My guest today 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.

You can buy or stream “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper here.

footnotes:
“One” by John Farnham
National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Cate Blanchett, and Mel Gibson
Ted Albert
Tara Morice and Craig Pearce

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My guest today is John Green. John is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of books including Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down, The Anthropocene Reviewed, and Everything is Tuberculosis. John and his brother Hank Green have co-created a lot of projects together, including their massive YouTube channel, ‘Vlogbrothers,’ and their podcast, Dear Hank and John. He also serves on the Board of Trustees for global health nonprofit Partners in Health. And when I asked John if there was a piece of music that changed his life, he knew the answer right away: “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Gerry and the Pacemakers.

footnotes:
The musical Carousel
The Mountain Goats, Will Oldham, and Loretta Lynn

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My guest today is director Rian Johnson, which is exciting for me, because I’ve been a huge fan of his ever since seeing his first feature film, Brick, in 2006. Since then, he’s made six more feature films, including Looper in 2012; Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017; the murder mystery Knives Out in 2019; and his most recent movie, another in the Knives Out series, Wake Up Dead Man, which is already out in theaters, and comes to Netflix on December 12. I talked to Rian about a piece of music that had a profound impact on him, which was the overture to Das Rheingold by Richard Wagner.

footnotes:
“Kill the Wabbit”
“La Traviata”
Focus Features
The Brothers Bloom
Opéra Bastille
Ring Cycle
J. R. R. Tolkien
J. J. Abrams
Terrence Malick
Nathan Johnson
Bayreuth Festival Theatre
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross

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