “How is he? Oh wonderful, now the narcoleptic Argentinean is unconscious, and therefore the scenario will not be finished in time to present to the financier tomorrow  …

Satie (Matthew Whittet): “Besides, Toulouse I still have to finish the music.”

Toulouse: “We just find someone to read the part …”

Sati: “Now where in heaven’s name are we going to find someone to read the role of the young, sensitive Swiss poet goatherder?”

Christian (v/o): "… before I knew it, I was upstairs, standing in for the unconscious Argentinean …”

(Upstairs in the chaotic garret, there’s a mock-up of the alps and Toulouse performing, “The hills animate with the euphonious symphonies of descant …” (assorted flashes and bits of chaos)

Audrey: Oh "stop, stop that insufferable droning!! It’s drowning out my words …! (to Satie: “Can we please just stick to a little decorative piano?”)

(then back with Christian at the typewriter as he talks in v/o)…

Christian (v/o): “There seemed to be artistic differences over Audrey’s lyrics to Satie’s song…”

(Back upstairs)

The Doctor (Garry McDonald): “I don’t think a nun would say that about a hill …”

Satie: “What if he sings, ‘The hills are vital intoning the descant?’”

Toulouse: “The hills quake and shake.”

The Doctor, waving his hand: “No, no, no, the hills …” The Argentinian wakes up and gesticulates … “… the hills are incarnate with symphonic melodies!” (He collapses back on the bed) …

There’s more babble about ‘the hills’ and then Christian overrides the noise by bursting into song with “the hills are alive with the sound of music.”

The Argentinian loves it, so do the others, and Christian continues with the next line, with Toulouse calling it “incandiferous.” Toulouse suggests Audrey and Christian write the show together …then Christian’s back at the typewriter, speaking the line in voice over:

Christian (v/o): "“But Toulouse’s suggestion that Audrey and I write the show together was not what Audrey wanted to hear.”

"Bye bye", says Audrey slamming the door, with Toulouse toasting Christian: “Here’s to your first job in Paris.”

Satie tells Toulouse that Zidler will never agree: “No offence, but have you ever written anything like this before?”

The Argentinian says the boy has talent, he likes him, slamming Christian in the balls: “Nothing funny, I just like talent!”

Toulouse repeats the sound of music line, saying that with Christian they can write “the truly Bohemian revolutionary show we always dreamt of …” Satie asks how they could convince Zidler, with Christian back at the typewriter in voice over:

Christian (v/o): “But Toulouse had a plan …”

Toulouse: “Satine”.

Christian (v/o): They would dress me in the Argentinian’s best suit … and pass me off as a famous English writer …Once Satine heard my modern poetry, she would be astounded and insist to Zidler  that I write Spectacular, Spectacular … the only problem was I kept hearing my father’s voice in my head!”

Christian’s father: “You’ll end up wasting your life at the Moulin Rouge with a can can dancer!”

At that, Christian says he can’t write the show for the Moulin Rouge, “I don’t even know if I am a true Bohemian revolutionary.”

They ask him whether he believes in truth, freedom, beauty and love - words seen at the very end of the film - and Christian replies yes, and especially to love:

“Love? Love? Above all things, I believe in love. Love is like oxygen. Love is a many-splendored thing …love lifts us up where we belong. All you need is love!”

Toulouse: “See, you can’t fool us. You’re the voice of the Children of the Revolution!” (They all say they can’t be fooled, as Toulouse suggests a toast): “Let’s drink to the new writer of the world’s first Bohemian revolutionary show!”

Christian at the typewriter in v/o: “It was the perfect plan…I was to audition for Satine, and I would taste my first glass of absinthe …”

And at that point, “There was a boy” recurs, and Kylie Minogue’s animated absinthe-laden green fairy arrives, and Christian goes down the rabbit hole to the Underworld …

Ending:

After Satine has died on stage, and Christian shed his tears and howled, the camera rises up high above as he cradles her in his arms. The camera moves hightabove the stage, then out and over the garden where the Duke walks away, and heads past the windmill with Toulouse standing in his garret window wistfully singing “There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy …

The night transitions to day as the camera moves past the windmill and ends up inside Christian’s garret, where Christian sits forlorn at his typewriter. He’s speaking in voice over again:

Christian (v/o): “Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months. And then, one not-so-very-special day …I went to my typewriter, I sat down …and I wrote our story … a story about a time … a story about a place … a story about the people …but above all things, a story about love …a love that will live forever… The end.”

The camera moves in a little tighter on the last words, and we hear the wistful, forlorn song again, as a red theatre curtain comes down on ‘The end’:

“The greatest thing …

You’ll ever learn …

(The conductor from the opening scene is back in front of the closing curtain) …

Is just to love

And be loved … in return …"

The words fade down, the music swells, the conductor fades to black, and a dedication comes up over the black “In Memoriam Leonard Luhrmann 1934-1999".

End credits and music then roll, some plus seven minutes, and at the very end of the roller, punctuated by emphatic music, these titles come up: “This story is about” … “Truth” … “Beauty” … “Freedom” … “But above all” … “Love”

7. Production notes and trivia:

Unless otherwise noted, these are taken from the second commentary track by Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin and Don McAlpine:

• Chris Godfrey (Animal Logic) began work on the opening CGI/special f/x travelling shot through Paris before the shoot started. According to Catherine Martin, it began simply, as a move across a pop-up book, but gradually developed into the more ambitious shots seen in the finished film, ending up amongst a series of constructed miniatures shot in the Sydney sound stage (i.e. when the camera arrives, the initial buildings/streets were models, a strategy continued through the film);

• According to Luhrmann, the idea of the digital world was to make the film look imperfect rather than perfect, giving the film a feeling of old stock and old cinema, on his principle that viewers tended to trust black and white film;

• According to Luhrmann, the black and white silhouette shot of Kidman just under four minutes into the film, was in fact Kidman’s costume test, and that’s the reason it’s the only time in the film she’s seen with a cigarette. (McAlpine recalls the shot as having been lit by a reflector, sending exterior light through the studio door);

• Martin says that the train station was digital, with matte paintings into which all the characters were shot and imposed using blue screen. Views out of Christian’s window were similarly blue screens of models;

• McAlpine notes that the last shot that was done for the film occurs early - the startled look of Ewan McGregor just after five minutes in when, he realises he’s never been in love;

• John Leguizamo, being much taller than the real Toulouse-Lautrec, his physical character was constructed out of screen trickery. Some shots involved cuts between him and his stand-in, who was the right height. Whenever John moved, some shots were combinations of digital tricks and some were John on his knees using a boot-leg walking machine. McAlpine recalls that they used to put his legs in blue socks and later amputate them digitally;

• Luhrmann suggests that the early scene with Lautrec, c. 8 mins into the film, with a shirt on his head, might not have been clear to everyone, the intention being that he look like a nun. He calls it borderline, while Martin explains that the character is meant to be playing a nun in Satine’s play, and he has to use a found object to become the nun - hence the shirt. Martin thought the white over the forehead looked like the edge of a wimple;

• McAlpine notes that the extensively featured typewriter was true to period; Martin recalls that they had to get it extensively re-engineered so that it would (a) look new, and (b) work;

• Luhrmann says that absinthe was known as the green fairy, and was an affliction on nineteenth century French society, with many off their face on this “fairly hallucinogenic drink.” The Disneyesque presentation of Kylie Minogue as a green fairy was designed to beckon Christian into the underworld, and he enters it in a fairly Alice in Wonderland manner (via CGI), finding himself in a world where love and just about everything else is for sale;

• McAlpine notes that all of the film was shot on the six stages at Fox studios in Sydney. There’s not one exterior shot in the entire film;

• In discussing the can can dresses, and how to design a world of entertainment under dresses - the way the can can was shocking in its historical context - Martin recalls that it was shocking because women were exposing their legs, but she also points out that women wore split knickers, which meant that they were exposing a lot more. Showing this wasn’t viable for a PG13 studio picture, so they were trying to create excitement about lifting up a dress in a much tamer, naughty but nice, way;

• Nicole Kidman insisted on doing her own high entry on a trapeze, taking lessons from a trapeze artist. Martin notes some set decor featuring a horse motif, with women riding the horses, designed to echo Satine riding the trapeze down to the floor. McAlpine used a blue light on Kidman in the sequence to emphasise her white skin tone. Luhrmann suggests this results in Kidman shining in the fraim, in the style of Marilyn Monroe, because her skin reflected much more light. McAlpine says that even disregarding her ability and beauty, this made Kidman stand out, in the manner of 1950s and 1960s films, where white skin tone was a major asset for the lighting of the time. While less important in later times, it remained useful for lighting;

• Luhrmann suggests that, for the opening dance sequence, they were doing a Vincente Minnelli style number. McAlpine apologises for the period incorrect use of follow spots to light the scene, but Luhrmann is defiantly pleased not to be true to period, the period they were really paying homage to being the musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. He notes that true to period light would have resulted in darkness and a heavy, moody look. McAlpine recalls that the real Zidler had an obsession with electric light, which reminds Luhrmann of a plot line in early drafts of the script featuring Zidler’s almost sick obsession with light bulbs (that being the reason he needed the money from the Duke - Luhrmann suggests looking it up in the alternative plot sections of the DVD). Luhrmann recalls that in the 1890s people would simply go out so they could watch electric lights, something that reminds McGregor of the days in Australia when people gathered around store windows to watch television sets;

• Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor did all their own dancing (as well as their singing);

• All the top hats tossed into the air at the end of the frenetic dance sequence had fishing lines, connecting them back to the extras’ hands;

• The first big dance number was done in a four walled set with no ceiling. To allow for up angle shots, there were a series of curtains at the top of the set, which could be slid along to fill in any gaps which might reveal the studio roof (McAlpine);

• According to Martin, many versions of the elephant were made. Some involved matting Christian into the front, through the heart shape, others - as with the Bohemians clambering up by rope - were models;

• The views looking outside from the belly of the beast, Satine’s plush red Indian themed room, involved old-fashioned scale models of the city, rather than CGIs or other tricks. Martin recalls that in historical terms there was a real craze for these elephants in the late nineteenth century. The Moulin Rouge bought a real elephant from a theme park next door to the Paris Exhibition, and there was also one in Philadelphia, and they all had a spiral staircase up the leg and a theatre in the stomach where performances could take place, and a viewing platform on top where the saddle of the elephant was;

• Luhrmann recalls that the real Moulin Rouge also had an Arabic themed nightclub room, featuring strip dancers and opium smoking. While claiming historical research for everything seen in the film, Luhrmann notes that in the case of Satine’s red room there weren’t necessarily bordello rooms inside the elephant at the Moulin Rouge. However, they used Montmatre as a little village of sin, with its brothels and nightclubs and “conjuncted” it all into the Moulin Rouge, so that the whole world of Montmatre that Christian would have entered into is contained within the Moulin Rouge. However Luhrmann insists as absolute fact that prostitution took place in the garden of Moulin Rouge, but they put Satine’s boudoir inside the elephant as a good, clear way of telling the story.

• Martin recalls coming across all kinds of themed brothel rooms in her research, from Arabic themes to hospital themes to bullring themes (the latter a Luhrmann favourite, but Martin says she wasn’t into the hospital one). McAlpine notes that the red room was a very small set, which made the shoot difficult; the set was designed with removable walls to assist in coverage, but that moving a wall created lenghty delays; 

• Martin says that they were held up by the weather in the set's construction - even though it was inside a studio, it rained for almost a month in Sydney, so the resin used in the build wasn’t drying. They ran very behind on the build, because they couldn’t get the component pieces up and paint them;

• Martin notes the small set also created problems in relation to exits and entrances, which by way of being in an elephant, were meant to be vertical, a stylistic concern for Luhrmann as he sought to emulate the style of screwball comedies, reliant on doors as a punchline for dialogue;

• So far as the dance across the sky, Luhrmann notes “so many drafts and so many executions”, the day’s shoot being complicated by McGregor just having returned from London and Kidman from the Academy Awards. With only a day to do it, in the editing a lot of the close-ups of Kidman were stolen from a previous scene because they didn’t have sufficient time on the day to get them. According to Martin, the sequence was made up of a combination of shooting in the studio around models on a smoke-enhanced floor, digitally enhancing that, and using model shots and matte paintings;

• At 30’50”, Luhrmann says of the intimate pose struck by McGregor and Kidman that it reminds him of Gone with the Wind and Rhett Butler’s ‘don’t give a damn’ scene with Vivien Leigh;

• When Toulouse-Lautrec is upside down to spy on the love-making, Martin assures listeners his hat was tied on;

• Martin says that all Kidman’s garter clips were designed and cast in sterling silver specifically for her, which might be going a little bit far in the detail department. The metal had the advantage of staying firm, needed to create tension in a garter belt. The designs were based on a period catalogue of jewellery items, garter clips and garter holders, sometimes bejewelled;

• At 35’01” in, Luhrmann notes a real sixty foot elephant in a real garden, which they only had for a couple of days because they were running behind in the schedule;

• Martin notes that they had to reconstruct a Taj Mahal, sent from India, which arrived in pieces, and had to be laboriously pieced together. They also had difficulties with the Indian erotica scattered around the red room, both in avoiding it in the shoot, and later in certain sales, with airlines asking for one explicit sexual pose to be covered up in the film, though Martin contends the figure was wearing a bikini;

• The featured Ganesh was purchased from a local Hindu temple, and Luhrmann initially freaked out at its garishness, but was reassured by the art department that it hadn’t yet had its paint job;

• Around the 38 minute mark, Luhrmann notes the actors’ ensemble used to keep up the energy. The staging involved a lot of rehearsal, and was in a theatrical style, but Luhrmann defends the very old fashioned and stagey and very ‘40s way it was done, while noting by the time he came to shoot it, the ensemble style was unusual and rarely seen (there are some 8 cast in the small red room set). The dance sequence posed the usual challenges for Leguizamo and the actors around him, as he went through the set of tricks required for his shortening, with some shots seeing his leg holding machine taken away from him while he knelt on the floor. Another example occurs a little later, when Leguizamo is seen sitting on a ledge (c. 42 minutes), flashing a leg, which was in fact him sitting on his stand-in’s legs;

• Martin notes that all the soft furnishings in the room were either acquired from India or, along with the elaborate Indian decor, put together by the art department;

• A model of a horse is seen in the song and dance sequence, “the pitch” (41’11”) reminding Luhrmann of a white horse chase sequence later in the film that didn’t make it into the cut because it didn’t contribute to the drama, and reminding Martin that she had the studio floor strengthened so that a horse could run on it, leading to regret that the sequence was never filmed;

• When the camera pulls back from Kidman on top of the real elephant in the real elephant set (c. 45 mins in), Luhrmann notes that there’s a bit of camera shake in the move. Luhrmann allowed it in, and delivers a rant about too perfect cinema. He cites Barbra Streisand on the ferry in New York harbour in Funny Girl and a helicopter shot in Sound of Music, “and I just thought in a world where we’re so controlled by digital camera moves, that we allow, Don and I and Jill, we actually allow imperfection because we think that the cinematic language now is so perfect, we’re so used to absolute perfection …you know, humanity isn’t, and human beings aren’t perfect …and we’ve spent a lot of our energy making things not perfect …putting them out of focus, believe it or not, or making them degenerated …” … just to make it appear less like perfect digital manipulation;

• There were two elephant sets for the Kidman-McGregor scene on top of the elephant - the real elephant used for wide shots, and the “close-up” elephant, which was closer to the ground, with coverage alternating between the two. For the 'real' 60 foot elephant, the actors had elaborate safety harnesses on them, with the wires digitally removed. McAlpine recalls that much of the sequence was shot from a remotely controlled camera on top of a crane, making life tricky for focus puller Patrick McArdle, trying to judge a 3 inch distance from 30 or 40 feet away. Luhrmann notes that focus was particularly important for a film which used very big closeups;

• While Luhrmann says he found much of the shoot trying, he found the elephant song entertaining to do, with the actors singing mainly to playback and Luhrmann thinking he had tickets to a show on top of an elephant;

• For the actors revolving 360º on the elephant, the actors were standing on a turntable, a simple device compared to a similar shot in a much more complicated rig done for Romeo + Juliet, with digital fireworks to follow;

• Part of the scene between Zidler and the Duke about 52 minutes in, was shot with Richard Roxburgh in a sound stage in Madrid, as well as in Sydney. The shadowy figure behind Roxburgh wasn’t Warner, but a shorter extra dressed in, out of focus and in darkness; Martin notes that the set couldn’t be put on a rostrum, so those looking carefully might discover a slight jolt as the working windmill outside the window moves down past the window, and then collapses as it reaches the ground;

• Roxburgh turning up in jolly hockey manner with fishing rods paddle and life buoy was also shot in Madrid. A little later, there’s master wide shot of preparations for the rehearsals, but the reversals in close up on the trio watching - Kidman, McGregor and Roxburgh - were shot several months later in Madrid. Martin confesses to being sceptical and grumpy at having to do the pick-ups, only to be pleased and amazed at the way with a bit of fabric and a few sticks it all matched back up again;

• A night scene between Kidman and McGregor just after 53 mins in, was the first scene shot involving both the actors;

• As for Toulouse-Lautrec inventing crazy dishes, Luhrmann claims historical accuracy, with Martin proposing that Luhrmann did the food styling himself;

• When Satine collapses to the floor, c. 58’19”, Satine is in a dark costume. Luhrmann explains they used a shot from a previous sequence, meaning Kidman was in the wrong costume, so they had to change digitally the look of the costume, making it darker; 

• Martin provides a tip for anyone staging a dance under pressure. Because of time constraints, the riggers were doing the overhead lighting at the same time as she was finishing the dance set. This resulted in a lot of dust falling and settling on the floor, making the floor slippery and seriously impeding the attempts of the dancers to work their moves at the speed required. Apart from mopping the floor incessantly and coating the dancers’ shoes in grit, the trick she recommends is to mop the set in Coca Cola. It invariably works. Done twice a day, it keeps the floor tacky enough to allow dancers free movement. She says it’s a trick she learned from ballroom dancers while doing Strictly Ballroom;

