Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (22 page)

Luhrmann’s preference was to select his male and female leads and then bring them together to see if there would be any chemistry, but he soon realized that would be impractical with the two actors he had in mind, so he invited everyone to Sydney for rehearsals. If any of the principles failed to live up to his expectations, insofar as the singing and dancing was concerned, then they would be replaced. Everyone knew that and considered it an acceptable risk.

To Luhrmann’s delight, when Nicole and Ewan arrived for rehearsals, there seemed to be an instant chemistry between the two actors. They were as playful together as cats on a lazy day. He appreciated her daring and her beauty, and she appreciated his youth and optimism, qualities that she—at age thirty-three—yearned to revisit.

Nicole also demonstrated a playful chemistry with Luhrmann. A decade earlier, when they did a photo shoot for the Australian edition of Vogue, they met for the first time at a restaurant where the photographs were to be taken. Nicole’s first impression of him was of how blatantly “Australian” he was; she was also somewhat taken aback by a loud, hacking cough he seemingly exercised at every opportunity. Despite the cough, she decided then that she hoped she would someday work with him.

Nicole caught Luhrmann’s attention because of the loud, boisterous way she interacted with the other people involved in the photo shoot. Years later, he recalled that meeting in a conversation with Nicole for
Interview
magazine: “When I met you, you were like so many of the girls I knew growing up—so crazy, so noisy. I say noisy because I remember you were eating along and suddenly ‘
Yahh!’
–you let out a big scream. I can’t remember if they threw us out, but I think they wanted to.”

One week before rehearsals began, Nicole got cold feet and begged Luhrmann to let her go. He refused, telling her she was there for the duration. The rehearsals were filled with surprises. Everyone was shocked at how well Nicole sang and how poorly she danced. She went into rehearsals thinking she could not sing and pretty sure that she was athletic enough to handle the dance routines. She was wrong on both counts. Her voice was surprisingly engaging and her dancing was the equivalent of two left feet. The dancing was what surprised her the most, for she had always considered herself very athletic, a tomboy in diva’s skin. But the deeper they went into rehearsals, the more confident Nicole became in her ability to do the role justice.

All of the actors spent long days doing readings, improvising, and taking singing and dancing lessons. Tom, who was in Sydney filming his
Mission Impossible
sequel, stopped by Luhrmann’s headquarters often to show support for Nicole—or was it because he had heard the same rumors about Nicole and Ewan that everyone else had heard?

“Of course, people said, ‘Nicole and Ewan are having an affair. They’re inseparable,’” Luhrmann told
Movieline.
“People love stories like that. I’m not surprised by it. It can happen. But as far as I know, there was a line. It just didn’t happen. But it was very close. I mean, look, they’re two gorgeous-looking people.”

On the last night of rehearsals, Luhrmann gave a party for the cast and introduced them to absinthe, a hallucinogenic green substance favored by the bohemian sub-culture at the turn of the century. Everyone went crazy that night, but, thanks to the drug, no one was able to remember anything the next morning.

  When they went from rehearsals to actual filming, the pressure to perform increased dramatically. Their singing and dancing was no longer pretend, it was now for real and the cameras were ready to roll, to capture their every move.

Tragically, on the day production was scheduled to begin Luhrmann received word that his father had died of skin cancer. He left to attend the funeral, and the cast stood about in stunned disbelief, grieving for the director’s loss, but also wondering if the entire project would be jinxed.

One week later, on November 1, Luhrmann returned and picked up where he had left off; it was a painful time for him, but the deeper he got into production, the more he was able to put his grief aside, at least temporarily.

Moulin Rouge
begins with Christian going to Paris to write about love, even though he has never been in love. After befriending Toulouse-Lautrec, he is asked to co-write a musical. He goes to the Moulin Rouge, the most ostentatious performance hall in the city, where the stage is filled with can-can dancers, musicians and singers.

Satine makes a spectacular entrance on a swing suspended over the audience and sings “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and then “Material Girl.” She faints during one of her songs and is taken backstage, where she coughs up blood. The Duke of Monroth arrives to meet her and she becomes convinced that he will become her patron. She mistakes Christian for the Duke, then she has to hide him when the real Duke arrives.

After the Duke leaves, Christian comes from his hiding place and asks, “Before, when you thought I was the Duke, you said that you loved me and I wondered if . . .,”  

“If it was just an act?” says Satine, finishing his sentence.

“Yes.”

“Of course,” she says.

Christian says that it feels real enough to him.

“Christian, I’m a courtesan. I’m paid to make men believe what they want to believe.”

“How silly of me. To think that you could fall in love with someone like me.”

Of course, Satine has fallen in love with Christian. Her dilemma is whether to pursue true love with Christian or financial security with the Duke. The love triangle becomes more complicated when Christian writes a similar romantic predicament into the musical, prompting the Duke to pledge to kill Christian if Satine does not do the show the way he wants and, on top of that, sleep with him.

It is at this point that Satine learns that she is dying of consumption. Moulin Rouge owner Harold Zidler tells Satine she must break Christian’s heart to save his life. “Hurt him to save him,” he advises.

Satine takes his advice and tells Christian that she has decided to go away with the Duke. The story ends the only way it possibly could—with Satine dying on stage.

There were times during production when Nicole felt she would die on stage. Early on, she broke her rib during a lift sequence in one of the dance numbers and had to take several weeks off to recover at her home in Sydney. Luckily, Tom was there to take care of her and the children. She used the time to stretch out on her sofa and rehearse her songs for upcoming scenes.

