Baz Luhrmann

Baz Luhrmann's first three features are tied together not by story but by theatre: dance, poetry and song. Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! make up that Red Curtain trilogy, and the first of them is also his plainest work. Romeo + Juliet carries the tragedy of 1597 into the present and swaps Verona for a fictional Verona Beach in Miami. Moulin Rouge! drew eight Academy Award nominations and won two, production design and costume design, both the work of Catherine Martin, his wife and long-standing collaborator. The Great Gatsby, a lacquered reading of Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, is his biggest commercial success, and in Elvis he went looking for the man behind the myth. Romeo + Juliet took the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 1997 Berlinale.