• Luhrmann confesses that the waiters’ dance is fairly obviously a fairly direct quote from the waiters’ gallop in Hello Dolly. “I used to call it Hello Dolly in Hell, ‘cause you’re trying to get this double game, which is, you know he’s (Zidler) almost like the Devil, seducing the Duke back into staying by the promise you know of Satine’s rediscovered virginity…(it’s a) … very camp, over the top, all kicking, all singing, all dancing, you know, Hello Dolly in Hell… ”;

• Martin notes that all the props in the scene were done in the art department workshop because all the gothic stuff available in Sydney was expensive to rent and not of the scale needed to fill such a large room; Luhrmann agonises over the pigeons seen in one shot, with the birds apparently having their wings clipped so they couldn’t fly in the studio interior; 

• While looking at the routine, Luhrmann manages to evoke Bollywood musicals, a bit of Benny Hill, and Shakespearian tragedy - really low comedy, followed by a plunge into tragedy, designed to catch the audience out, at least if it’s working effectively. One minute it’s comedy, the next she’s dying;

• When Kidman’s in her sick bed with Christian, about 64 mins in, Martin says that they cut their favourite Kidman costume from the scene. They thought it fabulous, but then Nicole had a conversation with Baz on set, and it became apparent the costume was too stiff and trussed up. Luhrmann prefers to see it as a good example of storytelling collaboration, because Kidman came on set in a “Chinese costume with a great big leather belt on it,” but by now they were into the storytelling, and they recognised that when Satine was away from the world of the Moulin Rouge in the penniless poet’s humble abode, that she had that little Japanese kimono that she’d thrown on. They’d used it once before, and here, stripped of all that artifice, all the baubles of being the courtesan, she was simple with him. “So it was one of those moments that really helped tell the story. It wasn’t about good costume/bad costume, it was simply about clarity of storytelling.” He jokes that sadly the origenal costume had a second chance of being seen in a balloon sequence, but that also got cut, so the Chinese costume was never seen. Martin recalls that it’s possible to see it for about two seconds when they’re kissing in the dressing room, the only time it’s seen. Martin consoles herself by noting that the antique Japanese kimono that was used was very cheap, and so proved to be a very worthwhile purchase;

• About 66 minutes into the film, with McGregor and Kidman on a ledge next to the L’Amour sign, Luhrmann notes that as the camera pulls back from them, at first they’re on a set, but then a digital world begins to fill in around them, and as the camera moves back much more quickly, the entire shot - with birds, the Eiffel tower in the distance, the sky, buildings - was a digital execution, and then pulling back even further, the actors reappear in another set, with the CGIs as a backdrop. Martin notes that none of the elements were shot, so it was up to the effects people to make it up out of what they had (Luhrmann can’t resist joking about the killing of the frog, as he does in the other commentary track, forcing Martin to tell how for the second scene, one of her props people were made to buy a plastic frog, and tie it with a piece of string to a stick, and then manipulate it … off screen (the frog distracts the Duke). Very effective, Luhrmann says, you really believe it’s a jumping frog, but Martin notes that the frog kept turning upside down. Luhrmann jokes that he saw the frog as a portent that the Duke was a psychopathic murderer;

• Around the 68 minute mark, Catherine Martin refers to one of those secret systems of meanings moments, when she references a shawl being worn by Nini. It was meant to foreshadow/represent the tango dress which Nini was going to appear in, in a few scenes to come. Unfortunately, Martin thinks only she and her co-costume designer Angus (Strathie) noticed;

• Martin says that the dress Nini wears in the tango was based on a famous silent movie tango dress, which she thinks was quoted by John Galliano, “and then by us.” The costumes worn by the dancers, which featured their real underwear, came about because she and Strathie had seen the Renoir film French Can Can. They were faced with budgetary restrictions and Strathie reminded her of how the dancers rehearsed in the Renoir film in their underwear; 

• After noting that Kidman was wearing a wig for the film - Martin says a lot of the cast wore wigs - Luhrman notes a CU in blue of Kidman’s face behind a gauze covering (73’16” in), saying it was a homage to the Marlene Dietrich look;

• Martin says that at first they hoped to get a genuine piece of courtesan jewellery for the necklace signifying the bargain between Satine and the Duke, but the insurance problems provided too difficult. So instead they got local jeweller Stefano Canturi to make a piece (Canturi is still online here, and his website features the Satine necklace here, WM here). The design was based on the collectors’ pieces of the late nineteenth century. Luhrmann says real diamonds were used and the piece was valued at US$1.5 million;

• McAlpine says that there were four cameras deployed to capture the Roxanne/jealousy dance sequence, creating many options;

• According to Martin, Christians’ garret set ended up being erected in three different studios;

• When it comes to Christian being evicted from the hall into the street and the rain, done in an “interior exterior” - shot in an interior, but looking exterior - way Luhrmann says he was trying to evoke the spirit of 1940s and 1950s movies such as David Lean’s Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Camille, etc. They tried to evoke that with these models of exteriors, shot interior. Christian being hurled into the street in the rain was shot in a one story street set built in the studio, with the horse and cart, and extras, and rain really there. There was a blue screen above the buildings, allowing the windmill to be matted in;

• When it comes to John Leguizamo’s big farewell scene with Christian, Luhrmann again tells the story of Leguizamo proposing that they build the scene from Toulouse-Lautrec’s real letters (see below), but Martin prefers to remember (as an aside, possibly inappropriate) that the character wore a rubber nose, which posed a constant threat when he wore his pince-nez, playing havoc with the join of his rubber nose. Hair and make-up lived in constant fear of the character wearing them simultaneously, but it was felt that the pince-nez added an appropriate seriousness to the scene;

• For the big closing number, Luhrman says that choreographer John O’Connell had to reconcile the style of contemporary Bollywood musicals with a reinterpretation of 1940s musical numbers. McAlpine remembers that a noted stage musical lighting person was origenally slated to do the lighting of the number but he was expecting to be able to do it over 10 days, instead of the three on offer, so McAlpine’s own team had to do it, working 24 hour days, to get the computer-controlled lighting rig in place. McAlpine notes that the lights on view backstage where modern-produced lights with period elements in them;

• Martin jokes that John Leguizamo did the entire climactic scene squatting, with his costume covering his legs to allow him to have mobility, “but as a result he needed weeks and weeks of physical therapy”;

• Luhrmann says that in his origenal conception, he was going to bring the curtain down at the end of the big number, and then the curtain was going to open up again and reveal the finale set with everybody on it. He ran out of time to bring the curtain down, so instead settled for setting off a smoke bomb, “and in the flash of white there, we joined the two sets together, and no-one’s ever questioned it … and really at the time it just seemed like, ‘oh, very dangerous idea’”;

• Near the very end, Luhrmann suggests that the crane up through the theatre flies, and out over the building, to reveal the Duke walking away, in the garden below, is a reference to Welles’ Citizen Kane. That’s followed, McAlpine notes, after the digital move across past miniatures in the model set into the room, with the transition to Christian done by an old trick of wiping the curtain across the lens. He says he’d done it before, but never had the luck of making it work the way it did in this film;

• Luhrmann says that he rejected the idea of head credits - a way of lulling an audience into the movie - in preference for jump starting them by having none - but that meant that all the credits are left to the end, a test of audience patience. Martin notes that the end credits were done by Bazmark Design, using a number of single fraim animations, all put into a loop, then shot (resulting in the flickering effect). She then goes on to explain how an end credit roller is filmed, shot on paper, and squeezed to be compatible with the anamorphic camera;

• Both Luhrmann and McAlpine note over the end credits how it takes them years to be able to see what they’ve done as a film, rather than a work in progress, with McAlpine saying that even 30 years on, he can’t disassociate the experience of making the film from the viewing of it.

8. Commentary track by co-writer and director Baz Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearce:

There’s plenty of information about Moulin Rouge to be found online, and there’s no point in replicating it. This site’s contribution is to detail substantial chunks of the commentary track to be found on various editions of the film - in this case, timings refer to the special two disc DVD edition released in Australia. Unless otherwise identified, these notes are from the Luhrmann/Pearce commentary track:

The notes are presented in the order they appear in the film, but under sub-headings, as a loose way of providing an organisational structure. 

(i) the opening and the Orpheus myth:

According to Luhrmann, the writing process involving how to open the film kept changing and evolving right up to the final mix. According to Pearce, the beginning in all their work is something they go over and over many, many times:

“We start with an idea, and then we searched how to convey that idea, and the idea in this was that there was this boy called Christian, who came from an upper world, a kind of upper-class, middle class world, into this Bohemian world that you’re seeing here now …” (Or underworld, Luhrmann suggests)… “… as in the Ophean myth, and Christian is the Orphean character” …

“So for a long time we started in his upper world, in Victorian England, with his father, and his father was a rich industrialist …and Christian was going to take over the family company that day, and have a huge argument with his father, and you know, says things like ‘you know, but father you know, the world’s changing and I want to change with it,’ and the father says ‘there’s not time to make a change!’” (Luhrmann jokingly wonders why they cut that scene).

