High-kicks? An the rest. We were so fueled with Parisian joie de vivre after watching the first UK screening of Baz Lurhman's Moulin Rouge we even attempted splits on the pavement outside the screening theatre. Yes, it was that good.
This film is cinematic speed- a rush of colour, fashion, dance and the hottest sexual chemistry seen on screen since Marilyn Monroe straddled Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot. OK, so Moulin Rouge doesn't hit our screens until 7 September, but- trust us- you need to know about it now.
Our exclusive photo shoot and interview with the film's stars, Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, will give you some idea of teh frankly shocking electricity between the pair (no wonder tongues were wagging on the set during filming in Australia). And, to confirm its place in the history book of truly fashion-forward films, you need only look at this months' comprehensive guide to the top 10 trends of autumn/winter 2001 to see that the return of the dress, the tight-laced granny boot and bordello shades of mauve and cerise are just the ticket for naughty kicker-flashing cancan girls. Ooh la la!
The article: This Year's Lovers
Sydney, Australia. In a beautiful room in an eccentric, rambling Victorian house, a boy and a girl are singing together at a piano accompanied by an over-excited director. They boy and girl have only recenly met and are quite shy of one another,but as Nicole Kidman recalls, 'It was magical when you look back on it. I remember it being quite balmy...'
At the director's request, Nicole sings Nobody Does it Better from The Spy Who Loved Me. 'It didn't make it into the film, obviously!'
'Corsets are very hard to dance in,' she begins diplomatically (her favourite of Satine's outfits was the simple black dress with long leather gloves, and she had no argument at all with her vampish fishnets.) 'You are not meant to dance in corsets. All the dancers were complaining about how you couldn't move in them, but Baz would want you crawling on the floor, throwing yourself on the ground. And I would be like, "OK, OK, I can do it. I can do it."'
It was an unlucky combination of corsetry and extravagant dance moves that caused Nicole to break her rib, not once, but twice on the set of Moulin Rouge, setting filming back six weeks.
'Basically, Ewan was the one that broke my rib. We were doing a dance move that we practised over and over. He based into me and, although I only slightly cracked the rib at first, they then put me into a corset and it cracked fully.'
More seriously still, in the final days of filming, Nicole fell downstairs in heels, badly damaging the cartilage in her knee, and was forced to shoot the final scenes of the film on crutches and pull out of her next project, The Panice Room, altogether.
'Being Australian, I like to think of myself as physically quite tough and like I can push through. I think women tend to be quite strong like that with pain,'' she says, with a half-smile that seems to say that ribs and knees can at least be mended.
'I look forward to winding down,' she smiles. 'I've spent a lot of time just with my kids adn my family recently, and I look forward to doiong taht again.' And, with this, it's time to gather up her things, say her goodbyes and get back to Los Angeles to face more press engagements and goodness knows what development in the divorce proceedings.
Outside on the terrace, I find Baz Luhrmann, who's squinting in the Riviera sunshine and thinking about his leading lady. 'It's pradoxical, because Nicole's one ofthe strongest persons I've ever met and also the most vulnerable. I asked her to follow me, to sing, to dance, to run around gong, "Wup! Wup! Wup!", make a complete idiot of herself and give up many other opportunites. The balls involved with doing that is real,' he says seriously. 'I can tell you, this woman has guts, as we say in Australia. She has guts.'
London, England. Ewan McGregor (whose favourite of Satine's outfits is 'the black suspenders one of course, of course!') says he's never been to a club as divinely decadent as Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge- well, unless you count Heaven in London, which he went to when he was 18 because his girlfriend at the time had a gay best friend. 'It was a real eye-opener. It used to be a mad place, but I stopped going when they opened a lesbian room and they wouldn't let me in. I thought that was fiercely unfair!' he laughs heartily.
Weeks have passed since the Cannes premiere of Moulin Rouge, and Ewan, in a buzz cut and a rugged tan, both souvenirs from his most recent film set, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down in Morocco, has the air of a man who has come home. He looks thinner than he's looked recently; more like Renton, the skinny Trainspotting whippersnapper with whom he made his name, than the dark-haired matinee idol he plays in Moulin Rouge. The voice, however, is the same- dulcet-toned, Scottish as shortbread and, for all his cheekiness, almost absurdly romantic.
He sparks up a cigarette and explains that Moulin Rouge is the most important film of his career. 'I have never invested more of myself or my passion into anything. I've been pushed places I've never been before as an acttor. I love it so much and it means so much to me that I don't want to hear if somebody doesn't like it.'
The crazy thing is, he nearly didn't take the job. 'I wasn't going to do it, because they really didn't pay us anything. That wouldn't bother me normally, apart from the fact that I had to move my family and my whole life to Australia for almost a year, because I knew that Star Wars was going to come in straight after it. You hear all these stories about actors in the States being paid ludicrous amounts of money, and I just wondered when it was going to start happening to me.'
He signed up in the end, of course, for 'scale' (actor's minimum wage)and threw himself into BNaz Luhrmann's world with gusto. He sampled absinthe with the cast and crew. 'Twice. Something I'll vever do again. It gets you abosolutely gutted. The next day, my vision was vibrating, everything was shaking from left to right and I couldn't see a thing.'
He partied at Sydnye's Mardi Gras. 'I went bananas at it. I went head-to-toe in leather and wore full drag-makeup, kind of reminiscent of Velvet Goldmine, and screamed around with my wife and my brother and his wife.' And when the hot-house craziness of the Moulin Rouge set became too intense, he simply acquired a Harley-Davidson, bought a tent and 'fucked off into the outback for five days. It was fantastic.'
Luhrmanns' circus-school-like rehearsal process clearly suited him to the ground- four months of workshops, singing (which he loved os much it felt like 'swimming naked') and dance class, although in truth he didn't find this last quite so exhilarating. 'You just have to do it over and over and over again, and you go through a boredom threshold, which reminded me of being in school, sitting in physics or something. There were days when you just wanted to call in sic. Nicole and I both did throw sickies on a couple of occasions and just didn't go in. Ha!'
McGregor admits that he was madly intimidated by Nicole at first, and, while he also felt the magic in the air on the first day when they sang together, he'd also got it into his head that she was looking into his eyes and thinking, 'why the hell has he got this part?'
'It's funny, she's one of those actresses whom you're slightly in awe of anyway. You imagine her as the movie star from the front covers of magazines, that she's untouchable and that somehow gets in the way of her being human and funny. But she really is good fun, Nicole. You meet her and discover she's just funny and girlie and all nice things.'
They got on famously. 'She's really giggly and you can make her laugh. A lot. I'd be very rude in front of her, swear a lot and belch, and she'd say "Ew-an!" Like a big sister with her younger brother. We had that sort of relationship where I would constantly be embarrassing her. But I used to play on it, and it amused me that this was Nicole Kidman and I could behave like this in front of her.'
'
