Making The Great Gatsby

Paula Fleri-Soler delves behind the scenes to discover how the seminal classic was brought to the big screen for contemporary audiences.

For 90 years, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal novel The Great Gatsby has thrilled readers across the globe. The story has had many incarnations on screen; the latest helmed by Australian writer/producer/director Baz Luhrmann.

Baz always recreates these worlds that are part of his imagination, but this adaptation is incredibly specific to this book

In the film’s production notes, Luhrmann recalls the time he first encountered The Great Gatsby on the screen – in 1974 as a young boy, in remote Heron’s Creek, Australia, where his father ran the gas station and the cinema. Thirty years later, the director was on a train in Russia.

“I had just wrapped Moulin Rouge,” Luhrmann recalls. “And crazily enough, I’d decided to take the Trans-Siberian Express from Beijing, across northern Russia, and then on to Paris to meet my wife and newly-born daughter, Lilly.”

And it was there that, via an audio book, he encountered The Great Gatsby once more. He listened intently, and by the time he reached the end, he reconfirmed that it’s an incredibly cinematic book.

“I thought I’d like to make this movie one day.”

Fortuitously, producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher had been trying to secure the film rights for some time, and the team started to fall into place.

The Great Gatsby is set in and around New York City, the city that Fitzgerald called his “splendid mirage”, and where he found early success and initial inspiration for the book.

It was there that Luhrmann set up the production team, including frequent collaborators such as his wife, costume and production designer Catherine Martin; co-writer Craig Pearce; and eventually the ensemble cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire.

The parallels between the novel and contemporary news headlines were not lost on the filmmakers. “While in New York, we did a lot of reading about the time – particularly about the financial system, the bond and stock markets,” says Pearce, observing that at the time the world was in the middle of the global financial crisis, the effects of which are still being felt today.

Comparing the mood then and now, Luhrmann posits that “Fitzgerald, I think, sensed a fundamental crack in the moral fabric of the 1920s, that things could not keep going up, up, up… as they were, it couldn’t last.

“That felt very relevant to the global financial crash of 2008,” he continues. “It felt parallel. If I think about it now, this fact is what told me I had to do Gatsby now and in this way. We came to New York because we had to be in New York to learn about and understand for ourselves those parallels of place, culture and mindset – Jazz Age and today.”

As for his take on the book, Martin explains that “Baz is a very literary director. If he’s going to make a movie based on a book, it’s because he wants to reveal what he believes is the centre of the story”.

Part of Luhrmann’s intensive preparation process includes collecting stuff to create his visual language. He makes collages out of photographs interspersed with his – at times rambling, he readily admits – scribbles.

Moreover, Luhrmann and the team studied the Gatsby text and other examples of Fitzgerald’s work intently, carrying out meticulous research with visits to the Princeton University Library, where Fitzgerald was a student and where the F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers and related collections are kept.

“Baz always recreates these worlds that are part of his imagination, but this adaptation is incredibly specific to this book,” says DiCaprio. “Not many liberties were taken as far as storytelling is concerned. The integrity of the story and Fitzgerald’s words are intact throughout.”

Pearce explains that it was their desire to include as much of Fitzgerald’s prose as possible in the screenplay. He adds that they wanted “to write voice-over or dialogue that sat within the style of Fitzgerald’s prose and captured its power and beauty, but that was also accessible to a modern ear.”

This desire to attract contemporary audiences also meant the inclusion of another Luhrmann staple – the use of contemporary music for the soundtrack, resulting in a collaboration with musical artist and executive producer on the film, Shawn ‘Jay Z’ Carter.

“I think that anything that becomes a classic is a classic because it moves through time and geography,” says Luhrmann. “It’s relevant in any country and at any time. These things are like that because the stories are universal human stories, and we know the people. And Gatsby is like that. And so that is the story all of us set out to tell right from the start.”