Key Change: Baz Luhrmann on "Time After Time."

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway. This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that changed their lives. My guest is Baz Luhrmann, the award-winning director whose films include Moulin Rouge!, Strictly Ballroom, The Great Gatsby, Elvis, and Romeo + Juliet. His newest film is Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert, a critically acclaimed documentary about Elvis that's playing right now in theaters and in IMAX. Before becoming a massively successful film director, Baz began his showbiz career as an actor and as a ballroom dancer in Australia. His first film was Strictly Ballroom, which came out in 1992 and became one of the highest grossing Australian films of all time. It was originally a play, and there's a song in the film that was part of the story all the way back when it was first performed on stage, and that's what Baz and I talked about for this episode.

[gentle music] There are quite a few songs that have changed my life, but no song really changed the trajectory of my life more than Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper.

I'm so thrilled that you picked Time After Time, because that is already a song that I associate with you because of Strictly Ballroom.

Yeah. Well, you know what, in growing up in a tiny country town, our working class theater was competitive ballroom dancing.

Hmm. Do you feel like your background in ballroom dancing, your training, you know, when you were younger, affected the way that you listen to music?

Yes is the answer. When we were very young, my dad was in the Vietnam War. And when he came back from Hong Kong, he loved music, and he had this thing called an Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was the latest technology, and this was, I would've been, like, five or something. And it was amazing because he also had a tape, which was kind of a sample tape of all sorts of music.

Hmm.

And on it was classical music, Tijuana Brass, and The Beatles. And then we moved away to the country, and we were very isolated. And so that tape I just played over and over again. And I think it instilled in me a lack of prejudice about kinds of music. It was just music.

Hmm.

I even had my own radio station. Like, we used the Akai, and I got a record player, and I put speakers up outside the gas station, and then I'd be, like, broadcasting Radio M-O-B-I-L. "And now let's play that crazy hit by John Farnham, One is the Loneliest Number." And I did that for about a week, only because I only had one record. [laughs]

[laughs]

So I played it over and over again. I had a lot of news broadcasting because read the paper, really.

Yeah. H-

But-

Wait, and how old were you at this point?

I was probably 10.

Yeah. And where was this? Where were you growing up?

Erins Creek is, like, northern New South Wales, really in giant timberland country. We were on the side of the highway, and we were very isolated. We had a pig farm, and we also ran the local cinema. But the town itself had five houses in it, six houses.

[laughs] Right. At that age, had you already started ballroom dancing?

Yes. It started with me finding a flyer on the ground of