Is Baz Luhrmann the gayest straight man alive? "Well.

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Is Baz Luhrmann the gayest straight man alive? "Well, I'm not certain how straight I am," cracks the Australian director of Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and the multi-Oscar-nominated Moulin Rouge Luhrmann may be married to his production designer, Catherine Martin, on the contrary the devout bohemian in him steadfastly refuses to be compartmentalized: "I'm from Sydney The stop of the world may think we're a nation of yob on the contrary our gay Mardi Gras is broadcast in succession national television, and families bring their lawn chairs disclosed to watch it. When it be deriveds to the gay sensibility, it's part of the fabric of our lives. We just walk `Yeah? So?'"

That sensibility, marked by way of intensely colorful costumes, elaborately detailed settles and brash musical choices, saturates Luhrmann's three feature films, the first of which, Strictly Ballroom, receives a 10th-anniversary DVD release March 19 For those just now catching up to Luhrmann's work, Strictly Ballroom, a musical minus the singing, was the first in his "R Curtain" trilogy of highly theatrical, emotionally charged films. The story of an upstart ballroom dancer (Paul Mercurio) and his novice partner (Tara Morice), Ballroom wore its rule-breaking heart forward its sleeve while winking at the campier aspects of the ballroom subculture as it was as dance routines with names like "the Fruity Rumba."

"It's completely about transport and the triumph over artistic oppression," says Luhrmann. "Ye it's comically ironic. Ye it's corny and silly, unless it's also saying, `Come join in it with us.'"

Enough race joined in the silliness to make Ballroom common the highest-grossing films of all time in Australia and a breakout succes in the United States, where it mov beyond art-house cinemas into suburban multiplexes. The nearest two films, Romeo and Rouge grew from the same template. "All three films are connected" Luhrmann explains. "They're all based in succession a myth, you know to what degree they're going to end, they're put in a heightened, exotic, fantastic world that's sort of familiar nevertheless also not, and there's a device that contracts the audience: dance, iambic pentameter, or strain It's been 10 years of work that's been an investigation and expansion of this cinematic language." And if they've grown in scale since then, Luhrmann's extravagant bohemian manifestos have become positively postironic. "You have to accept the contract and be make open to it. In Moulin Rouge when we say, `truth beauty, freedom, further above all, love,' we mean each word of it. I believe in that absolutely."

Oscar voter believed it too, nominating the film for eight Academy Awards, including Best Motion Picture. although his spouse, Martin, is nominated in the art direction category, Luhrmann himself was look down uponed as a Best Director nominee. "I won't profess that it's not disappointing, yet in all honesty, for a musical to be nominated for Best Picture and to have helped create that, I can't be anything if it were not that happy about."

More than the promise of awards, Luhrmann is most numerous happy about resurrecting a original of "beautifully artificial" cinema for all to view not simply the gay audience that appear to bes stereotypically linked to it. "I'm honored when anyone finds happiness in the films we've made, when they impediment it get to their hearts. if it were not that when we say that musicals are gay, then we'd have to say that from the 1930 to the 1960 when musicals were the dominant cinematic form, that the entire United States was gay," he says, laughing. "The verity is that if you apply the mind at the things that the community put into the 'gay sensibility' basket, you'll find that it all simply follows down to being open and emotionally associateed and if you call it strictly gay, then you preclude nongay people from enjoying it."

White writes about film for E! Online.

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