Key Change: Baz Luhrmann on "Time After Time"

0:00You'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 Rishikesh Hirwe.

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2:04It's only available with TurboTax full service experts. The real-time updates are only in the iOS mobile app. 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.

2:42His 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. 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 Lopper.

3:18I'm so thrilled that you picked Time After Time because that is already a song that I associate with you because of Strictly Ballroom. Yeah. Well, you know what? Growing up in a tiny country town, our working-class theatre was competitive ballroom dancing. 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? Yes, is the answer. When we were very young, my dad was in the Vietnam War. When he came back from Hong Kong, he loved music. And he had this thing called a Nakai, reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was the latest technology.

3:58And 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. 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, M-O-B-I-L.

4:43And 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 have one record. So I played over and over again. I had a lot of news broadcasting because read the paper really. Yeah. And how old were you at this point? I was probably 10. Yeah. And where was this? Where were you growing up? Erin's 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 in it, six houses.

5:21At that age, had you already started ballroom dancing? 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. Yeah. 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 like, like, that might, you know, but they were dressed like they were in the 19th century. Yeah. And then we were teenagers and there was great argument between my mother and my father, a big split up.

5:57And at some point I just ran away. So I ended up in the city and then I started joining the local theatre group and acting and then I actually got into amateur theatre. 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. I didn't get in. And I was devastated. I thought, hang on, this is not meant to happen. I'm meant to get in. I did reconnect with my mum and my mum was like, look, shouldn't you think about you know you dance really well what about choreography or something like that you know 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 says listen we want you to be in this movie opposite judy davis one of the great actors of the world and he went we're only paying you two thousand dollars 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 and I formed my own theatre company and then I had an opera company because I loved music.

7:01I did another movie. I was in a war film. 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 how the process of auditioning 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.

7:43I 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 40 minutes. So we had an idea. I had the idea about the Greek myth. Was there a Greek myth in particular that you were thinking of? 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.

8:23And 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 opposed upon you who the world wants you to be. 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.

9:01And 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 running 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 and then this idea of setting it in the world of boring dancing where you have this oppressive guy called Barry Vive and the Federation, and the Federation decided the rules.

9:38But 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 champion lead character, Scott Hastings. Everyone wants to dance with him. But he was breaking the rules by doing his own creativity.

10:19The whole thing was a metaphor really for creativity. And then the sort of bespeckled outsider girl, she was the sort of wallflower. I think we used to call her Jenny Wallflower actually. 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 where you went and bought a cheap cassette player. 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.

11:06and it was this new punkish girl dropped a song called Time After Time and it came on, you know, ding, ding, ding, ding, 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 Sydney Lawpah at the time. So I rushed, got that cassette, went back to the rehearsal room, played it. Everyone went like, this is it. The moment when Time After Time appears, how far along into the devising had you gotten? 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.

11:50Yeah. 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 that good, and then they'd spin, and time passed. It was very Brechtian, the way we did it. In the song, there's a cha-cha beat. 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 Abram lately.

12:32Where have they been? What's going on? And it was kind of a gossip Greek 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. 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?

13:14I know nothing about ballroom dancing and I wasn't sure if like... 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 4-4 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.

13:58And it was kind of just one of those epiphany moments, It's 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. I went to the bathroom and I came out and I'm washing my hands and there's a beautiful fish tank above where you wash your hands. And I looked through and there was a girl coming in. 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. Did you feel like the lyrics connected to this theme of creativity that's in the story of Strictly Barber?

14:42Yes. 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 hearty, strong, ego-y 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 My conversation with Baz Luhrmann continues after this I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

15:29It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Hirwe. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabond, Fen Lily, and the producer Phil Winerope.

16:07I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzoukas, Josh Molina, Min Jin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Kleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website.

16:43rishikesh.co or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks.

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19:27so 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 back stricter ballroom and a lovely man came and saw it ted 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 okay and 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.

20:05We play the movie. The one distributor that has the movie, he sees it and says, it's the worst movie I've ever seen 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 Rissillon. I am the director of the Kent Film Festival. I've seen you on 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 me by the arm and he says, Monsieur, from this day on, life will never be the same again.

20:46And he was right. So did Time After Time stay in all those different versions as you took it from NIDA onward? Was it always in the... 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. What prompted that? What made you decide to not just use the original? I thought that there was a bit of a twist because they were distributed through Sony. It was a music rights issue. 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.

21:26Once 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? In the recorded version, I wanted it to be a duet. So you have a boy and a girl singing. Because it is about a relationship 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. If you're lost, you can look and you will find me time after time.

22:08If you fall, I will catch you. I'll be waiting time after time. How did you discover that Tara could sing well enough to record the song? 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 Pierce, who's my bestie. And, you know, we wrote the screenplay together. And anyway, they fell in love. Craig and Tara fell in love? Yeah. Oh. They're children. So he was very much, look, why didn't we try and convince them that Tara should play the role?

22:51And 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. 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. I'm not sure it's even just auditioning. I think it's bigger than that.

23:29I 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. I'm not without a few biscuits, 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.

24:20I'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 bit of his Scott, but I'm your friend 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, rather florid overlord, whether it's Barry Fife or Ziedler or it's the Colonel Tom Parker.

25:00There's some patterns in there. Yeah. Artists are consciously or pretty much subconsciously self-medicating us against something that's marked them deeply in childhood. I, of course, I knew the Cyndi Lauper version. But in my house in the 90s, the version of Time After Time that we listened to was the version from Strictly Ballroom. Really? Yeah. My sister, it was one of my sister's first CDs. 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.

25:37But then Sony really didn't push the soundtrack. 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. Yeah. I just went like this. I'm going to be involved in day one. packaging, marketing, everything. And we've never stopped. I'm amazed that you had the soundtrack. Yeah. My sister saw Strictly Ballroom. She was in high school in Massachusetts. She came home, she saw it with her friend.

26:14I 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. Was this like in 90? 92. That's amazing. And it went to number one and it was a hit and it became the kind of soundtrack of Stricted 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.