Key Change: Baz Luhrmann on "Time After Time"

My guest today is Baz Luhrmann, the award-winning director whose films include Moulin Rouge!, Strictly Ballroom, The Great Gatsby, Elvis, and Romeo + Juliet. His newest film is EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a critically acclaimed documentary about Elvis that’s playing right now in theaters and in IMAX. Before becoming a massively successful film director, Baz began his showbiz career as an actor, and as a ballroom dancer, in Australia. His first film was Strictly Ballroom, which came out in 1992, and became one of the highest-grossing Australian films of all time. It was originally a play, and there’s a song in the film that was part of the story all the way back when it was first performed on stage. And that’s what Baz and I talked about for this episode. For more info, visit songexploder.net/baz-luhrmann. https://songexploder.net/baz-luhrmann

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18th. I'm going to be performing solo at Roughtrade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carry. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that changed their lives. My guest is Baz Luhrmann, the award-winning director whose films include Moulin Rouge, Strictly Ballroom, The Great Gatsby, Elvis, and Romeo and Juliet. His newest film is Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert, a critically acclaimed documentary about Elvis that's playing right now in theaters and in IMAX. Before becoming a massively successful film director, Baz began his showbiz career as an actor and as a ballroom dancer in Australia. His first film was Strictly Ballroom, which came out in 1992 and became one of the highest grossing Australian films of all time. It was originally a play, and there's a song in the film that was part of the story all the way back when it was first performed on stage.

• 1:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And that's what Baz and I talked about for this episode.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  There are quite a few songs that have changed my life, but no song really changed the trajectory of my life more than "Time After Time" by Sidney Loeb.

• 2:02Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm so thrilled that you picked "Time After Time", because that is already a song that I associate with you because of Strictly Ballroom.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you know what? And growing up in a tiny country town, our working-class theatre was competitive ballroom dancing.

• 2:18Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Hmm. Do you feel like your background in ballroom dancing, your training, you know, when you were younger, affected the way that you listened to music?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yes is the answer. When we were very young, my dad was in the Vietnam War. And when he came back from Hong Kong, he loved music and he had this thing called an Akai, reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was the latest technology and this was, I would have been like five or something. And it was amazing because he also had a tape, which was kind of a sample tape of all sorts of music. And on it was classical music, Tijuana Brass and The Beatles. And then we moved away to the country and we were very isolated. And so that tape I just played over and over again.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  And I think it instilled in me a lack of prejudice about kinds of music. It was just music. I even had my own radio station, like we used the Akai and I got a record player and I put speakers up outside the gas station. And then I'd be like broadcasting Radio MUBIL. And now let's play that crazy hit by John Farnham. "One is the loneliest number". And I did that for about a week only because I only had one record. So I played over and over again. I had a lot of news broadcasting because read the paper, really.

• 3:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. Wait, and how old were you at this point?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  I was probably 10.

• 3:45Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. And where was this? Where were you growing up?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Arans Creek is like northern New South Wales, really in giant timberland country. We were on the side of the highway and we were very isolated. We had a pig farm and we also ran the local cinema. But the town itself had five houses and it's six houses.

• 4:05Hrishikesh Hirway?

  At that age, had you already started ballroom dancing?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Yes, it started with me finding a flyer on the ground of a bus. And then I went to the local dance hall, which was, again, everything was an hour away.

• 4:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  And I started doing it. And so I went with the ballroom dancing. What was great about that was you got to dance and you went to local competitions, but you dressed up in tails. And so it was kind of fascinating because everyone's probably like that, mate, you know, okay, yeah. But they were dressed like they were in the 19th century.

• 4:33Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  And then we were teenagers and there was great argument between my mother and my father, a big split up. And at some point I just ran away. So I end up in the city. And then I started joining the local theater group and acting. And then I actually got into amateur theater. I was just basically not turning up at school. And I auditioned for NIDA, the National Institute of Dramatic Art. I mean, Cate Blanchett went there, Mel Gibson went there. It's our national drama school. You didn't get in. And I was devastated. I thought, hang on, this is not meant to happen. I meant to get in. I did reconnect with my mom and my mom was like, look, shouldn't you think about, you know, you dance really well. What about choreography or something like that? You know?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Anyway, the best like I ever had in my life was I came home from graduation day and the phone rang and this guy rings me and says, listen, we want you to be in this movie opposite Judy Davis, one of the great actors of the world. And they went, we're only paying you $2,000 a week, which was a fortune to me. So I went, yep, I'll do that. And I moved out and I did the movie in a film theater company. And then I had an opera company because I loved music. I did another movie. I was in a war film. And I tried to get into NIDA. Eventually I became so well known that actually NIDA said, look, you're a terrible auditioner, which is why I don't audition actors. I do workshops because I really realized

