The Academy Award-winning Australian director of hits like Romeo + Juliet and The Great Gatsby has taken on a new creative endeavour that he wants you to be a part of. He explains all to Karl Puschmann.
“All my synapses are connected to what’s in the air,” film-maker Baz Lurhmann
With anybody else you could dismiss that statement as an exaggeration or boast. With Baz, it’s a matter of fact.
While it’s his stylish, explosively colourful, and award-winning films like Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge! or The Great Gatsby that spring to mind when you hear his name, the Australian auteur is also wildly successful in other creative areas.
He had a TV hit with the Netflix series The Get Down a couple of years ago, which charted the birth of hip-hop. His operatic take on A Midsummer’s Night Dream won the Critics Prize at the Edinburgh Festival, he had a global hit with the melancholic song Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) in 1997 and has been nominated for three Grammys for his soundtrack work over the years.
He’s made multimillion-dollar commercials for luxury brands like Chanel No. 5 and, before moving behind the camera, was a regular stage actor at Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art.
When it comes to art and his artistic expression, he describes himself to Viva as “a restless soul”.
It’s creativity that Baz has zoomed in to talk to us about on an otherwise mundane Wednesday evening. But before I can even ask a question, his eyes light up.
“Hey Karl, are we at your musical desk in your studio there? That’s a period beatbox, right?”
He’s spot-on. Sitting amongst a couple of synths on the desk behind me is a big red box that’s covered in triangular pads. It’s a vintage sampler from the 90s called the ASR-X Pro.
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For a brief second, I’m surprised he picked it. Then I remember that as well as being a multiple Academy Award winner, he’s also worked intimately with the legends of hip-hop. The sight of my old groovebox sparks his memory.
“I was doing sampling very early on, back in the day with Missy,” he says, referring to hip-hop queen Missy Elliot. “I worked with Grandmaster Flash for years and he talked about it as such a big innovation when they brought those beat machines in. It blew their minds. It’s hard to imagine what that was like in this world we live in today.”
In an age when the average phone we carry in our pockets has at least 64GB of storage, the ASR-X only has a meagre 2 megabytes to work with. Yet some of the most creative and influential music of the 80s and 90s came from early instruments like it. Especially in hip-hop. Creativity didn’t just find a way around those limitations, it thrived.
“You put your finger right on it,” he says. “If you take Missy as an example; I can remember we were in the studio and had just put a beat down. We thought, ‘This is a really good groove.’ At that stage, there was a new invention called the laptop and it had a CD-Rom. You put a CD into the laptop and you burnt the track onto a CD. We were like, ‘We’ve got the latest laptop with the CD-Rom, let’s put the track down on that.’ We were fiddling around and Missy was like, ‘To hell with that!’
“She rings her phone, ‘Hello, it’s Missy Elliot, leave a message,’ and played the beat on to her own answering service. Then she got in her Lamborghini and ripped off.”
He laughs at the memory.
“The point is that she comes from a mindset where you’re not thinking, ‘Gee I need a CD-Rom and a big studio.’ She would just make the music.”
He gives another example of when he was living in the Bronx, working with Nas, Grandmaster Flash and DJ Kool Herc on The Get Down. For the originators of hip-hop, New York was not like it is now.
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“Why do I bring this up? Because it relates to the initiative in joining up with Bombay Sapphire,” he explains. “I’m prepared to front an idea where there’s another Flash out there in the world who has no resources. That does not stop you from expressing yourself. Human nature is the desire to express yourself.”
He pauses for a second and adds, “You could have all the resources in the world. You could be privileged, even. But you shouldn’t ever cap your own self-expression or creativity.”
This was something he never struggled with. He says he was creative from an early age, always dreaming stuff up and then doing it. The obstacle that he had to overcome was that he grew up in Heron’s Creek, a place he describes as, “an extraordinarily tiny town in the middle of nowhere” and where he’d get beaten up for his “dressy-up fashion sense”.
He didn’t let those obstacles stop him. Neither, he reckons, should you.
“If you get up in the morning and look at your world and go, ‘I’m stuck with this world’, and feel disconnected, then look at your patterns of getting up and what you do. You can use your own creativity to see the way things are, reimagine them and change your pattern. That’s a creative act. That can lead to another and another and ultimately self-expression.
“What I carry with me is the knowledge that you’re not ordained creative,” he says. “It is absolutely within everyone. Sometimes you just need an invitation to act on it.”
You can consider Bombay Sapphire’s “Saw This, Made This” campaign as that invitation. The initiative asks people around the world to create art out of what they see and find inspiring in the world around them. You are encouraged to share your work with a hashtag, which will also allow Baz to see it. He will then be spotlighting art that excites him and will curate a global showcase of this creativity in London and New York next year with exhibits open to the public.
“I like a good gin and tonic, Bombay Sapphire’s a good gin, and they bring with them enormous resources — and that’s not just money. They have a massive network,” he explains. “The idea of empowering the individual to be able to say, ‘I see this, I made this,’ is a good thing. I wouldn’t be getting hooked up with it if I didn’t think that.”
He’s genuinely excited to see art pouring in from around the world and is quick to point out that what is created does not have to be all sunshine and lollipops.
“It doesn’t need to be positive. If what you’re seeing is oppression and something comes out of you that’s scary, that’s all right too. Maybe it’s a representation of what you’re seeing or maybe it’s a counter to what you’re seeing. It doesn’t matter. As long as it’s you,” he says. “This is a call to arms to use the weapons of the artist. Those are truth, beauty and inspiration.”
For people new to creative expression, tapping into that inspiration and putting yourself and your work out there can be a daunting process. Baz agrees.
“It can be scary. But if you think about things in life that are scary, generally speaking, confronting fear and things that make us fearful generally results in a positive moving forward,” he says.
“If it scares you, that’s a good thing. It’s up to you to face that fear. It’s always the first step. If you’re fearful of it a little bit, then face that fear. You might actually get joy out of it. There’s no downside to expressing yourself through creativity. There’s just no downside to it.”
To begin your creative adventure and get involved with “Saw This, Made This”, simply upload your art to Instagram with the tag #sawthismadethis.
