Baz Luhrmann: Strictly Puccini

You just can't pigeon-hole Baz Luhrmann. The maverick Australian made his mark with the cult hit Strictly Ballroom, updated Shakespeare to contemporary Verona Beach in Romeo+Juliet, then gave us McGregor and Kidman singing in Moulin Rouge!. What next? Why, La Bohème on Broadway, of course. David Usborne meets him

Baz Luhrmann, the celluloid wizard from Oz, evidently has powers of persuasion. His most recent conquest is the King of Morocco. Lend me your army for my next film, Luhrmann said, and the King could not refuse. Soon, 5,000 soldiers from Morocco's armed forces will be his to play with in the North African desert for six months. And so, by the way, will Hollywood super-lead, Leonardo DiCaprio.

It is not that there is anything especially imposing about Luhrmann. With a deliberately dishevelled nest of greying hair and small eyes, he is not quite handsome and no longer quite young. (He is actually riveted by the fact of his having reached 40 in September.) Plus, he is addicted to creative risk. He is forever tackling ventures that no one else in the business, investors included, would normally go near.

Consider his career so far. Luhrmann's first film project, back in 1992, was an ironic comedy-romance set against a suburban ballroom-dancing competition in Australia. All he needed was two million dollars, but it took him an age to raise it. Who had even heard of Australian cinema back in those days? And where were the stars? If anything, his road took an even more eccentric direction thereafter. Next, he gave us Shakespeare with handguns instead of swords, before proceeding to reinvent the movie musical.

The three films we are talking about are Strictly Ballroom, which went on to make $80m at the box office and became a cult hit, in Britain especially. Then came William Shakespeare's Romeo+Juliet, shot in Mexico with DiCaprio and Claire Danes; and finally, last year, his gorgeously madcap musical, Moulin Rouge!, a film that split the critics but revealed that both Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman can sing.

Force of personality may partly explain such a daring portfolio of productions. When we meet in a penthouse suite of the Royalton Hotel in Manhattan – a place suitably hip and self-conscious – he is at once a verbal geyser. "Dare they say I babble on?" he jokes after the first five minutes of near-breathless expostulation. Well, it's not babble. It's more that he has stuff that he wants to say and there is no holding him back. He possesses a self-belief that could be construed as arrogance, but is also irresistible.

More importantly, he persuades, because, time after time, he has delivered. The against-all-odds success of Strictly Ballroom established the Baz brand of daring invention that has given him the power to sustain what he calls his "Creative Freedom Fund". With his wife and creative partner, Catherine Martin, the artistic eye behind the visual feast of his films, he has proved that the unlikely can be turned into the profitable. Now, investors fight with one another to get a slice of him and of his company, Bazmark Inc. His biggest backer for years, however, has been fellow-Australian and News Corp chairman, Rupert Murdoch.

"They always say, it can't be done, he's crazy," Luhrmann reflects. He tells how he first pitched to News Corp executives putting DiCaprio and Danes in a contemporary ghetto setting called Verona Beach, and setting their love affair against a backdrop of gang warfare. "There were tears. They were begging. Not that, anything but that. One executive then said, that's a great idea, but just don't mention the language, don't mention that it's Shakespeare." He laughs. "We've made ourselves a reputation. People say we are crazies, that it'll never work. But all my films have made money and won awards."

He is not lying about that. He defied his doubters with Moulin Rouge!, set in 1890s Montmartre, which went on to make $170m worldwide even before revenue from DVD sales, and won Catherine Martin two Oscars. R+J transformed the film career of DiCaprio, who had never opened a film before, and scored lavish praise in Britain especially, where it was nominated for nine Bafta awards, and collected four. (It was passed over by the Oscars, however.)