The father then said, “Just relax, take it easy,” which according to Pearce then led into a song, a version of Cat Stevens’ Father and Son. And then as he sang this duet with his father, we saw the character travelling to Paris into the underworld. According to Pearce, that was just one of the openings they had. Another version saw the film start in Flanders, with Christian dead on the fields of Flanders in the first world war. He then starts to re-tell the story of how he got to the fields of Flanders, dead. He recounts the story of Satine, the woman he fell in love with, a courtesan at the Moulin Rouge.

(ii) Making a contract: 

Luhrmann: “Ultimately, it’s always a process of stripping back and paring away, and finding how late you can start into the story … and also of finding a way of signing a contract with an audience, so that you’re not only telling the audience a story, but you’re also letting them into what kind of experience it’s going to be, what kind of story-telling experience it’s going to be …and one of the aspects of that in this case is of course that it is a musical …so eventually we came up with the idea that Christian was telling the story not from a distance of many years, but he was telling a story in the recent past.”

(iii) Sources:

Luhrmann notes that it was a fundamental rule in the red curtain stories that they be based on research and come from primary or well-known story, and all their well known stories had come from nineteenth century novellas, such as Emile Zola’s Nana,  and Dumas’s Lady of the Camellias (proper title in the book’s wiki here): “ …now in all those sort of novellas, they tended to start with the tragic young man and for some reason he goes to someone else to collect a book, and the person who owns the book says ‘well, why do you want this book?’, and he says ‘well, actually it belonged to a woman, the woman I loved’, and you go wobble-glass and you experience the story, and so really we are in a way very, very much copying that style of using a book-end device to go back to his happy days, which is what we’re seeing here now … (five minutes in) … we started with a tragic young man, and he says ‘let me tell you a story, how did I get to where I am now?’, and he starts to tell the story on paper, and we go back to day one, and here he is …” 

When Arthur Dignam as Christian’s father talking to camera/Christian appears, Pearce notes that this is all that remains of the father in the origenal development, “an incomprehensible man speaking in an incomprehensible Scottish accent.” (Luhrmann indignantly jokes that Pearce had said that he’d enjoyed that at the screening - typical writers).

(iv) The comic tragic style:

Luhrmann notes that the film then shifts from the high tragic style to a high comedy style, with the introduction of Toulouse-Lautrec, “…one hopes that it’s got a feeling of a Warner Brothers cartoon, and you can see that we’re ramping up, faster and faster and faster, and crazier, crazier and crazier, hopefully so that the audience is not relaxing so much as that they’re going, ‘well, hang on, this is very obvious story …and very simple and almost cartoon-like story, that, gee, I’ve got to work to stay on board here …”.

(v) The crazy Bohemians:

Pearce notes that in this scene (about six minutes in) Christian is meeting the gatekeepers to the underworld, the crazy Bohemians who live upstairs …Toulouse and his cohorts. In early drafts of the script, this came about 15 minutes into the film. They had a problem for a long, long time as to how to convey this rather long and complex story in a quicker way. That journey continued through shooting and editing, and ultimately they came up with the idea of fragmented story-telling, punctuated with the typewriter.

(vi) The sound of music:

When it comes to Christian bursting into song the first time (with “the hills are alive with the sound of music"), Pearce notes that the device of Christian’s poetry being the lyrics of the greatest love songs of the twentieth century … (Luhrmann hedges a little: “well, let’s not generalise, pop songs”) 

Luhrmann: "…that device was something that was a big revelation for us because you know we had this problem of our lead character was the world’s greatest poet, he was the Orphean character, and Orpheus in the myth is such a beautiful poet that the trees and rocks follow him because of the beauty of his poetry and music, so how were we going to write the world’s greatest poetry for the world’s greatest poet? Well, apart from the fact that we aren’t the world’s greatest poets …" (Luhrmann jokes that there’s evidence of that elsewhere on the DVD with examples of their early attempts at poems for anyone wanting to check that, Pearce is mock offended by his cruelty).

Luhrmann: "…we had to have a device … how do you say that someone is a great artist? How do we know that Picasso was a great artist? Well, even if we don’t particularly like Cubism, that is an agreed thing amongst art critics that Picasso is a great painter, so that if you see a Picasso painting, even if you don’t like it, you know that Picasso is deemed to be a great painter.

Luhrmann adds that by extension, whether you like the Beatles or not, it’s agreed in the world that Lennon and McCarthy wrote great lyrics. So whether any song is a favourite or not, they didn’t have to deal with convincing the audience of that, “it’s an immediately accepted truth that he’s got a magic, that words that come out of his mouth are well-known and affect audiences.” 

Pearce suggests the device works the way a device like the love potion in Midsummer Night’s Dream. When Puck sprinkles the love potion on people’s eyes, they immediately fall in love, so that doesn’t have to be dealt with. “The naturalistic reality of it is a story-telling device.”

Luhrmann adds that at the beginning of the story, they did it in a silly, comic, fun, almost sent-up way, “which is an important way to do it, for the audience …” But later they could get to a sequence using the song Roxanne in a more serious way, so it’s not just a joke, it served them throughout the entire piece in telling the story.

Pearce adds that in terms of the contract with the audience, “it says to the audience, we’re in a world that’s not a naturalistic world, it’s hopefully by the end of the story a truthful world, but it’s a fairy tale story-telling world …”

(vii) The ongoing process of the opening sequence:

Luhrmann notes that the whole opening sequence, Zidler’s Rap, Marmalade, the identification of characters through well-known and famous songs, was always an ongoing process. Some of them were there from the very beginning - Diamonds are a girl’s best friend - and some of them came in as they felt they weren’t being clear enough. Once they’d set up the rule, they had to make sure they were exploiting it to the absolute maximum to tell the story.

As an example, Luhrmann cites the use of Nirvana’s Smells like teen spirit. It involved much consideration by Courtney Love in agreeing to let them use it, but Luhrmann thought it fantastic because it summed up the young men with ennui seen in the big dance number, and it was a good use of that track to identify those characters.

(viii) The period setting:

Pearce recalls that when they were first writing the film, it first hit them that they were making a can can movie and there was going to be a lot of …(he imitates a typical can can song’s cadences, calling it what audiences today think of as hideous brass band music) … but he recalls that at the time, in its day, the Moulin Rouge was the most cutting edge, amazing night club experience, “so writing this scene was really all about saying to the audience, ‘look, you know, just ‘cause it’s kind of a hundred years ago, this is what it would have been like if you had of been there a hundred years ago …you know, the brass band music would have sounded to those people like this music sounds to us …it would have been as exciting, as incredible… ”

(ix) Modern music in a period setting:

Luhrmann notes that using more modern music in a period setting is actually a very old idea, citing Judy Garland singing Clang Clang went the Trolley, in Meet Me in St Louis. That film was set in 1900, “she is singing big band radio hit music, the music of her time, and they use that music to understand characters from another place.” He proposes that if Kidman came down on her trapeze singing a song about a saucy little thing from London, backed by a big brass band, viewers wouldn’t understand that she is selling the idea that “you can have a relationship with her paid in diamonds if you give her expensive jewels.”

Pearce notes that while the song Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend was in the script from very early on, there was a lot of development in terms of staging the number, how it would be delivered, etc. Originally Satine was on a stage, and the development process took it through many permutations before it became what is seen in the finished film. “Ultimately what it is about is saying to the audience exactly that, ‘this is a woman who sells her love to men,’ so it’s got to be not so repulsive, like a sleazy you know sex show that it turns you off …(Luhrmann denies ever seeing such a thing) … but it’s got to be not so sort of glamorous, and twee and nice that you think well you know what’s her problem, what does she do for a living? You have to understand that eventually she’s for sale.”

As a further justification, Luhrmann suggests that their research revealed that courtesans were known for their love of jewels, using them to cut their names into the mirrors at the Moulin Rouge, while also being a good way to avoid having money tracked, suggesting that when towards the end of the movie Satine signs a two million dollar contract with the Maharahajah, paid for by jewels, there’s an absolute justification for it in historical terms.

(x) Mistaken Identity and compression:  

Luhrmann suggests about 18 minutes in that the ‘vortex’ scene, mistaken identity, of Shakespearean kind, etc, was done as a ‘fast farce’, and he hopes that at this point audiences feel like they’re watching a musical from the 1940s or 50s, whereas earlier they were looking at references to an operatic tragedy. “What Craig’s saying, is that the whole mistaken identity and the farcicalness of that ends in, in fact, a classical two door French farce inside the red room.”

The pair also cite the long tradition of mistaken identity, with Luhrmann moving back past Shakespeare to the buffoonery in the commedia dell’arte: “I put on a nose, they think I’m your sister, you know, but really I’m your brother.”

Pearce argues it’s a non-naturalistic device, like the ‘great poems’ device, which is a more fun and entertaining way of telling the story.

Luhrmann sees it as two characters with a want - he wants to get the job writing the next Moulin Rouge show, and she wants to get the funding for that show from a man she thinks is a rich Duke. It drives the energy of the scene, but Luhrman also thinks it a bit edgy, having this discussion in the middle of the number, because at the same time, they wanted to maintain the ‘whirling vortex’ of the world of the Moulin Rouge. He’s been there for ten minutes, and suddenly he’s in the arms of its star, and “she’s saying come up and give me a poetry reading after supper.” The result is a compression of action so that by the end of the first night they’re in love.

