Baz Luhrmann Quotes

I feel funny about owning art. I don't really want to say: "Wow, come and see my Monet - it's in a dark room at the bottom of my cellar."

In the '60s not everybody was wearing flowers in their hair and flowing caftans.

I mean the future has become old fashioned.

Everything I make starts very personally.

If Paris is a city of lights, Sydney is the city of fireworks.

My wife is the fact-checker, I'm in the story telling business.

I wouldn't take a directing job if I didn't think it was enriching life.

So, what is creative freedom? We can make what we want, how we want. The only constraint is: not for any budget.

Having grown up far, far away in a small country town in Australia, I was only slightly aware of hip-hop.

Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.

Don't worry about the future.

In 1977, hip-hop literally wasn't outside the boroughs. But I was profoundly aware of the city through films like Saturday Night Fever, The French Connection, and Network. I had a friend who visited New York, and I asked him what it was like. He said, "Oh, it's great. Just wear a coat and don't look anyone in the eye."

Ultimately, you have to pursue your own path, not someone's idea of the right path. You need to stay on your path.

I do find walking is fundamental to my creative process.

You really think that on my films people tell me what to do? I don't think so. On my films I decide.

I think dance in any culture, in any form, is a true leveler.

My father made sure that I had lots of levels of education – from ballroom-dancing to painting, commando training, theatre and magic.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

Western films don't do very well in India.

When you're in theater or the circus or film - to me it's all one - affairs happen. People fall in love.

Accept certain inalienable truths.

Some of the greatest relationship films of all time, the two stars have hated each other, but mostly you see that chemistry.

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

Why live life from dream to dream, and dread the day when dreaming ends.

Sydney is rather like an arrogant lover. When it rains it can deny you its love and you can find it hard to relate to. It's not a place that's built to be rainy or cold. But when the sun comes out, it bats its eyelids, it's glamorous, beautiful, attractive, smart, and it's very hard to get away from its magnetic pull.

I feel like a member of any group comprised of outsiders.

The cold-audition process is not a science, so I ignore that.

One of my great all-time loves in cinema, and I've seen it three times, is Bondarchuk's 'War and Peace.' Not a lot of people may have seen that film. It was made during the Soviet era.

I understand that anything actors are doing, good or bad, is motivated by fear.

Australia, to the rest of the world, is just far away, and Australia in the Thirties was the faraway of the faraway.

Look, I had a passion for comic books growing up.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth.

Opera was the cinema of its time, so to bring back that popular appeal, you just need to unleash its visceral immediacy and excitement. Most productions don't manage that - but when an opera does do it, you never forget it.

I really believe musical form will go on. There's got to be a way of making musical form in cinema live again.

The race is long but in the end it is only with YOURSELF.

I don't have fights with actors. In absolute honesty, I've never fought with any actor ever.

I am always worried when someone says, 'This is perfect.'

Hurt him. Hurt him and save him

I mean, '8 ½' to me is such a great dissertation on the whole, you know, act of filmmaking and creativity.

At a very young age I was allowed to go into the cinema and watch adult films.

Trust yourself that you can do it and get it

The ugly duckling is a misunderstood universal myth. It's not about turning into a blonde Barbie doll or becoming what you dream of being; it's about self-revelation, becoming who you are.

To be honest, there is a tourists' trail; my family had a farm and a gas station, and you can go and see my birthplace, though where I lived is actually under a freeway now.

One of the great things about Sydney is that it has a great acceptance of everyone and everything. It's an incredibly tolerant city, a city with a huge multicultural basis.

I never see things I make in the same way that the audience does. You can never do that.

When I was growing up you would see big American films that really mythologised their landscape, that really showed the vastness and the drama of their country.

All good, clean stories are melodrama, it's just the set of devices that determines how you show or hide it.