Trailer
Plot summary
In 1939, on the eve of World War II, the English noblewoman Lady Sarah Ashley travels to northern Australia to make her philandering husband, Maitland Ashley, sell Faraway Downs, the cattle station that lies across Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Maitland sends an independent drover, known as The Drover, to bring her inland, but her husband is murdered before she arrives, and the officials name an Aboriginal elder nicknamed King George as the killer. At the station, Lady Sarah befriends Nullah, a half-Aboriginal boy who lives there. In Darwin, Captain Dutton, an Australian Army logistics officer, bargains over beef prices with King Carney, the cattle baron.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Australia (2008)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Russell Crowe demanded personal script approval before signing and said he did not want to work in an environment influenced by budgetary needs, so in May 2006 Baz Luhrmann sought to replace him with Heath Ledger. The following June, Luhrmann replaced Crowe with Hugh Jackman.
- Filming at Kununurra was gruelling: temperatures soared to 43 degrees Celsius, one day causing Nicole Kidman to faint while on a horse, and she worked 14- and 15-hour days while dealing with morning sickness. Torrential rain, the first in 50 years, then reduced the Faraway Downs set to mud and the crew returned to Sydney until it dried out.
- Two weeks before the premiere the Daily Telegraph erroneously reported that Baz Luhrmann had given in to studio pressure and reshot a happier ending after disastrous test screenings. Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman called the article "patently nonsensical", and Luhrmann said he had written six endings and shot three of them.
- Baz Luhrmann had been planning a film about Alexander the Great starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman, and had built a studio in the northern Sahara, but Oliver Stone's Alexander was released first and, after several years in development, Luhrmann abandoned the project to make a film closer to home.
- In Australia the film grossed A$6.37 million in its opening weekend, setting the record for the highest grossing opening weekend for an Australian film and bumping the latest James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, to second place.
- Baz Luhrmann decided to set the film between the First and Second World Wars in order to merge a historical romance with the Stolen Generations, the policy under which thousands of mixed-race Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families by the state and integrated into white society.
- Principal photography began on 30 April 2007 in Sydney and Nicole Kidman found out that she was pregnant. She instantly withdrew from her next film, The Reader.
