Australian director Baz Luhrmann was at the Canadian film festival TIFF to present his new documentary about American royalty, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert.
Busy Baz found time to visit Entertainment Weekly‘s 2025 Toronto International Film Festival studio to chat a bit about all things Graceland, but also about some of his past work — which includes 1996’s Romeo + Juliet, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s tragic play.
20th Century-Fox/Getty
While Luhrmann’s spin on the tale wasn’t the first to take one of the Bard’s plays and put it in an anachronistic setting, nor was it Leonardo DiCaprio’s first starring role, it was the first where he was positioned in a very polished, pop culture way.
Luhrmann said that in the run-up to production, he remembers thinking, “Oh, how am I going to make this? And then I saw a picture of what I thought was a model or something. It might have been in PEOPLE magazine or something.”
He continued: “That’s how Romeo should look. And someone said to me, ‘Oh, he’s actually an actor.'”
With this new info, the Strictly Ballroom director said, “Well…”
Luhrmann, trying to pinpoint the time, thinks DiCaprio might have just done What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Lasse Hallström’s film with Johnny Depp and Juliette Lewis that secured DiCaprio his first Academy Award nomination. The director added that he “thinks” he still has that magazine issue with the fateful photo.
20th Century Fox Film Corp./courtesy Everett Collection
He added that when he met with DiCaprio to first “workshop the idea, because [DiCaprio] wasn’t really sure,” the actor “cashed in his business class tickets, brought all his friends, and we have, today, still the videos of him and his friends doing the scenes. The rest is history really.”
Luhrmann concluded, “I mean, there was only Leonardo. I never actually auditioned any other person.”
Of the Oscar winner’s talents, he said, “Leo has a wonderful, quite unique quality of being both a tremendous actor and a star. Some people are stars and some people are great character actors, but he’s both. He’s a character actor who has star quality. He illuminates the screen.”
Full of praise that day, Luhrmann also had nice things to say about one William Shakespeare. “It doesn’t matter what he touches, you know those people. They’re not aliens to you,” he noted.
Emma McIntyre/WireImage
Romeo + Juliet, which saw DiCaprio opposite Claire Danes, was a box office smash back in the day. It was only Luhrmann’s second feature, but his first in Hollywood, and its success set him up to follow with Moulin Rouge! a few years down the line. He teamed up once more with DiCaprio a decade later for The Great Gatsby.
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If it’s been a while since you’ve looked at Romeo + Juliet, you are in luck, as the trailer is embedded below.