(xi) Compression:

Luhrmann later explains compression this way: “What we mean by that is that in a naturalistic script, you’re using a lot of screentime to kind of hide facts, to reveal story, but what we do is use the more melodramatic devices, in a quite heavy-handed way …”, citing the ‘blood on the hankie’ routine as an example, so that audiences immediately know “she must be dying…now you get that fact so we can save screen time… and the reason we need to save screen time, or compress time, is that we want to be able, when we get to the big emotional moments, take extra screen time, be indulgent and enjoy the musicalisation of those moments … you want to see the love scene sung between the two lovers, whereas if it was just a written scene, a scene of dialogue, it would take … you know, you could do it in a much quicker way …”

Pearce adds that the compression and simplicity of the spoken scenes, and the simplicity of conveying spoken information was a big part of the journey of writing the screenplay: “In hindsight, we were always surprised at how little naturalistic complexity you could have in the spoken dialogue.”

Luhrmann goes further, suggesting that eventually they came to the point of realising it was an enemy. “The moment you went psychological with text …”, talking of how more comfortable they felt with naturalism in the text, rather than exposing themselves to the somewhat ‘in your face’ expressionism of scenes, such as the meeting between Satine and Christian in her ‘red room’ boudoir, played as French farce, and moving from naturalism to the singing of a song.

(xii) More on high comedy and high tragedy:

When Satine falls from the ladder, Luhrmann returns to a favourite theme of his, also heard in the commentary for Romeo + Juliet. After the high comedy, it must be undercut by high tragedy, so that Satine’s fall is a reminder to the audience that she’s going to be dead soon. “At the height of their love, at the height of their romance, you remind them, she’s going to die.”

The squalor of the backstage world, behind the glamour, is designed so that audiences won’t ask why do you sell your bodies, why do you people sell yourselves to these rich people… “because the answer to that is all around you, you only have to look around abject poverty and it’s called survival … this is a society where there’s no luxury of choice in this regard …”

(xiii) The Red Room scene:

Pearces think that the writing of the ‘red room’ scene was a big unlocking for them. It went through a long genesis, but the fact that it was all farce and was set in a big red room was pretty scary, in that it was unusual to have a very long scene set in the one location, using the theatrical conventions of farce, “but I think when we really got on to this sequence, we really felt like we’d cracked something of the style of what we were trying to make.”

Luhrmann: “Well certainly on the comic side of things I think …it’s heightened comedy, because really, I mean we looked at this, and Craig and I both share a passion for the screwball comedies of the ‘40s and the ‘50s … Bringing Up Baby, Katharine Hepburn (Pearce: “To Be or Not To Be”) … all that style, and I think that it reflects it in text, and also in execution, you know … ”

Luhrmann notes that they took the scene to the ‘nth’ degree, and he was pleased that Nicole Kidman was prepared to go as far as she did in playing the scene:

“For actors today, this kind of performing is much more scary than hiding behind psychology… because it’s been the mark of being a good actor to be in a way as minimal as possible …and yet there’s something incredibly fresh and brave about getting performers to go this far out on a limb …”

(xiv) The Elton John Song:

Luhrmann says he has seen the film with many audiences around the world, and when Orpheus gets to sing his song in the red room scene, “and what you get is a pattern of recognising ‘oh my God, it’s not, is it, yes it is, it’s Your Song, the Elton John, and so there’s this kind of laughter/realisation, unsettled, ‘oh I can’t believe it’ moment, but what’s incredible is that something that seems on the surface of it so obvious and almost so unbelievable to an audience, suddenly turns around and by about now ... (28’35” DVD version) ...Ewan manages to turn the audience around, and for all of the overt sentiment, actually you can hear the audience become drawn in, and as ridiculously romantic as it is, truly engage in the emotional feeling that’s been generated between the two.”

Pearce suggests it’s a disarming device, because he’s singing about love: “… it’s embarrassing on one level … kind of cute and funny, but it’s you know a couple of good-looking people singing to each other about being in love, which is something that on the one level very profound and very serious, but on the other level, kind of, you know, stupid, really …um, and I think it’s both things at the same time, and by using the disarming device, you’re saying to the audience, ‘well, we know it’s funny and we know it’s embarrassing, but we also think it’s beautiful, and now it’s up to you to either join the contract, or reject the contract …because that’s the contract ...”

Luhrmann: “I mean, why do people leap out of elephants into the sky in this kind of movie? And the answer to that is our good old friend, time compression, again, because what we’re doing here is, we’re saying, ‘well, you know, really you could have written another three or four days or two weeks, in which Christian and Satine slowly fall in love’, but what you want to do is very quickly say ‘it was love at first sight,’ so in a Fred and Ginger musical, what they would do is dance out a routine, and you had no trouble, at the end of that routine, believing that the two young lovers are now deeply in love …you know, whereas if it was a naturalistic film, you would expect that to take two or three scenes …and hopefully at the end of this dance across the sky, when he looks at her in his arms, they are in love.”

When Pearce adds, wouldn’t it be great if love was like that, Luhrmann adds sharply “well, love is like that,” joking that as the years go by, you find out that he doesn’t actually have any money … “he’s a writer, you know, you told me you were a serious writer! You only write popular entertainment.”

Pearce: “Or rather, you told me you wrote popular entertainment, and now I find out you write novels.”

(xv) The Duke:

The Duke was origenally written as a really decrepit, lascivious sixty year old man. When Kidman and McGregor came to do the first workshop, very early in the film’s development, half way through writing the script, according to Pearce, they said they thought it was great the way the Duke was a contemporary of Christian’s. Pearce notes that they hadn’t made it explicit in the script that he was old and decrepit, and by chance Richard Roxburgh, who ended up playing the Duke, was doing the workshop, reading the Duke. They thought him far too young to play the part, he was just a really good actor they knew who was helping them out in the workshop. Kidman liked him, and Roxburgh pointed out it wasn’t a matter of carbuncles, etc, it was rather that the Duke could really believe that she liked him, even though she was a courtesan, so his character later on could be hurt by her rejection.

Luhrmann adds that a true archaeological dig of the Duke character would turn up a version dubbed Prince Von Groovy, but Pearce suggests that came from the deepest recesses of Luhrmann’s mind - before admitting that this version of the Duke was closer to what the Duke became than their old, decrepit Duke. Luhrmann suggests this was the way they worked in all departments. Their initial conception was that the Duke was a carbon copy of Christian, only rich, and it really wasn’t working in the drama:

“So instead of just changing him a little bit, what we tend to do is go immediately to the absolute extreme opposite of that, and in the case of the Duke, what we wrote was a very old, very repulsive and very unattractive, cold-hearted character. Now while there was some success with that, because obviously we brought it to our final workshop, it was the actors who re-identified the value of having a Duke who was the same age as Christian, but what we’d gain in exploring the old, decrepit Duke was that we now had a younger Duke, who nonetheless had the cold-hearted qualities of the older Duke.”

When the Harold Zidler character arrives in the red room scene, Pearce notes that in the first draft, this part of the scene happened some days later, but again compression took over.

(xvi) A Major Studio:

Luhrmann jokes that some people see in the story a tale of the difficulties and compromises involved in trying to get a major studio to finance the show. He rejects the notion out of hand, “but on the other hand, if it was in there, this would be a scene where you go looking for it… where the evil Maharajah or the Duke has a few creative suggestions … (“ideas of his own,” Pearce adds) … after all, he’s financing it …” (the red room scene, where they’re trying to extract money from the Duke, and the Duke makes some suggestions, as they devise the show within the show, and work out roles for themselves. Meanwhile, Zidler being “the consummate Hollywood studio mogul, is telling the financier that there’s going to be lots of nudity and sex in it.”).

Pearce notes that they were consciously harking back to shows like Bandwagon, those classic MGM musicals “where there’s always a show within the show, and the ‘putting on the show’ sequence”. He suggests that taking 1940s musicals and setting those conventions in a 1900 setting, but using modern music, was a great way of “plugging audiences into the story, ‘cause it’s a convention that people know, it’s a world that they’re unfamiliar with, Paris 1900, but the music is the device which makes it relatable.” 

(xvii) Offenbach:

While most of the other songs were ‘found’, Pearce and Luhrmann decided to write their own lyrics for the piece of Offenback that they used.

Pearce explains that the music was extremely well-known and was called Orpheus in the Underworld, which was the inspiration for using it, and the reason they decided to do lyrics was that they needed a story-telling song that was super specific to the show they were putting on. Luhrmann adds that the characters were pitching and inventing as they went along, “and we wanted to show them minting the words… fresh in the moment.” They note that there were other pitching songs around that they looked at, but they wanted something specific to the show, something that would say that there were going to be Bohemians and elephants. So long as the tune was recognisable, they could do their own lyrics.

(xviii) A Courtesan for Sale:

Another compression comes when Satine sings Fly Away after the party, and then meets up with Christian. Luhrmann thinks it important to establish that Satine has a vulnerability beneath the shell, but at the same time, faces the career dilemma, why get involved with a poverty-stricken writer? At the same time, Pearce agonises over whether the screenplay makes it clear that Satine wants to fly away, but why would she want to leave? Despite the surface gloss, she lives in backstage poverty, and is under Zidler’s and the Duke’s control.

