The task, as DiCaprio said, was tying to sort out “the choose-your-own interpretation of who these people are.” “What makes ‘Gatsby’ the book that it is,” the actor said, “is that people still have conversations about it.” That hurdle behind him, Luhrmann and his team turned their attention to the film’s supporting characters: Daisy’s husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton) Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher) Myrtle’s husband George (Jason Clarke) and Daisy’s friend and accomplished golfer Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki). ![]() A doctor prescribes that he write about what happened in West and East Egg, the respective New York homes of Gatsby and Daisy, and Nick’s recollections become the movie’s framing device. Traumatized by all he has witnessed, Nick is convalescing in a sanitarium. His answer, and one of the film’s most notable departures from the novel, is revealed as soon as the movie starts. Luhrmann began to consider adapting the novel after listening to it as a recorded book while traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway after finishing 2001’s “Moulin Rouge!” But it took a while to figure out how to translate “Gatsby” into a cinematic language that preserved Fitzgerald’s voice. ![]() and Village Roadshow), and numerous production delays, some tied to weather, postponed the film’s release from last fall to May. Worried about its budget, Sony Pictures backed out of the movie (the film was ultimately co-produced by Warner Bros. The director briefly needed his own adhesive to keep “The Great Gatsby” from falling apart. “It was our poetic glue,” the director said of 3-D. He filmed several sequences in long takes, as if “The Great Gatsby” were live theater, and shot it in 3-D the stereoscopic technology, Luhrmann said, heightens the film’s emotions, moving the audience from spectators to participants. While Gatsby’s famous bashes are even more excessive in Luhrmann’s imagination than in the novel, with fireworks choreographed to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” the director said he labored to keep the story intimate and immersive. “I have one duty - to the best of my ability to captain the storytelling team, and to tell and reveal the story,” said the 50-year-old Luhrmann, who followed his Oscar-nominated “Moulin Rouge!” with the critical and commercial disappointment “Australia.” “I set out to reveal ‘The Great Gatsby,’ but I also set out to do a movie of it.” The full note never appears on screen, but the fact that Luhrmann felt compelled to create it in such detail speaks to the director’s attention to detail and the intricacies of his creative embellishments. “You see my uniform hid the truth that I was poor,” the letter reads in the film’s imagination, its lines meticulously inked with a turn-of-the-century fountain pen on vintage paper (in handwriting that mimicked Fitzgerald’s, no less). Luhrmann and his team decided that the missive was Gatsby’s confession of undying love in a relationship doomed by his poverty and set out his thoughts to Daisy. The book never reveals the contents, but its impact on Daisy is profound. ![]() A case in point: The novel suggests that Gatsby, a former soldier, penned a heartbreaking letter to Daisy on her wedding day. When the source material left some questions unanswered, Luhrmann followed his own hunches.
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