• 5:59Speaker 01

  how the process of auditioning is so, can really disarm you. So they said, look, turn up and you'll get in. So I turned up, I got in. And while we were there, one of the programs was devising. Devising is where actors get together and they come up with an idea. You don't do a written play. No one actually writes the play. I was never very good at sitting down and just staring at the page. I do now, but I still find it kind of traumatizing, which is why I like to write with people, but I can sit there and write. But what I came up with was this sort of, okay, the play was forty minutes. So we had an idea, I had the idea about the Greek myth.

• 6:41Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Was there a Greek myth in particular that you were thinking of?

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yes, I spliced together both triumph over oppression, which is a primary Greek ideal, and with the ugly duckling myth, actually. And the ugly duckling myth or fairy tale is misunderstood. It's not that you sort of take off your glasses and become who you dream of. A swan's egg is accidentally put amidst a whole lot of eggs by ducks. And so when this duck is born, everyone goes, gee, you're weird. You're different. The duck doesn't really know that they're actually born a swan. And that is about self-revelation, revealing who you really are and growing on that road as opposed to imposing or having imposed upon you who the world wants you to be.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  So I spliced them together. Then we did a thing called the hot chair. So I got every actor to sit in a chair and we could ask them any questions about their life. You know, it was kind of a bit psychologically intense. And they would get a sense of what was really meaningful to them. And we realized in doing that, we were all very, very subconsciously oppressed about the Cold War. So we thought of using the triumph over oppression myth about this idea that the older generation were telling you, there's only one way to cha, cha, cha, and you've got to stick by the rules. And, you know, they were ruining the world and we couldn't do anything. And so by splicing the two myths together, I sort of came up with a rough structure.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  And then this idea of setting it in the world of Boreham Dancing, where you had this oppressive guy called Barry Vive and the Federation. And the Federation decided the rules. But there was a young dancer and he was a champion. But he started to make up his own rules, his own dances, his own steps. And he suddenly got shut down because people were loving his creativity. And the outside girl, she had been watching him and thinking, he's amazing. But no one liked her, she was terrible. And so secretly at night, they're creating their own choreography to go to the competition. Pretty simple plot. And there was a kind of moment where the kind of, you know, champion lead

• 8:55Speaker 01

  character, Scott Hastings, everyone wants to dance with him. But he was breaking the rules by doing his own creativity. The whole thing was a metaphor really for creativity. And then the sort of bespectacled outsider girl, she was the sort of wallflower. I think we used to call her Jenny Wallflower, actually.

• 9:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Hmm.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  She's watching him and it's very much, you know, the alpha male is teaching the wallflower girl how to be great. I was thinking, what would the musical construct be? And I needed this kind of song. I didn't have any money, but I went to, I guess somewhere we went and bought a cheap cassette player.

• 9:36Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  In those days, it was cassette players. And I was in there and the radio was on and this brand new single dropped. As I was having this thought while I was buying a cassette player, you know? And it was this new punkish girl dropped this song called Time After Time. And it came on, you know, you're ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sometimes think of you time after time. I went, that's it. That's the song. I didn't even know it was Sidney Lauper at the time. So I rushed, got that cassette, went back to the rehearsal room, played it. Everyone went like, this is it.

• 10:17Hrishikesh Hirway?

  The moment when Time After Time appears.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 10:20Hrishikesh Hirway?

  How far along into the devising had you got?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  We were in the middle of actually building it and I didn't have a middle. So I brought the song in and I went, why don't we use the song to do like a film montage? But let's do it as a piece of theatre.