On another occasion, she was walking down the stairs during the “Pink Diamonds’ routine, when she stepped on some feathers and missed her footing, falling and tearing the cartilage in her knee. She didn’t realize the seriousness of her injury for several days and continued working, denying that she was hurt, even though it was apparent to everyone around her that she was.

When the pain became too much for her, she was taken to a hospital, where she underwent surgery to repair the torn knee cartilage. “The rib wasn’t so bad, but the cartilage was a nightmare,” she told the
Sydney Morning Herald.
“I didn’t really realize the damage I was doing to my body. I just sort of kept going and taking painkillers and getting steroid shots just to get through it. I felt like a footballer.”

For the final scenes, Nicole was on crutches or sitting in a wheelchair. Luhrmann was forced to devise creative ways of filming her so that her injury was not apparent; that meant using close-ups where he previously had planned more expansive images and it meant surrounding Nicole with extras to cover up her disability.

On top of her injuries, she had to endure three-hour makeup sessions each day and costumes that inflicted pain whenever she moved. “The corset itself was just a complete nightmare,” she explained in an interview that accompanied the videotape version of the movie. “Doing high kicks in a full corset—forget it. The other girls, the can-can girls, wore it, too. We’d all have bruises and our nerves went numb .  .  . not pleasant, but as Baz Luhrmann said, 'Hey, it looks great!'"

Amid all that pain and suffering, Nicole sang her heart out. Many of the songs were done live on stage, with Nicole and Ewan surrounded by hundreds of extras, singing without benefit of the electronic studio “helpers” that recording artists use to make their voices sound better.

Typically, live recording sessions for Hollywood musicals would include an elaborately produced sound track, to which the singers’ voice could be added. Luhrmann did it the hard way: he recorded the songs live, then added the orchestra later, gluing the orchestration around the voices. No one had ever done it that way before, but Luhrmann didn’t care; he thought it could be done and proved the doubters wrong.

Despite all the chaos surrounding the film, Nicole maintained a normal relationship with her children, Bella and Connor, who stayed on the set the entire time. At lunch, she took the children into her dressing room, where, typically wearing fishnet stockings, a corset and four-inch stilettos, she cooked their favorite meals. The children thought nothing about seeing their mother dressed that way; to their way of thinking their mother was a circus performer and the funny clothing was just her work uniform.

“Yeah, I would go back in after doing takes to make sure the homework was being done,” she told
Interview
magazine. “Then suddenly I’d be doing grade one reading for twenty minutes, and then back on the set. And for their math lesson, they’d be out betting with the crew. Playing poker—now that’s how to do mathematics!”  

The production was actually wrapped before it was completed. The death of Luhrmann’s father and Nicole’s injuries had eaten up about six weeks of precious studio time. There was no way to get an extension because the studio had been leased out for Ewan McGregor’s next movie,
Star Wars: Episode II
. Within minutes after Luhrmann and company left the studio, wrecking balls were in place to demolish the set.

Luhrmann eventually finished filming in Madrid, Spain, where Nicole and Tom went to film the supernatural thriller,
The Others
, a project for which Tom had signed on as producer. The time that Tom and Nicole spent in Sydney was special in that it allowed them to be together with the children, but it was stressful in a professional sense because of all the problems that plagued both
Moulin Rouge
and
Mission Impossible II.
From beginning to end, it took two years to complete work on
Mission Impossible II.
They were well into production before the screenwriter, Robert Towne, turned in his first lines, long after Tom and director John Woo had worked out the action sequences. It was, after all, a movie that depended on action, not words, for its creative energy.

Woo saw Tom as what he called a “rock star,” meaning that when the actor spoke he generated so much energy it was like he was playing an instrument and dancing. Woo used that energy, he later explained to reporters, to choreograph Tom’s action scenes. It was a good thing that Woo, the master of karate flicks, saw those qualities in Tom, for despite all his action movies, the actor had never been in fight scenes in which he delivered karate chops. Woo pretty much “danced” him through those scenes, making it up as he went along.

Tom was his usual charismatic self on the set, enthusiastic and ever ready to offer suggestions on how a scene could be done better, but there was something different about him, something no one could quite put their finger on. He sometimes seemed preoccupied, distracted perhaps by his trips to the
Moulin Rouge
set to check up on his wife and children.

Tom also seemed more aggressive, from a director’s point of view, in that he wanted to do some of his own stunts. Was he trying to compete with his high-spirited, daredevil wife? Or was he trying to impress her? She had broken a rib and torn knee cartilage while making a girlie musical, wounds she wore like a badge of honor—and what did he have to show for his efforts on the set of a manly action movie? He had suffered no broken bones or bruises, nor did he walk with a limp.

Woo was stunned when Tom told him he wanted to do his own stunt on the “massive gorge” scene (shot in Utah), where supported only by a single cable, he clung to the face of a cliff over two thousand feet in the air. Everyone tried to persuade him not to do it, including Woo and the studio executives—even Tom’s mother joined in the don’t-do-it chorus and flew to Utah to see for herself—but he insisted, making fun of those who asked him where the nets would be placed (there were no nets or air bags).

  Nicole never seemed to be far from his thoughts. He insisted that production on
Mission Impossible II
begin in Sydney so that he could be there with his wife and children. He went often to the
Moulin Rouge
set, but no one can recall her ever visiting the
Mission Impossible II
set. There marriage was undergoing a major shift, but no one but Tom and Nicole were aware of what was happening.