Edge of excess

 

Scenes from director Baz Luhrmann's latest movie The Great Gatsby. Photos Provided to China Daily

 

Baz Luhrmann promotes 'The Great Gatsby' in Beijing

The Great Gatsby brings an all-American tale of decadence, idealism and social upheaval that Chinese audiences may find familiar, Liu Wei reports.

What relates Chinese audiences today to characters in America's best novel of the 1920s?

Director Baz Luhrmann says the connection is the zeal for money. His 3-D extravaganza The Great Gatsby, adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, premiered in China on Aug 30.

The promotion tour to Beijing is Luhrmann's second time in 10 years. The tall buildings "literally shooting up to the sky" impressed him as one of the testimonies that the country is in an economic boom.

"I really love to see," he says, "on a mass level, what Chinese people actually think of America's greatest novel written in the time that pretty much reflects where China is now - in the sense that China has found an extraordinary moment of economic growth and changes, like what happened to the United States in the 1920s."

Luhrmann's picture closely follows the novel's plot, and has visualized the famous Fitzgerald narratives such as "men and girls came and went like moths among the whispering and the champagne and the stars" with exceptional taste.