Down Under Flix

  I’m fascinated by recurring actor-director collaborations. Not just those much-heralded, long-term working relationships — your Lemmon and Wilder, your Mifune and Kurosawa, your DeNiro/DiCaprio and Scorsese — and not contractually-mandated IP/franchise-based partnerships, but those instances where actors and directors will click and work together for one or two more films. By way of example, besides his noted working relationships with Spielberg and Lucas, Harrison Ford clocked two films apiece with multiple directors over the 80s and 90s: Australia’s own Peter Weir ( Witness, The Mosquito Coast ) and Phillip Noyce ( Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger , admittedly franchise entries), but also Mike Nichols ( Working Girl, Regarding Henry ), Alan Pakula ( Presumed Innocent, The Devil’s Own ), and Sydney Pollock ( Sabrina, Random Hearts ). It reveals a lot, to me at least, about Ford’s stardom, who he esteemed and was comfortable working with, the material he gravitated towards...

While it feels counter-intuitive, given its subject, to list Elvis (2022) as an Australian film, the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Awards (AACTA) expressed no qualms, awarding this US-Australian co-production Best Film, Director, and Actor, along with 9 other awards, a veritable sweep. AACTA also gave director Baz Luhrmann’s previous co-production, The Great Gatsby , the same top gongs and a slew of others nine years earlier. Ironically, Australia , Luhrmann’s most Antipodean-flavoured work since his breakthrough Strictly Ballroom , was nominated largely in craft categories by AACTA’s predecessor, the Australian Film Insititute Awards. Having said that, perhaps the best way to look at Luhrmann — indisputably our most successful working director and a truly internationally-minded one — is to treat him as our Sergio Leone. Much as Leone’s work is a product of both American Westerns and Italian cinema, so too is Luhrmann a filmmaker dabbling in American genres and stories ...