This filmmaker, like many others, “offers the audience a contract” through his feverish editing and theatrical visual language.
The director of these mythic, glitzy, and overstuffed melodramas is often trying to capture the chaos of his mind. Baz Luhrmann, known for his fantasized realities in films like Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, and Elvis, is a director who loves the theatrics of storytelling, which inherently makes him one of the most exciting filmmakers to watch.
Whether you love a Luhrmann film or feel an intense pain in your neck from his whiplash editing, you cannot deny that Luhrmann is creating a mood and feeling that hits you like a bolt of lighting every time you think of his films.
Luhrmann’s collaboration with editors Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond creates pacing in each scene that hits every emotional beat Luhrmann wants the audience to feel.
“The idea of that—the pacing and the editing and all of that—is to make you kind of lean forward and go, I’ve got to work here as an audience member,” Luhrmann said in a recent interview with Vulture.
Author: Alyssa Miller
This article comes from No Film School and can be read on the original site.
