Australian Quotables

I was reading over my AFI (Australian Film Institute) newsletter today (er, via email) and there was an interview with a man called Nigel Bluck. He's an upcoming Australian cinematographer who has worked on work such as the previously mentioned Home Song Stories, the Toni Collette mystery Like Minds and the award-winning New Zealand feature Stickmen. Well, it turns out he is working on Baz Luhrmann's Australia as a second unit something or other. That means he gets to help photograph Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. Tough job. Check out the quote below, or read the entire interview here.

AFI: What can you tell us about Baz Luhrmann’s Australia?

NB: I’m doing second unit and I’m really interested in it because of its classical elements. It seems to be grounded in very classical filmmaking, almost like a Western. So there’s a real degree of purity that I’m looking forward to being a part of. The scale is very large but I think the style of the film will be close to the early Westerns which were made with a smaller style. Even though it’s a big film I think what Baz is trying to do is pure and simple and succinct rather than a big show. It’s also an opportunity to look at the Australian landscape and film it as if it’s a character, which a lot of films have done before, but it’s interesting for me because I’m not all that familiar with the Australian landscape. That’s part of the reason that Bahman got me to go to Iran for Half Moon - it's that directors often look for someone with an ‘objective’ eye – an eye that’s not too familiar with the landscape.