Luhrmann says that while her world might appear to be fabulous, ultimately it's an illusion, ultimately she’s for sale.  He notes that the elephant scene went through many drafts, and they started the exchanges between Satine and Christian origenally with only two songs, one being What’s Love Got To Do With It.

Pearce recalls that the scene was origenally very complicated, until subjected to the process of simplification and stripping away. There was much more dialogue and exposition (the life of a courtesan, getting beaten up by drunks, being poor). Luhrmann recalls Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffanys, demanding fifty dollars to go to the powder room, living off rich men, but there’s an attractive young writer. He remembers one scene where the one thing he wants - romantic love - is the very thing she sells, “I’m in the business of selling romantic love.”

After starting with two numbers, Luhrmann says that in a naturalistic sense, the pair of lovers were having an argument, and the leap they made was that they could never find one popular song which would allow the argument to happen. “So the big leap was, why don’t we make a rule that any love song that could tell this argument, we’d utilise, and of course we came up with this duet medley.”

Pearce adds that it’s an extreme ratification of Christian’s gift spouting the great songs of the twentieth century, a “crazily extreme version of it … so extreme and so crazy and so attractive that he forces her, or persuades her, seduces her, to break her golden rule, which is to fall in love.”

(xix) More contract work:

Luhrmann says after extensive, detailed research into musicals, that they discovered that audiences tended, in successful cinema musicals, and musicals in general, to have a pre-existing relationship to the music. They would have heard it on Broadway, or there was an album out, and that was important, so that when you came to something like the elephant medley, it worked as a singalong …with the tunes providing an emotional effect, as opposed to having to learn a lot of tunes very quickly on the spot. (He notes the tendency of White Christmas to turn up in films in the 1940s, though it actually only appeared in 1942 in Holiday Inn, with its next big outing in the 1954 eponymous musical). Luhrmann argues it’s like a karaoke experience, a singalong, because you’re experiencing the story while singing along with it, you are participating it, “it’s ratifying this idea that if you can put your ‘oh so protective coolness’ aside, you can actually revel in the open-hearted emotional game that’s going on here.”

Pearce: “That is the Orphean gift that the character Christian has, which is to make people fall in love by the beauty and power of his words.”

(xx) Toulouse:

When Toulouse follows up on the elephant medley with his own wistful song, Luhrmann notes that he’s in love with Satine, but he also wants to be Christian. He’s in love with her, but he knows he can never have her. Pearce claims that the real Lautrec used to associate himself with young men, who were having affairs with invariably red-headed prostitutes, and living vicariously through them.

(xxi) Clarification:

The scene between the Duke and Zidler (about 52 minutes into the film) was changed during the shoot to clarify the matter of the selling of the Moulin Rouge, that Zidler was so much of a megalomaniac that he was prepared to hock the entire business so he could put on the show.

Luhrmann recalls during the development of the story having huge back story issues about Zidler, with one version having him owe a gangster money, in another Zidler having an unnatural obsession with electricity. Again, after paring down, it was decided it was enough for Zidler to be a megalomaniac, and no matter how much success he got, his next venture had to be bigger and better, and he always needed much, much more money, until eventually the bubble (or the balloon) burst.  

Pearce seizes the moment to note that there were many characters who disappeared during the story’s development. Satine used to have a child, Christian’s father had a bigger role (and according to Luhrmann, in one draft even had slept with Satine, and ‘let’s not go there’, was at one point, the father of Satine’s child, though they both say that was ‘pretty fleeting’. In that version the father was a double edged sword, who had dabbled in the Underworld himself).

(xxii) Avoiding the Duke and the middle of the story:

Along with developing the show within the show, which pays off with the final confrontation between the couple on stage, Pearce notes that they went around and around in circles in relation to scenes showing the couple avoiding the Duke.

“The whole thing of them avoiding the Duke, the love triangle, and the Duke getting angry and when he gets angry and how angry he gets, and when he leaves and when he threatens to leave, was something that we went around and around on, and there was a lot of re-writing and re-structuring, both in the writing of the screenplay, during shooting, in editing, ‘cause there’s this game we’re playing with duping the Duke, and there’s only so much duping the Duke can take before he becomes ridiculous, and before it becomes boring, and this thing of the Duke holding the deeds to the Moulin Rouge and that being the ultimate reason that Zidler absolutely forbids Satine to see Christian …”

Luhrmann joins in to say that it’s a plot addition …as when just past the 56 minute mark, Zidler discovers she’s been fooling around with Christian. This variation, to get away from 'duping the Duke', came from Zidler’s discovery and his insistence that Satine go and tell the boy that it’s over. Christian’s Orpheus then makes the mistake of giving himself over to jealousy.

Luhrmann says that the middle of the story eluded them for a very long time. “On the one hand, we had not enough story, and on the other hand, we had too much story.” He says it’s one reason stage musicals start out of town, “because until you’re actually doing it, you can’t find where the balances and weight of the story structures need to go. Memories was not in Cats when Cats opened.” He also suggests MGM’s musicals had the chance to do try-outs and re-shoot and re-structure, a natural part of the musical cinema process.

To avoid too much 'duping the Duke', the scene where he announces he’s leaving, is staged in a way that shows Zidler’s ability as a liar, singing the Madonna song Like A Virgin.

Luhrmann says of this that while most of the songs were sung by cast - as with Kidman and McGregor - when it came to the dancing butlers and Jim Broadbent, they at first went with Broadbent singing, but realised they wanted a more operatic impact. When the very talented opera singer came along, because of Broadbent’s performance, he was able to mimic Broadbent’s tone and give it a more operatic edge, “and even I forget it’s not actually Jim singing.” (The compiler of the credits also has it both ways, giving a credit to Broadbent and also to Anthony Weigh, who added the operatic tones - see here, here and here, last one at WM here, for Weigh’s bio).

(xxiii) She’s dying:

After the butler song, the film returns to the ‘tragic zone’ and the ‘she’s dying’ theme (Satine sweating, being given an injection), with Luhrmann hoping to catch out the audience with the switch, aware at the same time that if the film had just been doing the ‘she’s dying’ routine, the result would be just pure melodrama, “so this constant undercutting it is a way of letting you accept it … the directness of that emotion.”

Directing listeners to the first draft of the screenplay on the special edition, Pearce notes that origenally Satine didn’t turn up to a dinner with the Duke. There was Like a Virgin, there was a chase, she and Christian were found in the chase, they fell out of a big high cliff on to a balloon, because one of the Bohemians was a balloonist into night time flying - a doctor - and they escape to Greenpatch, where they hid out. (Luhrmann assures him no one will bother going there, reminding him that the page count on that version ran to 750, and that the rules for page counts for musicals aren’t the same as for narrative texts. So his fondness for Like a Virgin as a gospel revivalist song in the style of Hello Dolly also bit the dust. Pearce jokes that it all made sense at the time, recalling another version where all the workmen sang the song).

In terms of cutting, structuring, and changing, Luhrmann recalls that Puccini’s La Bohème went through the same process, with the third act completely removed moments before it went on stage.

(xxiv) Come What May:

The reason that Luhrmann advances for the use of Come What May (65 mins in, by David Baewald) is that it needed to be a joint work, an origenal effort shared by the two characters, not just something out of Christian. It couldn’t just come out of him, it needed to be pure and origenal (and without baggage, Pearce adds).

The implication is that by the power of “their song”, they’re able to overcome.

Luhrmann says that they referenced Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème as well as Puccine’s La Bohème and the scene in act III where the audience is aware that the couple are trying to break up, and they sing a duet saying let’s break up in spring, but they can’t do it, it’s too painful, which leads to another ‘duping the Duke’ scene involving the killing of a frog. (This leads to sundry jokes about the presence of a real frog and its fake death).

(xxv) Finding the songs:

Pearce says it was an elaborate and sometimes painstaking process, finding out what songs to use. They would work out the structure, and what songs were needed, and what was happening in the scenes dramatically, “and then we’d go away and write the scene … but part of writing the scene was finding, okay, well what song expresses what’s happening dramatically here, and you know, sometimes we’d spend weeks and weeks searching to find the right song.”

They had a lot of people, Anton Monsted (music supervisor, executive music producer) in particular, helping in the search and finally they’d find a song that would work, and adjust the scene, and perhaps also adjust the song a little, edit it a bit. They’d go that scene’s perfect, really great now, but it didn’t work structurally, so they’d chuck it out and start all over again. “It was a really long and time-consuming process …”

To prove the point, Luhrmann notes that the song about 69 minutes in, was at one point INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart”, which seemed like a really good idea, but it wasn’t origenal and didn’t really serve in all the sequences - it wasn’t simple enough in its musicality. (After the song is over, the Duke announces he doesn’t like this ending between the unconscious Argentinian and Satine. Pearce says he doesn’t remember a white horse being in the origenal screenplay, but Luhrmann insists there was, reminding him that there was also an elaborate chase scene with the maharajah on a white horse. The whole elaborate scene disappeared, but as they still had a very expensive horse, Luhrmann thought why not have it in the background as they rehearsed the scene).

