Baz Luhrmann almost couldn’t hear the music.
The “Moulin Rouge!” and “Elvis” auteur revealed to New York Magazine’s The Strategist that he was “terrified” he was losing his hearing in one ear. Thankfully, Luhrmann realized that an earplug had been attached to his eardrum.
“I’m an insomniac, and I fly all the time. The two most important things when I’m flying are blocking out sound and light,” Luhrmann said. “I used to use those standard earplugs. But recently, I had a very, very scary situation where I thought I lost my hearing in one ear. I was wearing children’s earplugs, and unbeknownst to me, one attached to my eardrum. I spent weeks terrified on tour. Everyone was feeding me lines and I was pretending to hear, but I couldn’t.”
He continued, “Turns out, the earplug was stuck on my eardrum. The surgeon who removed it shared a tip that rock-and-roll drummers do. You know that squishy stuff you use to put paintings up on walls? Drummers use that instead of earplugs. You place it in, it forms in your ear, it comes out really clean, and you throw it away. It’s a much safer and cleaner option for blocking sound out of your ear.”
Luhrmann recently shared that he was eyeing a science fiction project as his next feature.
“It’s not that I don’t like fantasy — it’s just [that] other people have already done it, and they’ve done it really well,” Luhrmann told People magazine. “They’ve got their own language. I’ve kind of found myself in the world of the musical and post-modern melodrama and a particular wavering story.”
He added, “Having said that, as I’ve gotten older, I’m thinking, ‘What would I do with science fiction?’ So I wouldn’t count it out.”
Luhrmann also previously told IndieWire that there will eventually be a “directors’ assembly” of the four-hour concert footage from the making of “Elvis” starring Austin Butler as the King of Rock ‘n Roll.
“I have gone on record now to say not today, not tomorrow, but at some point I would do [it],” Luhrmann said in November 2022. “Because Austin did his concerts full out. He did all the numbers. Austin just did it and it was an out of body experience to watch him do those full concerts, so one day I will cut those full concerts together.”