Luhrmann has something to say about the qualitative difference between reaction to his work in Britain and America. We get him better than the Yanks. His work, he argues, "has been commercially successful and critically understood, on a kind of complex level, in England more than anywhere else in the world". (But he wants us to know, even so, that his very worst reviews have routinely come from Murdoch newspapers – "incredibly irritating... I think he encourages everybody to be really hard on us".)

"You talk about broad comedy and high tragedy in the United States, and it's blank-face time. Their understanding of my work over here is a bit more shallow than they like to admit."

Yet, here he is in New York embarking on perhaps his pottiest project to date. Opera on Broadway – something that has never been attempted before. Last night saw the opening at the Broadway Theatre of Puccini's classic coming-of-age romance, La Bohème. Luhrmann is the director and the impresario, with, as ever, his wife Catherine giving substance to his vision. The risk of failure is self-evident, and Luhrmann now needs his persuasive charms more urgently than ever before. Can he get the bums to fill the auditorium's 1,800 seats night after night, matinée after matinée, to recoup the cost and ensure a long run? Will the folks on buses from New Jersey choose opera over the more traditional Broadway fare now on offer, such as Oklahoma! and Thoroughly Modern Millie? How will the city's opera buffs react?

Part of the answer will come with the first newspaper reviews today. This writer is no opera expert. He was, unlike many of his friends, a fan of the quirky Moulin Rouge!. But, for what it's worth, he sat enchanted through a preview last week, which closed with a noisy standing ovation.

Luhrmann, who first staged La Bohème for the Australian Opera Company in 1990, has updated Puccini's piece to 1957 Paris, but the music is untouched by rock beats or modernised melody. Musically, and in its narrative, it is strictly Puccini. The libretto that is projected as subtitles on to the stage is updated to a contemporary vernacular, which, on occasion, seems slightly daft. Rudolpho and his pals "freeze their asses off" in the first act. The staging and costuming, both eye-popping, are very obviously of Luhrmann-Martin conception. What you do see, in fact, are vivid echoes of the staging in Moulin Rouge!. You half-expect Kidman to occupy Rudolpho's rooftop garret, which has a red neon sign blaring "L'Amour" at its rear. Mimi and Kidman's Satine could have almost shared the same wardrobe. They do share the same fate, of course. Luhrmann, apparently, has a fascination with beautiful women who die coughing.

"We could get incinerated, and very quickly," Luhrmann admits when I ask whether this time he may have gone too far. He is not happy that so much rides on what The New York Times might say this morning. And he fully expects a backlash from the opera cognoscenti. For that reason, he has spent the past several weeks orchestrating a public-relations blitz for his show of the kind normally reserved for a major film opening, and never seen before by the folk on Broadway. The day after our conversation, he is slated to do 32 television interviews in a stretch. A fancy party was planned for the entertainment media. "I can't let one reviewer's opinion decide its fate," he frets. "I can't let one opinion stand in the way of some 25-year-old who, if they come to see our production, may have his life changed by it."

His mission is to get all types of punters into the theatre. That, he points out, is what Puccini was about also. The composer was not writing for any kind of élite. When it first appeared, his opera was not the equivalent even of a hit film, he argues. Rather, it was the equivalent of a television soap opera for the masses. "It will have to survive on a large percentage of people getting off buses. We need to attract the Broadway audience that is already there. But what we also need are audiences who don't traditionally go rushing to Broadway. We need the girls from Sex and the City to go – we need that audience. But we just don't know if we can get enough of them to sustain the life of the production. So I am fearful."

What makes his Bohème daring, he argues, is the very fact that he has chosen to leave Puccini's work largely intact. "The hugely radical idea in this production is that it's Puccini, it's his Bohème, it's in Italian, it's every note he ever wrote. I could have put new beats into it, but that would have been so middle-of-the-road."