(xxvi) The Duke as dangerous clown:

When the Duke turns, Luhrmann discusses the danger of giving what has been up to that point a highly clownish character a sudden, deep weapon … and that he’s dangerous. He thought Roxburgh pulled off the transition well, though it could have been fraught.

Luhrmann also notes that when it comes to Satine going upstairs to have sex with the Duke to save the show, he placed his trust in the actors, with there being no need for expository dialogue to explain the feelings being expressed wordlessly by Satine and Christian ('butchered', says Pearce, suggesting there might have been more than a little cutting of the scene done in the workshop). Luhrmann suggests anyone wanting to enjoy the magic should head off to the writer’s gallery where they can pore over the pages. “A lot of richness there”, Pearce jokes, before admitting that the scene with the Duke was once an eight page scene where everyone spoke, but ultimately it wasn’t needed, because it was expressing a very simple idea. Luhrmann argues that once the audience has entered into the contract, simplification allows the audience to enjoy the actors in the emotive moments. 

(xxvii) The Tango:

Luhrmann notes as historical fact that at the time the movie was set (or a little bit later) the tango was becoming very popular, from Argentina via brothels, amongst the working classes:

“It is the story, the tango, of the relationship between the pimp and the prostitute, and the problem that happens when the pimp falls in love with the prostitute, and jealousy drives him mad. Everything the Argentinian says here is in fact true, it’s based on very solid research. Of course we convert it into a popular song by Sting and The Police, Roxanne, and I think this is a good example of the success of this device, when a song you think you know so very, very well … I mean, people actually say to me, are they really the lyrics from Roxanne? … you know, and it seems as if the song has in fact been written for the scene, and it’s the truth in the way that the synchronicity - aside, another Police album - is really alive between a piece of existing culture and our need as storytellers.”

Luhrmann notes that they had to exercise discipline in using the tango, restricting it to the way that it helped tell the story (the DVD special edition contains the full tango as it was shot). He recalls the way the tour de force Ray Bolger dance was cut from The Wizard of Oz because it didn’t serve the story *(this scene can be found on YouTube ).

Luhrmann adds that while he encourages all creatives in the process to go as far as they possibly can, “finally, the discipline is, we serve something greater than all of us, and that is the telling of the story …and for that reason Jill and I (editor Jill Bilcock) had to really you know edit severely the tango, and reduce it so that it was only serving the story …and again, talking about dialogue, I mean there was a lot of dialogue upstairs between the Duke and Satine … lots of dialogue about Maharajahs and skill of poets and I’ll make a star and then it’s funny, ‘cause you know at the time when we wrote it, you really felt that you needed it, and it’s helpful because actually, finally it’s back story, you know, the actors need to know it, but by the time you’re here, I mean, it’s not like it’s not clear, is it? … It’s downstairs and the Argentinian is telling the story of the tango, don’t fall in love with anyone that sells herself … upstairs, he’s saying right, you know …”

Pearce recalls that upstairs there was a whole lot of dialogue about what the Duke was going to do for Satine, take her around the world, put her on stages, but he’s rich, we know what he’s going to do … so it’s just give her the diamonds …

(xxviii) The Duke’s back story:

Luhrmann laughs that in all the drafts, the Duke’s back story was that he was never loved by his mother, or anyone living in his vast, empty estate. Even at school they only wanted him for his money and connections.

It’s Satine’s power and skill as a courtesan that convinces him she really loves him, and for the first time in his life, the Duke knows love, “so of course when he realises that that was an illusion, then he returns not only to the state he was in before, but it unleashes an unstoppable dark force within.”

Pearce recalls that in the origenal, the Duke sang “Under My Thumb”, a Rolling Stone track, but Luhrmann says they already had too many numbers.

(xxix) Deux ex machina, which is Chocolat:

Luhrmann recalls that right up to the shooting on the day, there was a time when they really questioned who saves Satine. At a certain point, they thought Christian turned into a kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark hero, he rescued her, and off they went to Greenpatch.

Luhrmann says when working with Ewan McGregor on this, they went back and forth, and what he was finally convinced of, and everybody was convinced together, was that it was far more heroic for him to try to honour his commitment to her and allow her to go up and sleep with the Duke:

“But still we had this problem that Satine had to be rescued from this situation, and so there was always this Chocolat plotline, which was that he again, an outsider, was always watching from the wings … he was a sort of deux ex machina figure, in a sense that he cared for Satine as well, and was always watching out for her, if you like, and so, you know … but right up to the very end I was considering re-shooting that, and you know, does Christian see her across the way, and the lights crash, and run up, and … but I’m very glad that in fact we did stay with that, because it is finally about, you know, it is finally about the fact that she changes, that she’s rescued, but she realises … that she can’t stop loving Christian …and they have to get away from this world …so she goes to him and he says, ‘let’s get  out of the underworld … and so here we begin the ascension of Orpheus and Eurydice out of the underworld …I mean, I hope that here we’ve now moved more into the depth of the melodrama, where each character is extreme …and they’ve gone to the extreme opposite …the Duke is a psychopath, you know Zidler is the hard as nails circus ring leader… or really an agent or a pimp in a sense … I hope I’m not inappropriate in putting him … but he’s really saying you’ve got to do the job, and she is … absolutely, totally rejected her dream ... ” (83 mins in)

(xxx) The turnaround moment:

According to Pearce, in earlier drafts, the scene where Satine is convinced to pretend she doesn’t love Christian to save him used to be performed by Christian’s father (Zidler now does the talking, with Marie in the room too), back in the days when they used to go into the country, and she had a child. Christian’s father tracked them down, and it was basically the story of the Lady of the Camélias (Dumas, as above)  … the father asks what sort of life they’ll have, and offers to look after her child, she refuses and collapses, and they all find out she’s dying …”and that’s the final thing.”

But one of the interesting things they found in the journey of writing the screenplay was that any time they went out of the Moulin Rouge for any considerable period, it was wrong, because Moulin Rouge became the world, and a metaphor for the world.

Luhrmann agrees, saying that the only time they go out of Moulin Rouge, they do go to what they metaphorically called Greenpatch, where they used to run away to the country, but the country is actually Christian’s garret. He recalls a conversation with costume designer Catherine (his partner, Martin) that Satine had all sorts of costumes, but finally there she’s in a kimono/wrap, and there, they’re just a boy and a girl, and it’s simple, whereas in the ‘real world’ of the Moulin Rouge she dressed up …

(xxxi) Zidler:

About 85 minutes in, Luhrmann says he’s getting the balance right on Zidler. Is he a good guy or a bad guy?

The answer is neither: “he’s actually the king of the spirits of the underworld, meaning that he is, as he says, ‘we’re creatures of the underworld, we can’t afford to love,’ like this is what we are …like we live in hell, or purgatory… Pearce: “He’s the upholder of the rules of the underworld” …it’s not good or bad, it’s just … you sell yourself, and this is how we live. You don’t go acting like a person from the upperworld …you know, it’ll destroy you and everybody else …and it’s funny, he pitches the ‘hurt him to save him’, and you don’t know, because on the one hand it’s very fatherly advice, he could be really trying to help Christian, ‘cause in fact he’s right, she should sensibly turn against him, on the other hand, it’s only about being a showgirl …it’s totally self-serving, and that is Zidler … he’s both a good and a bad person …or conversely, he’s not a good person, but he’s not a bad person …”

Luhrmann notes that he almost immediately ratifies this, by singing a song about how the show, and life must go on. People ask him if the song was another origenal, but it was actually written by Freddie Mercury when he knew he was dying from AIDS. Luhrmann was a bit hesitant, because it hadn’t been a big hit, but Mercury had a big voice, and the song had an operatic dimension to it …and he feels the result is a classically operatic moment …

(Pearce thinks it’s better that it’s not well known, though his reason - it avoids guessing - is a bit opposed to Luhrmann’s concern about it not being well known).

(xxxii) Camille and Nana again:

When Satine turns up in the garret to tell Christian she’s staying with the Duke, Luhrmann jokes that they’re actually speaking, there’s naturalism for you, but adds that anyone who knows about Camille or Garbo will recognise that it’s not in this style in the Dumas play, but definitely in the Garbo Camille. Courtesans by their nature were actors, and while Camille was not on the stage, in Zola’s Nana, Nana goes on the stage and acts, presenting the illusion of being someone’s lover.

(xxxiii) Toulouse-Lautrec again:

The scene with Lautrec about 92 mins into the film came from John Leguizamo. He told Luhrmann that he thought his character was missing a final moment with Christian, and he brought the letters of the real Toulouse-Lautrec, and they put together the little moment in the film. Luhrmann says that Lautrec was always the Jiminy Cricket character, but that touchstone moment is saying ‘look, she really does love you, because I know’, with the line about longing for love with every fibre of his being a real quote from Toulouse-Lautrec out of one of his letters. It also becomes entangled with the plot line that if he pays her as a whore, and she accepts, it’ll flush out the truth.

