Baz Luhrmann, seen in the photo at the right maintaining an even strain while trying to fend off the slavering zombie armies who wanted their money back after a screening of his latest epic, Australia, wants you to know that he's not going anywhere, so you might as well just knock it off with the death threats. "We're making people cry," said Luhrmann in defense of his film, a two-hour, forty-six-minute celebration of the complete immobility of Nicole Kidman's facial muscles. (Try anything! Wire her up to jumper cables and run five hundred volts through her. Have Tom Cruise dragged onto the set and let a kangaroo kick him in the nuts. She won't pout and she won't smirk. The woman's a sphinx!) "I know it," he said in defense of the claim about the crying, "because they write to us." (Actually, nobody doubted that the movie is making people cry. We're just open to the possibility that it had something to do with thoughts about what else they could have done with the evening.) "But," he added, "there are those that don't get it. A lot of the film scientists don't get it. And it's not just that that they don't get it, but they hate it and they hate me, and they think I'm the black hole of cinema. They say, 'He shouldn't have made it, and he should die.'" The problem, as Luhrmann sees it, is that the film scientist community tends to be between the ages of 18 and 39 and likes their movies more formulaic than he can supply. "This is not a romantic comedy for 40-year-old women or action movies for 17-year-old boys, and that's not OK with some people. It's not OK for people to come eat at the same table of cinema. But you look at movies like Gone With the Wind and Old Hollywood classics, and they don't fit in any box. Corny Hollywood movies from the '40s freak out (the film scientists)."

To combat this problem, Luhrmann hopes, on his next project, to abandon the corny old '40s and jumpback twenty years: he's planning to film F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. This would mark the third time the novel has been filmed, following a 1926 silent film starring Warner Baxter, a 1949 version starring Alan Ladd, and the infamous, hugely expensive, misguidedly nostalgic 1974 waxworks edition starring Robert Redford. (More recently, there was a 2000 miniseries made for cable TV; it starred Tobey Stephens, Mira Sorvino, Paul Rudd, and Martin Donovan. There was also a weird 2002 indie called G. that transposed the book's plot and characters to a modern hip-hop milieu.) For Luhrmann, Gatsby provides the opportunity to say something about contemporary society, specifically the economic calamity: "If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money,' they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time they'd be willing to...People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and The Great Gatsby can provide that explanation." Given that Australia cost a reported $130 million and has given little indication that it'll be earning that back anytime soon, Luhrmann may have already made his searing indictment of those drunk on money, without knowing it at the time.

While Luhrmann was recasting himself as David Selznick crossed with Paul Krugman, one of his homeland's most flamboyant literary celebrities was recasting herself as a film scientist. Writing in the Guardian, Germaine Greer let fly with this opening: " The scale of the disaster that is Baz Luhrmann's Australia is gradually becoming apparent," and responded to those who praised the film's "myth of national origin" with the observation that "Myths are by definition untrue." In Australia, Luhrmann's gooey, corny epic isn't just a throwback to "Old Hollywood" romances but a political film, one that "is designed to promote the current government policy of reconciliation" by misrepresenting the history of the mistreatment and exploitation of the Aborginal population. In fact, the government had a hand in getting the thing paid for: "Australia cost the Fox Corporation about $90m, minus a hefty tax rebate. The other $40m was contributed by the Australian Tourism Export Council, in the sanguine expectation that the film would do for Australian tourism what Schindler's List did for Kazimierz, the Jewish district of Krakow." The fact that so much is riding on the movie's success has not ensured it good word of mouth or positive reviews even in Australia, where one writer speculated: "it's an elaborate joke. A ruse. A jape. A gag . . . Some drunken nut challenged Luhrmann to break box-office records by making the most astonishingly bad Australian film of all time." Given notices like that, you might forgive a little whining on Luhrmann's part, but he's way ahead of you: "I'm not whining," he's insisted, "because when you do what I do, you expect to be covered in mud. But there seems to be a lot of misinformation."