Baz Luhrmann found himself in “an abyss.” When production on his biopic, Elvis, shut down due to the world’s first A-list COVID case, the director—so used to hopping around the world in pursuit of projects big and small—was at a loss. “At first it was like, ‘Oh, great, I get to have some dinners and hang out,’” he says now. “But then it was like, ‘What am I going to do?’” The solution for Luhrmann, it turned out, were in 2.5 million feet of footage from 2007, and in the nagging sense that they contained unfinished business.
Hulu’s Faraway Downs, which premieres on November 26, is what the streamer describes as “a film in chapters” and what Luhrmann calls “episodic storytelling.” It is a reimagining of the director’s 2008 epic, Australia, adding new footage and re-editing some sequences in a film that ran two hours and 45 minutes in theaters and now spans five episodes and around 37 additional minutes. Coming on the heels of AMC+’s episodic version of BlackBerry, Faraway Downs is part of an odd micro-trend blurring what remains of the lines between film and television. But Luhrmann’s project is more like Francis Ford Coppola’s re-edits of Apocalypse Now than a moneymaking effort to latch on to existing IP. As Luhrmann himself puts it, “It’s not like I needed the gig. I was just intrigued—could we do it, and what would I learn from doing it?”
Luhrmann has one of the most identifiable styles of any filmmaker working today, with a love for high comedy, melodrama, and head-spinning editing that endures from 1992’s Strictly Ballroom all the way up to Elvis. But there are moments in Faraway Downs where it’s clear that he’s changed over the years. Early in the film we see Nicole Kidman’s Lady Sarah Ashley, a British aristocrat who has kept her distance from her husband’s Australian cattle ranch, arrive via ship into the colorful chaos of Darwin, the city on Australia’s far northern coast. The plot of the sequence is the same in Australia and Faraway Downs, leading to Sarah’s awkward first meeting with Hugh Jackman’s rugged Drover. But there are noticeable differences, from the excision of a ferry boat captain who gropes Sarah to her glimpse of a group of biracial children being escorted to a nearby orphanage. It’s not just adding back footage that got cut by the studio; it’s reimagining the flow of the film’s opening sequence entirely.
Luhrmann says he wanted that opening sequence to be “broad but not sloppy,” and that revisiting was an opportunity to “clip and focus.” But more than fixing what felt like past mistakes, he expanded the story of Faraway Downs to focus even more on what Australians call the Stolen Generation, a government-backed effort to separate biracial children from their First Nations families. That story is represented in the film by Nullah (Brandon Walters), a boy with an Aboriginal mother and villainous white father who eventually builds a surrogate family with Sarah and Drover. There is more of Nullah in Faraway Downs, and the series has new music including a title sequence song from Budjerah. It represents a shift in focus that has happened in Australia at large since 2008; it was only after Australia wrapped production that the country’s prime minister issued the first public apology to members of the Stolen Generation.
That’s a heavy topic for any film, much less one that now includes a slightly longer sex scene between achingly beautiful Kidman and Jackman, an extended death via crocodile, and what must be the unlikeliest use of the Hokey Pokey in cinema history. But that’s always been the Luhrmann magic: committing as much to silly jokes as to big ideas, and with an unyielding belief in the power of art. I talked to Luhrmann about how Faraway Downs captures all of that, and how, even in this poststrike period of uncertainty for the movie business, he’s optimistic about what comes next.
Vanity Fair: Are you in Australia? Is it early for you?