Key Change: Baz Luhrmann on "Time After Time."

Introduction

0:00You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirwe.

0:10I'm going to be on tour for the next few weeks, and all the dates are at songexploder.net slash live. I'm going to be playing songs from my new album, In the Last Hour of Light, with a full band, and I'm going to be talking about the making of my album with a special guest moderator in each city. I get to be the interviewee instead of the interviewer. So I'm going to be joined by Jason Manzoukas, Samin Nosrat, Allison Russell, Joshua Molina, Ken Jennings and John Roderick, Min Jin Lee, and Adam Scott. It's a really personal album, and I hope you can make it out to one of the shows.

0:41You can get tickets and more info at songexploder.net slash live.

0:48Summer. It's when we share more time, more memories, and more photos. And at AT&T, the iPhone 17 Pro is your summer essential. It's center stage front camera auto-adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. And AT&T makes sharing those pics with everyone easy. Right now at AT&T, ask how you can get the iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone trade-in, any condition. Requires trade-in of iPhone 15 Plus or higher, excluding iPhone 16e and 17e.

1:21Requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.com slash iPhone or visit an AT&T store for details.

Baz Luhrmann Interview

1:30This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that changed their lives. My guest is Baz Luhrmann, the award-winning director whose films include Moulin Rouge, Strictly Ballroom, The Great Gatsby, Elvis, and Romeo and Juliet. His newest film is Epic, Elvis Presley in Concert, a critically acclaimed documentary about Elvis that's playing right now in theaters and in IMAX. Before becoming a massively successful film director, Baz began his showbiz career as an actor and as a ballroom dancer in Australia.

2:04His first film was Strictly Ballroom, which came out in 1992 and became one of the highest grossing Australian films of all time. It was originally a play, and there's a song in the film that was part of the story all the way back when it was first performed on stage. And that's what Baz and I talked about for this episode. There are quite a few songs that have changed my life, but no song really changed the trajectory of my life more than Time After Time by Sidney Lopper.

2:41I'm so thrilled that you picked Time After Time because that is already a song that I associate with you because of Strictly Ballroom. Yeah. Well, you know what? And growing up in a tiny country town, our working class theater was competitive ballroom dancing. Do you feel like your background in ballroom dancing, your training, you know, when you were younger, affected the way that you listened to music? Yes is the answer. When we were very young, my dad was in the Vietnam War.

3:12When he came back from Hong Kong, he loved music. And he had this thing called an Akai, reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was the latest technology. And this was, I would have been like five or something. And it was amazing because he also had a tape, which was kind of a sample tape of all sorts of music. And on it was classical music, Tijuana Brass and the Beatles. And then we moved away to the country and we were very isolated. And so that tape, I just played over and over again.

3:44And I think it instilled in me a lack of prejudice about kinds of music. It was just music. I even had my own radio station. Like, we used the Akai and I got a record player and I put speakers up outside the gas station. And then I'd be like broadcasting radio, M-O-B-I-L. And now let's play that crazy hit by John Farnham. One is the loneliest number. And I did that for about a week only because I only have one record. So I played over and over again.

4:16I had a lot of news broadcasting because, read the paper, really. Yeah. And how old were you at this point? I was probably 10. Yeah. And where was this? Where were you growing up? Erin's Creek is like northern New South Wales, really in giant timberland country. We were on the side of the highway and we were very isolated. We had a pig farm and we also ran the local cinema. But the town itself had five houses in it, six houses. At that age, had you already started ballroom dancing?

4:46Yes. It started with me finding a flyer on the ground of a bus. And then I went to the local dance hall, which was, again, everything was an hour away. Yeah. And I started doing it. And so I went with the ballroom dancing. What was great about that was you got to dance and you went to local competitions, but you dressed up in tails. And so it was kind of fascinating because everyone's like, that might, you know, but they were dressed like they were in the 19th century. And then we were teenagers and there was great argument between my mother and my father,

5:18a big split up. And at some point I just ran away. So I ended up in the city and then I started joining the local theatre group and acting. And then I actually got into amateur theatre. I was just basically not turning up at school. And I auditioned for NIDA, the National Institute of Dramatic Art. I mean, Cate Blanchett went there, Mel Gibson went there. It's our national drama school. I didn't get in. And I was devastated. I thought, hang on, this is not meant to happen. I'm meant to get in. I did reconnect with my mum. And my mum was like, look, shouldn't you think about, you know, you dance really well.

