"With no film I've made, do I say, 'Oh, it's perfect.' I know when they have crossed the line, and they're working, but I know that I probably would have kept working on any movie I've made," recalled director Baz Luhrmann. "I might have ruined it or made it better, but they're a bit like children in that you don't think of them as good or bad; you just remember making them. I do remember how poorly Australia was received in America. I also remember the big shock that it's still my number one movie in Europe, especially in Spain and France. It has a huge connection with people there."

Australia, which starred Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, got mixed reviews and grossed $211.3 million against a $130 million budget. Set in northern Australia before WWII, the film tells the story of an Englishwoman, Kidman’s Lady Sarah Ashley, who inherits a sprawling ranch and joins forces with a man called Drover, played by Jackman, to move 2,000 cattle through brutal terrain.

Now Oscar-nominated Luhrmann has had the chance to recut the original material and give the project new life as what's being called a film in chapters called Faraway Downs.

"When I went to do this, what I will say and what I do know to be true, is that when the pandemic hit, I was locked in this big white house on a river, and I started to think, 'Well, what am I going to do?' and I started looking at the footage again," the storyteller, who also co-wrote and co-produced the work, recalled. "The big idea of flipping a Gone with the Wind melodrama and telling it from a First Nations, indigenous child's point of view, and the big themes that go with that, are what I did start to see in all that two and a half million feet of footage. There was way more of a lean into that idea."

Luhrmann continued, "I felt that had not been fulfilled, and I really thought I could do episodic storytelling. Melodrama always has lots of tragedy, and the chapters of this have so much of that. When you put that into a two hour 40 minutes, it's like bang, bang, bang, bang, right? When you can let it breathe, it suits it better. It's like how Dickens wrote his novels; doing it episodically suits epics and very long-play narratives. We're now in a world where episodic television is great for long-play."

Once the filmmaker started to look at the material more closely and with fresh eyes, he found "a richer telling of this big idea" that he could use as the heart of Faraway Downs. He also found something else.

"There was a lot of great character work by Hugh and Nicole that I hadn't been able to allow into it," he exclaimed. "The first call I made was to Peter Rice at Hulu and said, 'I think I'd like to revisit this but as an episodic telling.' Remember, there wasn't a precedent for that. It's not like what happened with Zach Snyder returning to his DC project, Justice League, because he shot stuff for that. I was just going to reuse stuff we already had and make a separate work. Faraway Downs isn't just the Director's Cut; it has different plot points. I've got stakes in it, but it's an experiment."

While he didn't film anything new for Faraway Downs, which streams on Hulu from Sunday, November 26, 2023, Luhrmann was able to add some new creative elements, including working with "young, emerging indigenous pop artists to make new music and graphics," which helped create "a strong reimagining."

After calling Hulu, the director picked up the phone to his stars.

"The next people I rang were Hugh and Nicole, and they were really enthusiastic about it," Luhrmann confirmed. "They shot a lot of good work for that movie, but many good things have to be jettisoned sometimes just for running time. They actually came and worked on it and did some voiceover and things like that."

Getting the green light for reworking the original material was easier than securing a budget for a feature.

"It was nowhere near what it is to make the initial film," Luhrmann said. "It's a post-production budget, so it's not nothing. Some new business constructs have to be made, and all of the actors involved have some new business construct, but that's not my department. There was a bit of like, 'Hmm, That's unprecedented,' but people are used to me ringing up and saying, 'I think I want to make something. Let's reinvent the musical.' Early on, it was a bit more energy behind it and convincing people, but now they know I make things that are out of the box, and there's some trust there."

"Everybody was re-contacted, and what I was particularly thrilled about was the indigenous community we worked with and lived with for all that time. We re-engaged with them. We were able to screen it for them recently, and it was such a great reaction. What was so beautiful was that they applauded the landscape, so it was quite beautiful."

While it's not the first time a feature film has been reimagined and serialized in an episodic format, there have been examples such as Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight and, more recently, Glenn Howerton's Blackberry. Did Luhrmann reach out to Tarantino to discuss his plans and how best to approach such a project?

"Actually, I didn't. Maybe I should have?" the multi-hyphenate creative confessed. "I know Quentin really well. We started out together; we were on the first time directors panel together at Cannes, and I love what he does. We have joked with each other that Quentin does with violence what I do with confetti and dance, but I haven't seen what he did. The Hateful Eight is definitely epic. I can see how he would have done that, and I think this suits the format because of the epic nature."

Having had this experience with turning one of his features into a film in chapters, would he try something similar with any of his other works? There are no plans, but he wouldn't rule it out, although some are out of bounds.

"I wouldn't unpick Moulin Rouge! because it's a two-hour sitting; it's tight," he firmly stated. "It could maybe happen with Elvis. I've seen a different four-hour version, but it's not like someone who has had too much surgery, so you don't recognize them at all."

"Maybe The Great Gatsby would work in chapters? The thing about it is this. If you look at Elvis' life, for someone who lived to be just 42, he had an epic life with so many layers and points of view. If you look at The Great Gatsby as a book, it's very slender; it's a novella, and novellas make the movies because they're very compressed. Scotty Fitzgerald was a genius at compression, and he loved movies, actually. It's possible, but Elvis could definitely be a long-play."

One thing is for sure, and that's Luhrmann's philosophy about Australia's shortcomings. He is delighted to have been given the chance to make something new out of work he still very much believes in.

"I think with Australia, for sure, what happened was that we were testing during the economic meltdown in the US. Everyone was so depressed, and the nature of our melodrama is that you have all of these tragic losses," he mused. "There were so many of them, and the film had to get tighter and tighter, but I just think the final notion of it was too intense. It being a long play, I could go back and look at it and really look at this theme that Hugh Jackman speaks so clearly of, which is you can't own land or be defined by land or by child or by relationship."

"The only thing you really own is your story, so you'd better try and live a good one, and I was able to sort of really breathe it out. Because that more dramatic ending of loss didn't suddenly come at us, it has more breadth and depth."