Crowe barred from Luhrmann epic

Jun 4, 2006, 11:47 GMT

Actor/singer Russell Crowe. EPA/SERGIO DIONISIO

Sydney - Russell Crowe confirmed Sunday that Australian director Baz Luhrmann had scratched him from the epic romance that was to see the New Zealander play alongside fellow Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman.

It has been reported that Crowe's demand for a say in the script of a film that Luhrmann reckons could rival Gone with the Wind was what caused the falling out.

'Before I could tell them what I thought of the script, they'd moved on,' Crowe told Sydney's Sun-Herald. 'That's their choice.'

Last week a spokeswoman for Luhrmann told Sydney's Daily Telegraph that 'Baz doesn't publicly comment on his casting processes and currently he has made no final decision on the film, who is in it, or when and where it will be shot.'

Brokeback Mountain actor Heath Ledger is one tip to take the role that was to have gone to the Gladiator star.

'I trust that Baz will make the move he wants to make and that's absolutely the way it should be,' Crowe told the paper.

Last year the Moulin Rouge! director told the Daily Telegraph that Kidman and Crowe had agreed to take a 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.'

The epic romance, which was scheduled to start filming in Australia this year, 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.

Australians are hoping that the long-promised epic will fare better than Eucalyptus, the film project based on Murray Bail's 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. Crowe and Kidman had signed contracts restricting them to a maximum 500,000 US dollars each for the film.

Despite Crowe promising that the film would do for Australia what Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand, the 25-million-dollar project was abandoned two days before shooting started.