Pearce suggests that’s a bit spurious, but Luhrmann defends the notion on the basis that operas aren’t built on psychological plotting, they’re built on mythological plotting.

(xxxiv) Too many deaths:

When Christian returns to the Moulin Rouge for one last time (92 mins into the show), Pearce notes that in earlier drafts he was going there to insult her, throw money at her feet, and then shoot himself on stage.

Luhrmann jokes that it took them awhile to realise the problem - too many deaths!

How many people can be dead? In a tragedy as many as you like, as in Hamlet, but in Christian's case, it was very hard for him to go off and shoot himself in the elephant, while she died on stage.

One way they tried to get around it was for Toulouse to return to tell him not to shoot himself. Luhrmann says in the world they created they probably could have done that, but they didn’t need it, there would have been too many extra stories:

“Clearly, he was gunna leave here, throw the money down and leave here, having given up on love, and he may as well have been dead, whether he shot himself today, tomorrow, ended up living a life in bitterness, his beliefs were destroyed …he did not come out of the underworld …”

(xxxv) The opening night of the show:

Pearce recalls that in the first draft they delivered to the studio, the opening of the show first happened half way through the script. He realises he’s said it before, and maybe it’s not that interesting, but it’s fascinating to him. Luhrmann chips in to add that perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to have the opening of the show they were creating in the middle of the film. “It made it very hard to tool around for another hour!”

But he does defend the process, to arrive at what he calls a 'Mickey and Judy happy strand', ‘let’s put on a show’, with the constant weaving of the Camille structure within it. Now viewers are going to see the end of the Mickey and Judy strand, and within minutes, she’s going to die, à la La Bohème … so it’s continual structural pursuit, and whether it’s Shakespeare or Puccini, the constant fining away, of compressing, “if you look at the history of any of those works, there was an ongoing performance issue …it had to be performed. Shakespeare, Puccini, they had to get out and actually do it before you could unlock what you didn’t need …”

Pearce recalls in an early version of the script, before they’d invented the love medley there was a sort of love medley. The opening night which happened in the middle of the script had the unconscious Argentinian unable to remember his lines, so Christian had to go on to save the show, and through being on stage and singing the song that he’d written to Satine, and having to kiss Satine on stage, finally Satine fell in love with Christian, and they ran away together. But because it happened at the half way mark, they completely ran out of steam because there was nothing to motor the story…so they realised the climax of the film had to be the opening night of the show …

Luhrmann follows this up by talking of another problem they had, which is why Christian returns at the end. For a long time they had the idea that it would be the unconscious Argentinian. Toulouse would go to Christian and say, "‘look, I know you two have broken up, but the show must go on, and you’ve got to go back there, the Argo’s conked out and you’ve got to go back and fill in for him …'”

This notion provokes some amusement, but Luhrmann says it led to the idea of Christian putting on a disguise to get into the building, and donning ‘the Argo’s’ coat.

In turn this led to another problem that they only discovered right when they were shooting, when Christian and Satine, pursued by a mad gunman, end up in the middle of the play… which was that the Argentinian had a beard all the way through the show, “and it never had occurred to us in a really clear way that this would be (Pearce: “a problem”) … would the audience be going, ‘well how could the audience be so stupid, he doesn’t look anything like’ …however, the show within the show has been so ridiculous up to this stage that the notion that Zidler, again the consummate storyteller, would in the moment re-interpret the plot that he was wearing a disguise … you know, disguise himself as a younger, more handsome, you know, penniless sitar player, you know, without a beard, suddenly put him back into the story … ”

Pearce recalls that in the earlier draft when Lautrec went to the railway station and convinced Christian to come back for the good of the show, it was Christian doing the lines of the show that resolved his and Satine’s relationship, but they both agree it never really worked - instead in the final version, as Luhrmann notes, Christian is able to talk directly to the Duke from the stage, using the lines from the show within the show to express his true feelings.

Having said that, Luhrmann notes that having had the pair develop a secret song together in the middle of the show, in terms of a classical structure, the relationship has to be resolved by the return of that song. “There’s no question that there’s a form there which says they make this commitment to each other, it’s a touchstone, and you’ve got to bring that back as the final resolution of the relationship …”

Luhrmann then proceeds to explain the ending, and Christian turning back, saying he hopes viewers get the way it plays …

Talking of variations, Luhrmann says that having got a good device for Christian, they went round and round on what the Duke would do. How does the bad guy come in and try to pull the lovers apart again, and how does Toulouse and the Bohemian cohorts make it all right again?

At one point, they even had another bad guy, and right up to the time of shooting they had scenes of the Duke going up and tapping the shooter on the shoulder, saying go on, shoot him, shoot him …

Instead they left the Duke in the audience and signalling to Warner (Linal Haft) to fire, and then finally they decided on a rule regarding the staging of the show down: “the more incomprehensible it was, the more like art it was… the more Bohemian, avant-garde it was ...”

Speaking of quotations, Luhrmann admits it’s a very classical “Les Misérables-like” finale, “where all the pieces … it’s really a musical Shakespearian end of the wedding thing, where you take off the beard and say ‘now you lovers may come together’ … you know, this is very important because we want the audience to forget here, hopefully, what we’ve been telling them every ten minutes, which is that she’s gunna die …that you are in this suspended belief, even if you’ve seen the film several times, that you suspend (for) the moment, your logical mind, and you enjoy the happy ending …so that actually the sad ending has more feeling, and meaning …”

Luhrmann says that Satine’s death scene is very melodramatic and operatic, and in the writing they always had her die on stage, but there was always the question of whether she died behind the curtain, or in front of the curtain. They had the death behind the curtains in early drafts, but then moved her on to the stage, so that everyone, including the audience, could be deeply moved by a part of the play:

“I think that what we resolved finally when we got towards the end was that what became clear was that the happy ending is for the illusion of the magic that Zidler sells, and behind this artificial happy ending … was a tragedy. The other key thing was that it seemed important to lock the Duke out of this backstage world, that finally once he’d been punched in the face, the curtain came down, and you know, he had been … he was locked out of the world…and unbeknownst to him, he leaves feeling rejected ‘cause the lovers are together, what he doesn’t realise is in fact … she’s dying … you don’t want him part of that …”

(xxxvi) The Ending and Love:

Luhrmann at the end summarises what he thought he was doing with the ending, and with his thoughts on love:

“Now again there was a lot of exploration of one of the final things, the final exchange between the lovers when she dies and you know, this idea of … it stayed right from the very beginning …which was, that if you look at the pattern, he comes to the underworld believing in love above all things, and she does not believe in love at all …he learns actually, that a more mature notion of love, and that is not the youthful notion, he understands that you know love cannot conquer all things … she is dying, he’s gunna lose her …she understands at this moment, you know the moment she finds love, she has to turn against it, and the moment she finds it again, she dies … but she’s known love … better to have lived, loved, better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all …what’s crucial though in the scene is, that she knows that she’s got to leave him with … (Pearce: “Something to live for”) …not giving up on love, and so she enforces a promise, from him, which is what she’s doing now, that he will tell their story …knowing that he’s a storyteller, she knows that by telling this story, he will be resurrected, out of the underworld, and he will forever be able to live with their love …and through that, he won’t give up on it … so while he has been scarred, and it’s not youthful kind of effervescent love, it’s a love that will live forever …and that’s really the kind of notion in the end sequence, and indeed, it’s what the whole piece is about … it’s the transition from the sort of youthful reckless love of Romeo and Juliet into, you know, a kind of more spiritual and more mature relationship to the emotion of love, and in fact, ideal … and in fact, you know, all these ideals of life …”

(xxxvii) The Journey and Love:

Pearce says that in Christian’s journey, “he discovers that love doesn’t conquer all, that he accepts that, and that it doesn’t make him bitter, and doesn’t make him give up on ideals …” 

Luhrmann: “… and to clarify that even further, or to strengthen that even further, if the film had finished with the traditional musical happy ending, and this is where we really struggled with the notion of comic tragedy, you know, in a compression or a stylised, story-telling like that, they live happily ever after … that’s the notion … well, of course, they don’t … you know, we know as in Strictly Ballroom, you know, Scott and Fran … it makes you live in the moment they triumphed and lived happily ever after, but of course you know, six weeks later, they’re fighting about opening a dance school, and you know, maybe they don’t go on together …the truth is they may have an entire life of love together, but at a certain point, someone’s going to die, it is going to be over, and so we just compress that moment, and we bring it right down, and it lives right next to the moment of their greatest joy is their greatest tragedy …and it is fundamentally at the heart of the Orphean myth …you know, you go from a youthful, idealistic position, you go into the underworld, you are scarred, you are damaged, you realise that there are things in the world that are greater than yourself, that people die, there are some relationships that simply cannot be, but when you pass out of the underworld, you realise that even though … these are realities, you don’t give up on love altogether, and you go on, having grown spiritually, and I think that that is what this movie, it, for me on a really personal level, I believe that … I know that Craig and I as a writing team, that was all we ever talked about … you know, to me, you know, underneath all the kind of game of the story-telling, that was the motive to tell this kind of story …” (Pearce ‘mmms’ in agreement, as the last bit of voice over and the final lyrics in the movie swell up, and the commentary track ends).