5:52What about choreography? Or something like that, you know. Anyway, the best like I ever had in my life was I came home from graduation day and the phone rang and this guy rings me and says, listen, we want you to be in this movie opposite Judy Davis, one of the great actors of the world. And they went, we're only paying you $2,000 a week, which was a fortune to me. So I went, yep, I'll do that. And I moved out and I did the movie and I formed my own theatre company. And then I had an opera company because I loved music.

6:23I did another movie. I was in a war film. And I tried to get into NIDA. Eventually, I became so well known that actually NIDA said, look, you're a terrible auditioner, which is why I don't audition actors. Because I do workshops because I really realised how the process of auditioning can really disarm you. So they said, look, turn up and you'll get in. So I turned up. I got in. And while we were there, one of the programmes was devising. Devising is where actors get together and they come up with an idea.

6:57You don't do a written play. No one actually writes the play. I was never very good at sitting down and just staring at the page. I do now, but I still find it kind of traumatising, which is why I like to write with people. But I can sit there and write. But what I came up with was this sort of, okay, the play was 40 minutes. So we had an idea. I had the idea about the Greek myth. Was there a Greek myth in particular that you were thinking of? Yes. I spliced together both triumph over oppression, which is a primary Greek ideal,

7:29and with the ugly duckling myth, actually. And the ugly duckling myth or fairy tale is misunderstood. It's not that you sort of take off your glasses and become who you dream of. A swan's egg is accidentally put amidst a whole lot of eggs by ducks. And so when this duck is born, everyone goes, gee, you're weird. You're different. The duck doesn't really know that they're actually born a swan. And that is about self-revelation, revealing who you really are and growing on that road

8:02as opposed to imposing or having opposed upon you who the world wants you to be. So I spliced them together. Then we did a thing called the hot chair. So I got every actor to sit in a chair and we could ask them any questions about their life. You know, it was kind of a bit psychologically intense. And they would get a sense of what was really meaningful to them. And we realized in doing that, we were all very, very subconsciously oppressed about the Cold War. So we thought of using the triumph over oppression myth about this idea that the older generation

8:37were telling you there's only one way to cha-cha-cha and you've got to stick by the rules. And, you know, they were running the world and we couldn't do anything. And so by splicing the two myths together, I sort of came up with a rough structure. And then this idea of setting it in the world of Boreham dancing, where you had this oppressive guy called Barry Five and the Federation, and the Federation decided the rules. But there was a young dancer and he was a champion. But he started to make up his own rules, his own dances, his own steps.

9:09And he suddenly got shut down because people were loving his creativity. And the outside girl, she had been watching him and thinking he's amazing. But no one liked her. She was terrible. And so secretly at night, they're creating their own choreography to go to the competition. Pretty simple plot. And there was a kind of moment where the kind of, you know, champion lead character, Scott Hastings, everyone wants to dance with him. But he was breaking the rules by doing his own creativity.

9:41The whole thing was a metaphor, really, for creativity. And then the sort of bespeckled outsider girl, she was the sort of wallflower. I think we used to call her Jenny Wallflower, actually. She's watching him and it's very much, you know, the alpha male is teaching the wallflower girl how to be great. I was thinking, what would the musical construct be? And I needed this kind of song. I didn't have any money. But I went to, I guess, somewhere where you went and bought a cheap cassette player.

10:15In those days, it was cassette players. And I was in there. And the radio was on. And this brand new single dropped, as I was having this thought, while I was buying a cassette player, you know. And it was this new punkish girl dropped a song called Time After Time. And it came on, you know, you ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sometimes, think of you, time after time. I went, that's it.

10:45That's the song. I didn't even know it was Sydney Lawp at the time. So I rushed, got that cassette, went back to the rehearsal room, played it. Everyone went like, this is it. The moment when Time After Time appears, how far along into the devising had you gotten? We were in the middle of actually building it. And I didn't have a middle. So I brought the song in and I went, why don't we use the song to do like a film montage, but let's do it as a piece of theatre. Yeah. And we choreographed the middle sequence to that. So a very simple Brechtian device where you're doing one scene.