• 10:33Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  And we choreographed the middle sequence to that. So a very simple Brechtian device where you're doing one scene and just by, because it was an open black gloss floor, you just spin on the chorus and that meant time passed on and they were suddenly dancing better. So they sort of did it and she wasn't a good, and then they'd spin and then time passed. It was very Brechtian, the way we did it. In the song, there's a cha-cha beat.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  There's a sort of time. But in the middle eights, the rest of the cast got together as a group and they would move in a sort of military formation across the stage. And they'd stop and their heads would go like, I haven't seen Scott and Fran lately. Where have they been? What's going on? And it was kind of a gossipy chorus system. Meanwhile, our lovers were dancing left and right of this moving group in military formation where their heads were flicking and turning as if they were creating a sense that time was passing and they were gossiping about what strange things were happening to Scott Hastings, you know? And that Fran girl, that Fran girl hasn't been seen around.

• 11:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. Well, the music of Time After Time had to fit the idea of them doing this sort of dancing montage. Was it easy to imagine that song, which is kind of, you know, like a slower ballad, as the score essentially for this moment of them? I know nothing about ballroom dancing and I wasn't sure.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Yes, because actually, if you look at the rhythm of it, it actually is in cha-cha time. And that sequence was cha-cha. But the interesting thing about the ballroom dancing cha-cha is that it also works on the same four-four rhythm, if you halve the time, as a rumba, right? So you could dance both a rumba to it and a cha-cha. So we were dancing a slow cha-cha that then converted into a rumba, but then it had this double time rhythm. So the moment I heard it, I just went like, that's it. And it was then about constructing this sequence that gave you a montage time passing feeling, him teaching her and a sense of gossip because they were changing.

• 12:42Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  And it was kind of just one of those epiphany moments, a bit like how I discovered the fish tank idea in Romeo and Juliet by being in a nightclub in Miami where I was riding in. And I went to the bathroom and I came out and I'm washing my hands and there's a beautiful fish tank above the, where you wash your hands. And I looked through and there was a girl coming ahead and I went. That's it, you know? Like, things aren't born perfectly. And when you work with others, and I'm a serial collaborator, you shape up, you feel, you work off each other.

• 13:19Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Did you feel like the lyrics connected to this theme of creativity that's in the story of Strictly?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. It was almost as if it was written for us. That's how accurate it seemed. And in a way, when you're devising a play, the funny thing is, everyone in theater or film, creativity, fundamentally, when it's collaborative, all that sort of hardy-strung, egotistical stuff falls away. And in the act of creating, you are there for each other. And you're there to support, to catch, to be there. And you lift each other up because you're serving something higher. And that is the story and the audience.

• 14:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

  My conversation with Baz Luhrmann continues after this.

• 14:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 14:54Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 15:14Speaker 01

  So then about a year later, I had my own theater company. It was a very high profile position. I was the artistic director. So I brought Backstreet to Ballroom and a lovely man came and saw it. Ted Albert, what a beautiful man. He said, I'm starting a film company. I would like to get the rights to your play to make it into a film. I said, no, I'm going to direct it. And he looked at me and went, okay. And he said, I'm going to finance it. We suddenly got the financing and then tragically he died and the film was over. But his wife stepped in and said, no, my husband knows talent. I'm going to back you. We shoot the movie. We play the movie. The one distributor that has the movie, he sees it and says, it's the worst movie I've ever seen.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  And you've ruined Pat Bishop's career. I go up the coast. I shave off my long, black curly hair, well, half of it. Get a phone call from a guy, you know, in a trailer park. And he says, my name is Pierre Rision. I am the director of the Cannes Film Festival. I've seen your Ballroom dancing and I'd like to offer you a 12 o'clock screening. Boom, boom, boom. We end up going, we screen it. And as this sort of crowd squashed in around me, I always remember the security guard grabs him by the arm. And he says, monsieur, from this day on, life will never be the same again. And he was right.

• 16:33Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So did Time After Time stay in all those different versions as you took it from NIDA onward? Was it always in the?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  The record was, but as soon as I did the film, we recorded a new cover of it where the lead actress Tara Marie sang it with this kind of local pop star.

• 16:51Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What prompted that? What made you decide to not just use the original?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  I thought that there was a bit of a twist because they were distributed through Sony.

• 17:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  It was a music rights issue.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Might have been, but Ted Albert actually owned a record company. Albert Music, including ACDC. So they had enough muscle. They cut some sort of deal because ACDC is so huge.

• 17:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Once it was decided that this new version of Time After Time was going to be made, since you'd already shot the film, did it have to be as close to the original Cyndi Lauper version as possible? Or did you have ideas for how you might want it to be different?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  In the recorded version, I wanted it to be a duet. So you have a boy and a girl singing it because it is about a relationship.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  And the fundamental relationship, although it's built in creativity, is if you fall, I will catch you. I will be waiting. I'll be there, time after time.

