Luhrmann on the wire to finish Australia
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Perfectionist director Baz Luhrmann. (Getty Images: Gaye Gerard, file photo)
Baz Luhrmann's Australia is still unfinished and completion will be "very close to the wire", the director says.
Luhrmann is confident the epic film, which stars Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, will be ready in time for its November 26 release.
But he says it will be delivered reel-by-reel rather than as a completed whole.
"We're probably going to hand reels over in a way which probably happens with no other film," Luhrmann told local media.
"We have to be that inventive."
Set in the outback, Australia is about an English aristocrat (Kidman) who finds adventure and romance when she arrives Down Under before World War II.
Luhrmann says he has repeatedly asked 20th Century Fox to delay the release of the film, which also re-enacts the Japanese bombing of Darwin of 1942.
But the perfectionist director of Moulin Rouge and Romeo And Juliet has succeeded in extracting only a further 13 days.
"I would have begged them to put it back probably once a week for a year. I have 'please put it back' tattooed on my arm," he said.
"I think when you do what I do, no matter what show you're doing, you'll always want to put it back. I've never made anything where I've gone, 'It's finished, it's perfect'."
Luhrmann says structural work is on track and he is confident of the narrative.
"But the finishing work - can the visual effects be done, can we mix - we're playing it very close to the wire," he said.
- AFP