11:18And just by, because it was an open black glass floor, you just spin on the chorus. And that meant time passed on and they were suddenly dancing better. So they sort of did it and she wasn't that good. And then they'd spin and time passed. It was very Brechtian the way we did it. In the song, there's a cha-cha beat.

11:39There's a sort of time. But in the middle eights, the rest of the cast got together as a group and they would move in a sort of military formation across the stage and they'd stop and their heads would go like, I haven't seen Scott Abraham lately. Where have they been? What's going on? And it was kind of a gossip Greek chorus system. Meanwhile, our lovers were dancing left and right of this moving group in military formation where their heads were flicking and turning as if they were creating a sense that time was passing

12:11and they were gossiping about what strange things were happening to Scott Hastings, you know. And that Fran girl, that Fran girl hasn't been seen around. Yeah. Well, the music of Time After Time had to fit the idea of them doing this sort of dancing montage. Was it easy to imagine that song, which is kind of, you know, like a slower ballad as the score essentially for this moment of them? I know nothing about ballroom dancing and I wasn't sure if like... Yes, because actually if you look at the rhythm of it,

12:42it actually is in cha-cha time and that sequence was cha-cha. But the interesting thing about the ballroom dancing cha-cha is that it also works on the same 4-4 rhythm if you halve the time as a rumba, right? So you can dance both a rumba to it and a cha-cha. So we were dancing a slow cha-cha that then converted into a rumba, but then it had this double-time rhythm. So the moment I heard it, I just went like, that's it. And it was then about constructing this sequence that gave you a montage,

13:15time-passing feeling, him teaching her, and a sense of gossip because they were changing. Yeah. And it was kind of just one of those epiphany moments, a bit like how I discovered the fish tank idea in Romeo and Juliet by being in a nightclub in Miami where I was riding in. And I went to the bathroom and I came out and I'm washing my hands and there's a beautiful fish tank above there where you wash your hands. And I looked through and there was a girl coming in and I went, that's it, you know?

13:45Like things aren't born perfectly. And when you work with others, and I'm a serial collaborator, you shape up, you feel, you work off each other. Did you feel like the lyrics connected to this theme of creativity that's in the story of Strictly Bahrain? Yes. Yes. It was almost as if it was written for us. That's how accurate it seemed. And in a way, when you're devising a play, the funny thing is everyone in theatre or film, creativity,

14:18fundamentally, when it's collaborative, all that sort of highly strung ego-y stuff falls away. And in the act of creating, you are there for each other and you're there to support, to catch, to be there. And you lift each other up because you're serving something higher. And that is the story and the audience.

Game Mixtape

14:40My conversation with Baz Luhrmann continues after this.

14:48Song Exploder is sponsored by the game Mixtape. And to learn more, I talked to one of the creators. My name is Johnny Galvatron. I'm the writer and director of Mixtape. It's about three teenagers on their last day of high school going to their final party together, listening to the greatest mixtape of all time. And where did the idea for this game originally come from? Just wanting to make a game based around That's Good by Devo, which is the greatest song of all time. There's just something alive in that song that speaks to me. And it's very much a game about being a music lover

15:20and someone who appreciates music and knows where to place it in their life. And then game-wise, there are different kinds of mechanics. There's different kinds of music. There's different kind of art style. So the game as a whole should be viewed as a mixtape and kind of this artistry of arrangement. And so how is the game itself like a mixtape? So usually in a video game, you will have a standard set of mechanics, which might be fighting. But in a mixtape, there's different people saying different things with different vibes.

15:52And you want each song to be given its own experience, its own life. And you want to use the medium. That's what's kind of important about making video games. You want to use the medium to show what the music is showing. We have this song, BJ Thomas, most of all where a friend gets betrayed and she floats back through town and just kind of knocks everything out of her way as she floats through town and you control her. And like, what a beautiful way to kind of use that song and to use a mechanic and input to show the betrayal and the despondency and the sadness.

