Born Mark Anthony Luhrmann on the 17th September 1962, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, Baz is an Oscar Award, Golden Globe Award-nominated film director, screenwriter, actor and producer, best known to the world for his first three films “Strictly Ballroom” (1992), “Romeo + Juliet” (1996), and “Moulin Rouge!” (2001), which were named the Red Curtain Trilogy, due to the same filming technique and the fact that every film has a theatre motif that appears throughout the film. Aside from those accomplishments, Buzz directed “The Great Gatsby” (2013), which also became a success.
Have you ever wondered how rich Baz Luhrmann is, as of mid- 2017? According to authoritative sources, it has been estimated that Luhrman’s net worth is as high as $20 million, an amount earned through his successful career, which started in the early ‘80s.
Baz Luhrmann Net Worth $20 Million
Baz is the son of Leonard Luhrmann, who owned petrol stations and a movie theatre, and Barbara Carmel, who was a ballroom dance teacher and owned a dress shop. He grew up in Herons Creek and went to St Joseph’s Hastings Regional School, Port Macquarie, and then St Paul’s College, Manly, only to matriculate from Narrabeen High School, where he met and befriended Craig Pearce, with whom he would later collaborate on his most successful films.
Baz got his nickname from his father and in 1979 changed his birth name to Baz. After he finished high school, Baz enrolled at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, where he took an acting course and graduated two years later next to Sonia Todd, Justin Monjo and Catherine McClements. Even before he finished his education, Baz started pursuing a career in the entertainment world.
He featured in the film “Winter of Dreams” (1981), and the TV series “A Country Practice” (1981-1982), and then moved on to stage work, appearing in such plays as “All’s Well That Ends Well” (1984), “Strictly Ballroom” -which he also directed and later made into a film – then “Once in a Lifetime” (1985), and “The Conquest of the South Pole” (1989), all of which added to his net worth.
In 1992 he adapted the play “Strictly Ballroom” to film, with the help of Craig Pearce and starring Paul Mercurio, Tara Morice, and Bill Hunter, the film reached stardom immediately upon its release and grossed more than $11 million, which added a significant amount to Baz’s net worth. He continued successfully with films “Romeo + Juliet” (1996), starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes and John Leguizamo, and the film earned a massive $147 million, further increasing his wealth.
Nothing changed for Baz in the coming years, as he hit the world with another adaptation, this time it was “Moulin Rouge!” (2001), with Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor in the lead roles. The film won two Academy Awards, and a number of other awards and nominations, and grossed nearly $180 million. Three years later he directed commercial for Chanel No. 5, “Chanel N°5: The Film”, and then in 2008 returned with the feature film “Australia”, which again had Nicole Kidman in the lead role, this time teamed up with Hugh Jackman.
After that, he directed a series of short films that featured conversations between two fashion legends, Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada. Then in 2013, he returned to the big screen with another successful production, “The Great Gatsby”, which grossed around $150 million, significantly increasing his wealth.
Most recently, he created the TV series “The Get Down” (2016-2017), with the help of Stephen Adly Guirgis.
Regarding his personal life, Baz has been married to Catherine Martin since 1997; the couple has two children together.
AACTA Award for Best Film, AACTA Award for Best Direction, Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, AACTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, BAFTA Award for Best Direction, AACTA Awards - Byron Kennedy Award, BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Producers Guild of Americ...
Nominations
Academy Award for Best Picture, Golden Globe Award for Best Director - Motion Picture, Golden Bear, BAFTA Award for Best Film, AACTA Award for Best Original Music Score, César Award for Best Foreign Film, Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media, BAFTA Award for Best Original S...
Movies
The Great Gatsby, Australia, No. 5 the Film, Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet, Strictly Ballroom, Winter of Our Dreams, Puccini: La Boheme (Sydney Opera)
TV Shows
The Get Down
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Trademark
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Films often begin in a comedic manner and end in tragedy
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Uses contemporary music in films set in the pre-20th/21st century.
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Frequently uses bright distinct colors and fast-paced editing
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Quote
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[on Beyonce Knowles] She can step onto a stage and draw every single person in the audience into an intimate experience. No one has that voice, no one moves the way she moves, no one can hold an audience the way she does. And she keeps growing and evolving in the ways that she expresses herself as a singer, as a performer and now as a mother. She and Jay Z are the royal couple of culture, and she is the queen bee.
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[on his version of 'The Great Gatsby'] The novel wasn't set in in a period called 'The Minimal Twenties'. It was called 'The Roaring Twenties'. So it had to roar.
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The Red Curtain requires some basics. One is that the audience knows how it will end when it begins, it is fundamental that the story is extremely thin and extremely simple - that is a lot of labor. Then it is set in a heightened, created world. Then there is a device - the heightened world of Strictly Ballroom (1992), Verona Beach. Then there is another device - dance or iambic pentameter or singing, and that's there to keep the audience awake and engaged. The other thing is that this piece was to be a comic tragedy. This is an unusual form, there's been a few goes at it - [like] Dancer in the Dark (2000) - but it's not common in Western cinematic form.
