ABOVE: Director Baz Luhrmann

I’m passionate about Fitzgerald and the Twenties era; I get completely lost in it. It is such a culturally rich period, how could you not love it? Postwar America is the new exploding place. There’s an industrial explosion and at the same time, the stock exchange and new monetary products are being created. In many ways, it’s very much like the modern era; people who couldn’t afford things were being brought into fiscal schemes and there was this whole notion that money was to be made and money was the reason and the end. In the novel, Nick Carraway puts aside his interest in literature to make money on Wall Street. Buildings are going up, hemlines are going up, hair is going up and planes are going up. Everything is going up, up, up in an orgy of money. Mention The Great Gatsby and people think, ‘Oh the parties, oh the glamour.’ But it’s really about how it’s all going to end in a terrible crash and in my estimation, Fitzgerald predicts the crash of 1929 in a book he wrote in 1925. He can tell there’s something fundamentally corrupt in the fabric of society.

Another endless fascination with the era comes from the huge collective lie that was taking place; the shared hypocrisy called prohibition. Even the most moral people would rail against alcohol publicly, then expect wine on their tables. It meant there was a shift in the moral dial, with gangsters and governors mixing together in secret drinking cabins. Out of that comes a new type of economy and women are liberated. They’re drinking, there’s the Charleston dance fad and morality goes crazy. People are intoxicated by money, drinking, sex and music. Not to mention everyone wore great suits and had fantastic props.

Fitzgerald and [his wife] Zelda were the poster children of the generation, but what’s so interesting is that he was really a bit of a loser. Everything he tried, he failed at. He started the Twenties as the un-coolest person in the world, then in a drunken rampage managed to write This Side Of Paradise [1920] and suddenly won back Zelda, the girl of his dreams, and became famous overnight. He and Zelda rode the great wave of the first youth quake of the Twenties in a wild, intoxicated champagnedriven miasma. It was extraordinary and amazingly exciting. But it killed them.

Baz Luhrmann on re-imagining The Great Gatsby