16:23And when you can get all those things mixed together and hit those crescendos where you hit between video game, music, narrative, that's the goal, that's the diamond that you aim for. I think you would really dig it. Mixtape comes out May 7th on console and PC. Check it out at mixtape.game. Thanks to Function for supporting Song Exploder and my general health. I've been traveling these days a lot for my album release shows and I remember that someone once said to me, part of the job of a touring musician

16:54is to make sure that you don't get sick. I do have a tendency to get sick when I travel a lot. And the function tests that I took revealed that I was deficient in vitamin D and magnesium. So I made changes to my diet and my vitamin intake. Because it's one thing to say, oh, I'm trying to be healthier. And another thing to actually have the information that lets you do something about it in a targeted and effective way. So check your health the way that I do with 160 plus lab tests a year for $365.

17:26Plus the ability to dive deeper into your results through Functions connections to platforms like ChatGPT and Claude. Join at functionhealth.com slash songexploder or use the gift code songexploder25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. Song Exploder is brought to you by Shopify. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US from household names like Heinz and Allbirds to brands that are just getting started.

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18:29at shopify.com slash songexploder. Go to shopify.com slash songexploder. Again, that's shopify.com slash songexploder.

Strictly Ballroom Story

18:40So then about a year later, I had my own theatre company. It was a very high-profile position. I was the artistic director. So I brought back Stricted Ballroom and a lovely man came and saw it. Ted Albert, what a beautiful man. He said, I'm starting a film company. I would like to get the rights to your play to make it into a film. I said, no, I'm going to direct it. And he looked at me and went, okay. And he said, I'm going to finance it.

19:11We suddenly got the financing. And then tragically he died. And the film was over. But his wife stepped in and said, no, my husband knows talent. I'm going to back you. We shoot the movie. We play the movie. The one distributor that has the movie. He sees it and says, it's the worst movie I've ever seen and you've ruined Pat Bishop's career. I go up the coast. I shave off my long black curly hair, well, half of it. I get a phone call from a guy, you know, in a trailer park. And he says, my name is Pierre Rissillon.

19:42I am the director of the Kent Film Festival. I've seen you on ballroom dancing. And I'd like to offer you a 12 o'clock screening. Boom, boom, boom. We end up going. We screen it. And as this sort of crowd squashed in around me, I always remember the security guard grabs me by the arm and he says, monsieur, from this day on, life will never be the same again. And he was right. So did Time After Time stay in all those different versions as you took it from NIDA onward? Was it always in the... The record was, but as soon as I did the film,

20:14we recorded a new cover of it where the lead actress, Tara Marie, sang it with this kind of local pop star. What prompted that? What made you decide to not just use the original? I thought that there was a bit of a twist because they were distributed through Sony. It was a music rights issue. Might have been. But Ted Albert actually owned a record company, Albert Music, including ACDC. So they had enough muscle. They cut some sort of deal because ACDC is so huge. Once it was decided that this new version of Time After Time

20:47was going to be made, since you'd already shot the film, did it have to be as close to the original Cyndi Lauper version as possible? Or did you have ideas for how you might want it to be different? In the recorded version, I wanted it to be a duet. So you have a boy and a girl singing. Because it is about a relationship.

21:09And the fundamental relationship, although it's built in creativity, is if you fall, I will catch you. I will be waiting. I'll be there, time after time. If you're lost, you can look and you will find me. Time after time. If you fall, I will catch you. I'll be waiting. Time after time. How did you discover that Tara could sing well enough to record the song? Tara was in my ensemble company.

21:40She was a very outstanding young actor. And so we had to do various things. So I knew she could sing. And actually, we went through the audition process. Who should play the lead in Strictly Ballroom? And I'd have to say Craig Pierce, who's my bestie. And, you know, we wrote the screenplay together. And anyway, they fell in love. Craig and Tara fell in love? Yeah. Oh. They're children. So he was very much, look, why don't we try and convince them that Tara should play the role? And we got Tara a crack at it.

22:12And I said, look, I really think she is the best at it. I really think she is the best. So she got the role. Well, I was wondering about the significance of you having had this experience with auditioning and then setting this crucial moment of the film, this moment where she finally gets to dance with Scott for the first time. With this song, the pressure of the audition is built into the story. I was wondering if you felt like you were consciously putting that part of yourself into the plot.

