The Belmond connection, meanwhile, came about after Gary Franklin, Belmond’s senior vice president of trains and cruises, was thinking about who his dream collaborators would be, and Luhrmann’s name was the first that sprang to mind. (He eventually managed to track the couple down via their longtime lawyer.) After Franklin invited the Luhrmann clan to take a family trip on the Belmond-owned Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, the director immediately knew that designing a train carriage was the ultimate assignment.
“It seemed like a dream, and I think that made it attractive, as that’s what we do anyway,” Luhrmann says. “That is what I consider my responsibility to an audience: to come into a space and to leave their lives behind and go on a journey, whether that’s through a play or a movie or a train. They should feel spiritually renewed, because they’re able to leave themselves and come back—hopefully having readjusted the energy that might be pulling them down. Which feels like a lot of verbiage to say: It was an easy yes.”
An easy yes, perhaps, but it’s difficult to fathom just how Luhrmann and Martin were able to fit this into their jam-packed schedules. On Monday, they helped oversee the creative direction of the Met Gala, and are currently in the end stages of a years-long pre-production process for Luhrmann’s Joan of Arc biopic, which is set to begin filming later this year. “I will say that, even for someone who’s always a bit four points on the compass, I’m probably a little more stretched than usual,” Luhrmann says, with a chuckle.
Though, as he explains, it’s exactly these creative side quests—or “adventures,” as he and Martin call them—that keep his creative juices flowing, inevitably feeding back into their next film project. “Whether that’s the hotel in Miami, or the little bar we’ve got Downtown, or an election campaign—it’s always great to do something we haven’t done before.”
Photo: Ludovic Balay
Photo: Ludovic Balay
