The following comes from the New York Times via the Sydney Morning Herald, and elucidates some of the thinking behind the choice of 3D (and also makes brief mention of the silent version).
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http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/a-modern-classic-20120119-1q6zw.htmlA modern classicJanuary 21, 2012
Baz Luhrmann breaks new ground with a grown-up drama in three dimensions, writes MICHAEL CIEPLY.
With Avatar, 3D conquered the world. With The Great Gatsby, it might finally grow up.In a daring test of both himself and today's movie audience, in December director Baz Luhrmann is planning to release a star-packed and high-budget version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's much-admired novel of the jazz era.
In it, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan is Daisy Buchanan and Tobey Maguire is the narrator, Nick Carraway. In 3D.
Luhrmann's film will come three years after Avatar, a science fiction epic directed by James Cameron, became the biggest hit in movie history, with $2.8 billion in worldwide ticket sales. It proved that a new generation of 3D technology could immerse viewers in a credible fantasy world, the fictional planet Pandora.
But The Great Gatsby, its screenplay written by Luhrmann with his longtime collaborator Craig Pearce, will tell whether 3D can actually serve actors as they struggle through a complex story set squarely inside the natural world.
If The Great Gatsby succeeds, it could open the door to a new generation of sophisticated movie dramas that will match the spectacle value of the animations (Happy Feet Two), action films (Underworld: Awakening) and elaborate fables (Hugo) that now fill Hollywood's 3D release schedule.
It might also supply what has been missing in Academy Awards season - the heat of a film that breaks a barrier, such as Gone with the Wind, the first all-colour best picture, or The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, perhaps the first Oscar-winner to be anchored in its make-up and fantasy effects.
''The 'special effect' in this movie is seeing fine actors in the prime of their acting careers tearing each other apart,'' Luhrmann says.
He is using 3D not to create thrilling vistas or coming-at-you threats but rather to find a new intimacy in film. He refers particularly to a climactic scene in which Daisy's husband, Tom Buchanan, played by Joel Edgerton, confronts DiCaprio's Gatsby in a suite at The Plaza Hotel, all in three dimensions. ''How do you make it feel like you're inside the room?'' he asks.
Luhrmann's experiment will have to overcome the ambivalence of audiences yet to fully embrace 3D technology, especially in North America. The success of Avatar notwithstanding, 3D has fallen flat in high-profile efforts like Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Green Lantern. Studios have had to work hard to convince consumers there is a reason for it beyond charging higher prices.
As a result, American audiences have become increasingly picky about 3D, though moviegoers in other countries - where films can now make up to 70 per cent of the studios' profits - have been more enamoured of the technique.
Luhrmann says the idea of filming Gatsby occurred to him about a decade ago. He had finished Moulin Rouge! and was travelling from Asia to Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railway with ''some bottles of red Australian wine'', earphones and two recorded books. One was The Great Gatsby. After listening for a day or two, he began to wonder why Fitzgerald's novel, which he said he found ''exquisite'', had seemed to elude filmmakers.
Luhrmann had seen the 1974 version by the director Jack Clayton in which Robert Redford played the lead. Redford ''was the coolest thing in the world'' but the movie didn't really tell him ''who Gatsby was'', says Luhrmann.
In 1949 Alan Ladd played Gatsby, the socialite-ruffian, in a version directed by Elliott Nugent. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther said its problems were a ''weak script'' and direction that seemed ''completely artificial and stiff''.
Luhrmann looked in vain for a print of the first cinematic Gatsby, a silent film directed by Herbert Brenon with Warner Baxter as Gatsby. It was released in 1926, just a year after the novel was first published.
So Luhrmann took it upon himself to unlock the movie potential from a small book whose many themes - including social climbing, Prohibition thuggery, faithless marriage and the self-conscious modernism of almost a century ago - are squeezed into a compressed yet strangely operatic plot. (There was also an opera , in 1999, which was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and composed by John Harbison.)
A lecture by Cameron, who was then working on Avatar, persuaded Luhrmann that 3D might help him find what had been missing in Gatsby. To examine the potential of actors
in 3D without the gimmickry of contemporary action sequences, Luhrmann turned to Alfred Hitchcock's 3D version of Dial M for Murder from 1954. It wasn't easy. He was able to locate only two projectors - one in New York, one in Burbank, California - that could still play the film.
The sensation of moving through it with Ray Milland, Grace Kelly and Robert Cummings sealed the deal - both for himself and for DiCaprio and the troupe, who also studied the Hitchcock film.
''It was like theatre,'' Luhrmann says.
The chief executive of the 3D technology provider RealD, Michael Lewis, says this is ''the final stage in the maturing of the medium''.
Other filmmakers are pushing forward with grown-up dramas in three dimensions but fewer than might be supposed, given the success of Avatar. Steven Soderbergh almost shot Contagion in 3D but pulled back when it proved difficult in tests to get close-ups and other critical shots.
Cameron's Titanic, a drama with considerably more action than Gatsby, will be re-released in 3D in April. RealD, which collaborated with the Royal Opera House on a 3D version of Carmen, will follow that up with Madama Butterfly, Lewis says.
''It's settled into a very, very good place,'' a Warner executive, Dan Fellman, says of adult interest in 3D.
He became sold on the potential of Luhrmann's film - which was shot in Sydney with a budget of roughly $125 million - after viewing scenes that took what he called an almost ''subliminal'' approach to the medium.
''You were immersed in the lifestyle of Gatsby,'' Fellman says. ''You were in his world, moving from room to room.''
Luhrmann acknowledges that some will fear he is violating a sacred text. After all, he is the director who in 1996 cast
DiCaprio and Claire Danes in an MTV-style adaptation of Shakespeare, titled Romeo + Juliet.
''Everyone has strong and, generally, opposing opinions when you mention 3D or The Great Gatsby or Baz Luhrmann,'' he says.
But Fitzgerald, he insists, would have approved. ''He was a modernist,'' he says. ''He was very influenced by the cinema.''
The New York Times
Sun Jan 08, 2012 10:11 pm