22:43I'm not sure it's even just auditioning. I think it's bigger than that. I think it's about creativity and a fundamental understanding that I just can't do it the way that it's been prescribed as a system and a process. So I couldn't get into drama school like everybody else by turning up and doing a bit of Beckett. I had to get in by creating so much other energy. And that's the same with the way I make movies or tell stories.

23:17I wish I was a shooter. I'd make a lot more movies a lot quicker. I'd probably be a lot wealthier. I mean, I'm not poor. I'm not without a few biscuits. But I've always had to find my own process, my own way. And that leads to my own way of telling stories and whether you like it or not. I've always accepted that what comes with that is that you're not going to be embraced by the larger, I guess, system or process.

23:47That I'm always going to have to be. I'm more your Fran. I'm a bit of your Scott, but I'm your Fran as well. I always put a bit of, I don't consciously do it, but I think that, I don't know why people point out, you know, you do tell the same story over and over again. The funny thing is you can pretty much cast any of my movies with the same cast. There's always a sort of kindly grandmother and there's always a sort of, you know, rather florid overlord, whether it's Barry Fife or Ziedler or it's the Colonel Tom Parker. There's some patterns in that.

24:19Yeah. Artists are consciously or pretty much subconsciously self-medicating us against something that's marked them deeply in childhood. I, of course, I knew the Cyndi Lauper version, but in my house in the 90s, the version of Time After Time that we listened to was the version from Strictly Ballroom. Really? Yeah. My sister, it was one of my sister's first CDs. I'm amazed by that because you know what? The film did well. Miramax ultimately bought the film. I mean, the film ultimately did very well around the world.

24:52Amazing in England. It was like number one in the UK. But then Sony really didn't push the soundtrack. And I was really disappointed. We did the cover. And I always remember they did this nasty little thing in the cassettes where they just took the album cover and stuck it on the cassette with Blue. And that's when I decided to get very involved in everything with my music. Yeah. I just went like this, I'm going to be involved in day one, packaging, marketing, everything.

Soundtrack Discussion

25:19And we've never stopped. I'm amazed that you had the soundtrack. Yeah. My sister saw Strictly Ballroom. She was in high school in Massachusetts. She came home. She saw it with her friend. I think I was too young to see it, you know, or something. I just didn't go to the movies that much at that age. But she came home. She loved it. She bought the soundtrack. And my first experience with the movie before I ever saw it was just listening to the soundtrack. Was this like in 90? 92. That's amazing. And it went to number one.

25:49And it was a hit. And it became the kind of soundtrack of Strictly Ballroom. And I guess the thing about that track is that, I mean, that's 40 years ago or something. But the point about the song is that every now and then in life I'll be somewhere and I'll just hear it at a distance and it's just thematically, if you fall, I will catch you, I will be waiting, time after time. And it's always given me a sense of, you know, somehow it's a little touchstone, a little

26:22safety net that's just out there as a piece of music. Thank you so much. Cut, as we like to say. Yeah.

26:31Baz Luhrmann's new movie, Epic, Elvis Presley in Concert, is in theaters now.

Conclusion

26:42Visit songexploder.net slash keychange for more Key Change episodes and for a playlist with all the music that's been discussed on this show. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Biscop. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. And if you'd like to hear more from me, you can subscribe to my newsletter.

27:12You can find a link to it on the Song Exploder website. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishikesh Hirwe. Thanks for listening.

27:28Radiotopia from PRX I want to tell you about another Radiotopia show called Proxy. It's hosted by Yo-Ai Shaw, who you might know from her time hosting Invisibilia from NPR. On Proxy, Yo-Ai tackles your niche emotional conundrums. Maybe you have a question that is impossible to get answers for because no one in your life can relate. Or the person you wish you could talk to about it isn't in your life anymore. So Yo-Ai scours the world for the perfect stranger for you to talk to.

28:01Someone who's been in the same situation or has relevant experience and can hopefully provide the insight that you're looking for. It's emotional investigative journalism at your service. Listen to Proxy with Yo-Ai Shaw wherever you get your podcasts.