• 18:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  How did you discover that Tara could sing well enough to record the song?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Tara was in my ensemble company. She was a very outstanding young actor. And so we had to do various things. So I knew she could sing. And actually, we went through the audition process, who should play the lead in Strictly Ballroom? And I'd have to say Craig Pearce, who's my bestie. And, you know, we wrote the screenplay together. And anyway, they fell in love.

• 18:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Craig and Tara fell in love?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:30Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Oh.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  They're children. So he was very much, look, why didn't we try and convince them that Tara should play the role? And we got Tara a crack at it. And I said, look, I really think she is the best at it. I really think she is the best. So she got the role.

• 18:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Well, I was wondering about the significance of you having had this experience with auditioning and then setting this crucial moment of the film, this moment where she finally gets to dance with Scott for the first time, with this song, the pressure of the audition is built into the story. I was wondering if you felt like you were consciously putting that part of yourself into the plot?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  I'm not sure it's even just auditioning. I think it's bigger than that. I think it's about creativity and a fundamental understanding that I just can't do it the way that it's been prescribed as a system and a process. So I couldn't get into drama school like everybody else by turning up and doing a bit of Beckett. I had to get in by creating so much other energy. And that's the same with the way I make movies or tell stories. I wish I was a shooter. I'd make a lot more movies, a lot quicker. I'd probably be a lot wealthier. I mean, I'm not poor.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  I'm not without a few biscuits, but but I've always had to find my own process, my own way. And that leads to my own way of telling stories. And whether you like it or not, and, you know, I've always accepted that what comes with that is that you're not going to be embraced by the larger, I guess, system or process that I'm always going to have to be. I'm more your Fran. I'm a baby Scott, but I'm your Fran as well. I always put a bit of, I don't consciously do it, but I think that, I don't know why, people point out, you know, you do tell the same story over and over again. The funny thing is, you can pretty much cast any of my movies with the same cast. There's always a sort of kindly grandmother and there's always a sort of, you know,

• 20:39Speaker 01

  rather florid overlord, whether it's Barry Five or Zedler or it's the Colonel Tom Parker. There's some patterns in there.

• 20:48Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Artists are consciously or pretty much subconsciously self medicating us against something that's marked them deeply in childhood.

• 20:59Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I, of course, I knew the Cyndi Lauper version, but in my house in the nineties, the version of Time After Time that we listened to was the version from Strictly Ballroom.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Really?

• 21:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, my sister, it was one of my sister's first CDs and.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  I'm amazed by that because, you know what? The film did well. Miramax ultimately bought the film. I mean, the film ultimately did very well around the world. Amazing in England, it was like number one in the UK. But then Sony really didn't push the soundtrack and I was really disappointed. We did the cover and I always remember they did this nasty little thing in the cassettes where they just took the album cover and stuck it on the cassette with Blue. And that's when I decided to get very involved in everything with my music.

• 21:42Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  I just went like this, I'm gonna be involved in day one, packaging, marketing, everything. And we've never stopped. I'm amazed that you had the soundtrack.

• 21:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, my sister saw Strictly Ballroom. She was in high school in Massachusetts. She came home, she saw it with her friend. I think I was too young to see it, you know, or something. I just didn't go to the movies that much at that age. But she came home, she loved it. She bought the soundtrack. And my first experience with the movie before I ever saw it was just listening to the soundtrack.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Was this like in 90?

• 22:14Hrishikesh Hirway?

  92.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  That's amazing. And it went to number one, and it was a hit. And it became the kind of soundtrack of Strictly Ballroom. And I guess the thing about that track is that, I mean, that's 40 years ago or something. But the point about the song is that every now and then in life, I'll be somewhere, and I'll just hear it at a distance. And it's just thematically, if you fall, I will catch you. I will be waiting time after time. And it's always given me a sense of, you know, somehow, it's a little touchstone, a little safety net that's just out there as a piece of music.

• 22:54Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Hmm. Thank you so much.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  A cut, as we like to say.

• 22:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Baz Luhrmann's new movie, Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert, is in theaters now.

• 23:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit songexploder.net/keachange for more Key Change episodes and for a playlist with all the music that's been discussed on this show. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. And if you'd like to hear more from me, you can subscribe to my newsletter. You can find a link to it on the Song Exploder website. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.