Australian Gone with the Wind to star Kidman, Crowe

Feb 23, 2006, 14:08 GMT

Sydney - A 'sweeping romance' to rival Gone with the Wind and starring Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe as star-crossed lovers will start rehearsals in the United States next month and begin filming in Australia before the end of the year, Sydney-based director Baz Luhrmann said Thursday.

The Moulin Rouge! director told Sydney's Daily Telegraph that the twin Oscar-winners had taken a pay cut to help convince Twentieth Century Fox to finance the film.

'Russell, Nicole and I have been wanting to do a large Australian piece for a very long time,' Luhrmann said. 'We have some of the most extraordinary landscape on the planet and we want to get two of the most extraordinary actors in the world to put them, acting, in that landscape.'

Luhrmann said he'd been working on the screenplay for seven years and that Kidman and Gladiator Crowe shared his ambition to do 'something purely Australian on a scale the world hasn't seen before.'

There will be a mostly Australian crew and a mostly Australian cast - including an Aboriginal boy in a major role.

The love story is set in the 1930s and 1940s and will have a scene recreating the bombing of the far north city of Darwin by Japanese fighter bombers in World War II.

Locations have been selected in the tropical north-east and in the Outback, but how much is shot outside and how much at Sydney's Fox Studios is yet to be decided.

'In this day and age of computer generation, no studio wants you to step outside the studio to shoot locations anymore,' Luhrmann moaned. 'Making it in a traditional sense is not something people support you in.'

Australians are hoping that the promised epic, which hasn't a title yet, will fare better than 'Eucalyptus,' the film project based on the novel of the same name.

'Eucalyptus,' which was to be the first pairing of Kidman and Crowe, collapsed in a heap last year after bickering among its leading lights.

Australian-born Rupert Murdoch's Fox Searchlight Pictures had put up the money for Eucalyptus. Crowe and Kidman had signed contracts restricting them to a maximum 500,000 US dollars each for the film.

Despite New Zealand-born Crowe promising that the film of Murray Bail's Outback novel would do for Australia what Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand, the 25-million US-dollar project was abandoned two days before shooting started.