With a budget of $120m (£77m) and a top-notch cast including Oscar winner Nicole Kidman, director Baz Luhrmann’s new Australia is a Titanic-style super-saga of an epic outback adventure. He promised a masterpiece.
However, the film’s tragic ending may have been a bit too much for Hollywood studio executives. After “intense” discussions with 20th Century Fox officials, Luhrmann agreed to rewrite the final scene to keep Kidman’s lover, played by Hugh Jackman, alive.
This decision was made following negative reactions to the first cut of the film at test screenings.
One critic said, “There’s no reason to kill off Wolvie (Jackman played Wolverine in the X-Men trilogy).”
The studio apparently thought that, apart from saving audiences the extra cost of tissues, a more uplifting ending would bring greater success at the box office.
In the film, Kidman plays a British aristocrat who inherits a ranch in Australia at the outbreak of World War II. After a rival owner plots to steal her land, she teams up with a cattle driver played by Jackman and leads thousands of animals across the country, only to be bombarded by the Japanese. You will have to face it.
The two fall in love during an epic journey, but in Luhrmann’s first cut, Jackman’s character later dies.
The film, which will be released in the US and Australia this month and in the UK on Boxing Day, features a happier ending rather than an “action-packed tragedy” as one critic described it.
The decision angered some Australian movie fans. One person wrote on the website of Australia’s Sunday Telegraph: “Buzz clearly has no control over his films and no ethics in bringing the story he wanted to tell to the screen.” .
The rewritten ending is the latest in a series of setbacks that have affected the film.
Actor Russell Crowe had originally agreed to play Jackman, but declined, and filming was delayed due to Western Australia’s worst weather in 100 years and a subsequent outbreak of equine influenza. “There was nothing that was supposed to happen that didn’t happen,” Rahman said.
Film artist and singer Rolf Harris recorded his legendary wobble board as a soundtrack for the film’s opening credits. Mr Harris, 78, put the finishing touches on the track this week at a studio in Harrow, northwest London.
He said: “Apparently Baz Luhrmann suddenly said, ‘This is crazy. We’re not incorporating the iconic sound of Rolf Harris’ wobble board into our music. We must be mad.'” Ta.
