Baz Luhrmann: Strictly Ballroom

Baz Luhrmann was born in Sydney in the year 1962. His father, Leonard Luhrmann, ran a petrol station and a movie theatre while his mother, Barbara Carmel, was a ballroom dance teacher and dress shop owner. Luhrmann was a ballroom dancer as a child and this along with his mother being a ballroom dancing teacher gave him the inspiration for the film Strictly Ballroom. He was raised in Herons Creek, a tiny rural settlement, in northern New South Wales and attended St Paul 's College. During college he performed in the school’s version of Shakespeare 's Henry IV, Part 1, and Narrabeen High School?. Luhrmann officially changed his given name from Mark to Baz, his nickname, sometime around 1979. In 1983, he commenced an acting course at the National Institute of Dramatic Art during which he made Strictly Ballroom. He made it in response to feeling “artistically oppressed” during the time of the Cold War. In 1985 he graduated from the Institute of …show more content…
While his style is distinctive, Luhrmann also has rules that his films must abide by. These rules and styles make Luhrmann’s film very distinctive and easy to spot when you recognise his work. The rule that all three films must abide by is that all must show the end of the story at the beginning which allows the audience to focus more on the film, the film techniques and Luhrmann’s style, not on the actual story. The fast cutting between shots grabs our attention and adds intensity and tension along with helping convey large amount of information to the audience very quickly. The last rule I covered was the fact that they were all based around theatre and shown in a very much theatre way with bright colour and over exaggeration in the acting. This could be because of his upbringing in ballroom dancing and having been in plays that Luhrmann was so keen for the films to be so theatre based. Having all three based on theatre also gave them all a definite