Why take these risks then? Is it just that Luhrmann has a perverted taste for danger? That is not it, he insists. "It's not like I wake up in the morning and go, 'Right. What heroic thing shall I do this morning in the arts? Bring me my challenge!' No, I shake with fear like anyone else." While in this vein, he admits that there are plenty among his detractors who are salivating for the day that he stumbles. "Of course. I mean, it's always entertaining to see someone who gets away with things and then gets caught. But I cannot be fearful of that. I have to get my fear and tuck it in the drawer, because I am the captain of the no-fear team. I can't arrive for rehearsal and say that we are all doomed, how did I get us all into this!"

That would be especially disastrous with the young and relatively inexperienced singers he has gathered together from all corners for La Bohème. Luhrmann doesn't mind if his reputation is one of artistic daring, but he has a deeper purpose that has to do with luring that mixed audience. As with R+J, this production is about democratising a work that was first written for the broadest possible public, but which, in time, has become mostly accessible to only a highly cultured minority. "My real brand is that we have done a body of work that has reinvestigated classical works and made apparently stodgy and somewhat distant works more available to a larger public," he explains.

The point of Broadway is that it is not the Metropolitan Opera. "Opera is about a lot more than an élite club, but it has become that. I want to show that this is not some scary temple, that you are not worthy to come in to or that when you do come in you will find some scary religion in which you cannot participate. It shouldn't be some secret system of meaning, of which you don't know the language."

But there is a personal logic to reviving his Bohème, too. When Luhrmann, who earlier studied acting at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art, put it on in Sydney 12 years ago, he was on the threshold of international success and what he calls his "Red Curtain Trilogy". It comprised his three hit films, each imbued with cinematic invention and bold scores – Ballroom, R+J and Moulin. It was a phase of his own life that, as he passes 40, he is ready to leave behind. "So this is a sort of a bookend to all of that," he says. "We thought, let's kiss that period goodbye, bring a curtain down on it, and do La Bohème one more time. In a way, we are saying farewell to our bohemian youth. And, of course, we said, let's take it to the place where we are going to find the broadest possible audience, and that happens to be Broadway." Plus, he and Catherine were happy to make New York home again, if only for a few months.

He has been talking lately of having children and retiring from the business entirely, as of 2008. But he is not depressed about entering his fifth decade. He insists – too much, perhaps – that his 40th birthday was a welcome moment, when the priorities of physical pleasures give way to the spiritual. "It is Day One of your spiritual journey. There has got to be something exceptional and unique and only available to you in the second half of your life. A new experience. I have only been doing this for a few weeks – being 40 – but I am digging it." (Never mind that he can't resist advising our photographer on which of his shots might best flatter his looks.) He also says it is nice no longer to be labelled a wunderkind, something that started with the release of Ballroom when he was just 32. "I have spent my life being that clever kid. It was always like 'you pretentious little twerp'. Now, at 40, I have the right to say that I am a wise old man."

In the past, Luhrmann has used breaks between his projects to sling on a backpack and travel solo. A trip after the completion of R+J took him overland from Spain to Sri Lanka. Such journeys, he says, return him to reality. "Otherwise, you are in danger of thinking that, somehow, you are important." He will be leaving New York soon, but not for the road. Already, he is preparing his next major enterprise – the one that requires so many Moroccan soldiers as extras. He has a deal with Fox and Universal Pictures to direct an epic movie, Alexander the Great, with DiCaprio playing the Macedonian conqueror. Aside from the star and the army, he already has the money, too. Alexander will have a budget of $160m.

But what of La Bohème, meanwhile? Tickets are on sale in New York until the end of March, but Luhrmann must be hoping its life will extend much further. Then there is the question of taking it elsewhere. His biggest luxury, he explains, is that having recruited, after months of auditions, so many singers – the British tenor Alfred Boe took leave from Covent Garden to be one of three singing the part of Rudolpho in rotation – he has assembled a virtual opera company. In theory, his Puccini could travel further afield. Right now, however, he has only two cities in mind where he thinks his Bohème might fly – Tokyo and London. Will we see it in the West End soon? "It's quite possible," he replies, but says no more.