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We went to this huge, ice-cream picture palace to see a Bollywood movie. Here we were, with 2,000 Indians watching a film in Hindi, and there was the lowest possible comedy and then incredible drama and tragedy and then break out in songs. And it was 3-1/2 hours! We thought we had suddenly learnt Hindi, because we understood everything! [Laughter] We thought it was incredible. How involved the audience were. How uncool they were - how their coolness had been ripped aside and how they were united in this singular sharing of the story. The thrill of thinking, "Could we ever do that in the West? Could we ever get past that cerebral cool and perceived cool?" It required this idea of comic-tragedy. Could you make those switches? Fine in Shakespeare - low comedy and then you die in five minutes.
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But above everything else, [William Shakespeare] had to deal with a city of 400,000 people and a theatre that held 4,000 and everyone from the street sweeper upwards. Not unlike your local cineplex, and he used everything possible to arrest and stop that audience - really bawdy comedy and then, wham! Something really beautiful and poetic. Everything we did in Romeo + Juliet (1996) was based on Elizabethan Shakespeare. The fact that there was pop music in it was a Shakespearean thing. We would be fearless about the lowness of the comedy.
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The primary myth part came out of a revelation of the value of [William Shakespeare]. Those are dramas that play to the simple person and the complicated person.
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So, yes, we won for ourselves a criteria, a mantra, which is that we only make what we want to make in the way we want to make it. I believe we make universal stories for the world, but it has an Australian voice, and to maintain that voice you must be connected to your land. So the need to be in Australia motivated us to motivate Fox to build this studio down there, where they now shoot "Star Wars" and "The Matrix", so it's a wonderful facility.
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So we thought, let's look back to a cinematic language where the audience participated in the form. Where they were aware at all times that they were watching a movie, and that they should be active in their experience and not passive. Not being put into a sort of sleep state and made to believe through a set of constructs that they are watching a real-life story through a keyhole. They are aware at all times that they are watching a movie. That was the first step in this theatricalized cinematic form that we now call the Red Curtain.
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There are successes and failures in what we're doing, but that's the road we're walking down - stealing from culture all over the place to write a code so that very quickly the audience can swing from the lowest possible comedy moment to the highest possible tragedy with a bit of music in the middle.
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. . . if you make a film full of risk, studios don't run towards you to give you $50,000,000 in order to reinvent the post-modern musical, I can tell you. If you do manage to cajole them into doing it and you want to maintain the flag of creative freedom, you better make sure that it pays its bill.
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Well, it's pretty hard for them to sack me and put someone in to do iambic pentameter in modern dress, you know? What we've made, we only have one ironclad guarantee every single time, which is it will never work and no one will ever see it. Because it has gone on to more than pay its bill, and, by varying degrees, it has been acclaimed, the notion that the studio interferes . . . I like to engage with them, I don't have a producer . . . There's a whole system in Hollywood where the director never speaks to the studio, but I like to engage them in a discussion. I listen. But then finally we listen to ourselves.
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That's the only plan I've got - to not have a plan.
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So, what is creative freedom? We can make what we want, how we want. The only constraint is: not for any budget.
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One of the proud moments for us was Robert Wise, who directed The Sound of Music (1965) and West Side Story (1961), he is the great-great-grandfather of musical cinema, and he said, "I've seen Moulin Rouge! (2001) and the musical has been re-invented." I bring this up because you get that kind of thing and that's wonderful.
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There's no doubt that when you're up for an award you want to win, but, finally, art is not a horse race. If Gladiator (2000) was a great film in its form and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) a great film in its form, which is better? They're just different. It's not a horse race. You can't say, you know, "Gladiator" is so much faster!"
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All the films I make are about 60% of what I imagine them to be.
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Fact
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Produced a quirky number one record: "Everybody's Free to wear Sunscreen".
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The cast of his production of Puccini's opera, "La Boheme," at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, California was awarded the 2004 Los Angeles Stage Alliance Ovation Award for Ensemble. Performance.
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Darlinghurst, New South Wales, Australia [January 2009]
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Editing Australia (2008) in Sydney. [September 2008]
He was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal in the 2001 Queen's New Years Honours List for his services to Australian society in film direction and production.
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Profiled in "Conversations with Directors: An Anthology of Interviews from Literature/Film Quarterly", E.M. Walker, D.T. Johnson, eds. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008.
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Wanted to make a movie about Alexander The Great with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role around the same time as Oliver Stone made his movie Alexander (2004), but this project was dropped.
Son William Alexander Luhrmann was born June 8th, 2005
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In late 2004, he directed the world's most expensive advertisement for Chanel No 5, a 4-minute short film titled "No 5: The Film" starring Nicole Kidman (who he worked with for Moulin Rouge! (2001)) and Rodrigo Santoro. The film ad, about a fairy-tale romance in which Chanel is part of the story but is not what the story is about, cost £18 million and made Kidman a Guinness World Record holder for highest paid actress in a commercial (she netted $3.71 million). Varying length versions of the film ad were shown on television, and - a first for Chanel - in movie theaters. Costumes were designed by Karl Lagerfeld and a score by Claude Debussy. Kidman wore £17m worth of real gems.
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Family once owned a gas station and a farm.
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His father died the first day of filming Moulin Rouge! (2001).
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Did ballroom dance as a child.
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His first three films, Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001), were dubbed the "Red Curtain Trilogy", as they all fell under a particular style of filmmaking. He then changed direction and plans to make a trilogy of historical epics. The first of these was to be "Alexander the Great", which was later dropped.
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Luhrmann and Catherine Martin's first child, Lillian (Lilly) Amanda Luhrmann, was born in Sydney on Friday, 10th October 2003.