The man who redefined Gatsby But, insists Luhrmann: "Our film is more closely aligned to the book than the others were, and if Fitzgerald could coin the phrase 'The Jazz Age" then I thought I could blend hip-hop and jazz because we live in a hip‑hop age." He is anticipating further flak over his decision to film in 3D, although he believes that Fitzgerald himself would have approved. I know there will be a lot of jokes and comments about me just doing it to be flash, but I don't mind. I accept all that. Fitzgerald was a modernist; he was obsessed with cinema and was really into the movies. The 3D came about because I had an epiphany when I was watching Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder in 3D at Warner Bros. It wasn't things coming at me that was interesting, it was seeing Grace Kelly just moving around a room in 3D and the camera's not moving. I just wanted to reach out and touch her. I filmed in 3D because I thought it would be powerful and impressive. The idea of drama in 3D is thrilling. Does it have to be done in 3D? Does it play in 2D? Do I think it's a gimmick? No, I don't think 3D's a gimmick. When sound came along, they said that was a gimmick. He was struck with the idea of bringing his version of The Great Gatsby to the screen when he listened to an audio version of the book during a long and tedious journey on the Trans-Siberian railway more than a decade ago. "It struck me as such an entertaining, modern story," he recalls. It has this fantastic romance and the world of the bootlegger with flash and cash, but it also has violence and death and tragedy. Casting the role of Gatsby was easy. He had previously worked with Leonardo DiCaprio on 1996"s Romeo + Juliet and Luhrmann never had anyone else in mind. Someone complex, romantic, glamorous, a great actor - there was always only Leo. Casting the ethereal Daisy, the object of Gatsby's obsession, was very different. "The search for Daisy was like a Gone with the Wind search," he says. Every actor you can imagine wanted the role and every actor came in to audition. Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley were reportedly among those vying for it, but Carey Mulligan was the runaway choice. "After 10 seconds of her audition I said to Leo, 'Did you see what I just saw?" and he said, 'Well, I guess we've just seen the next acting phenomenon." " DiCaprio's longtime pal Tobey Maguire plays Nick Carraway, the story's narrator and Gatsby's neighbour. Daisy's bullying, philandering husband Tom was originally to be played by Ben Affleck, but when he dropped out to direct and star in Argo his place was taken by Joel Edgerton. Isla Fisher has a small part as Tom's mistress, Myrtle Wilson. Baz Luhrmann, who is 50, made his first movie, Strictly Ballroom, 20 years ago and since then has gained a reputation as a creative and innovative filmmaker with his visually stylised Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge! and the melodramatic Australia. He works in partnership with his wife of 15 years, Tony award-winning production designer Catherine Martin. She is content to remain in the background with their two children, aged nine and seven, while her husband does the talking. And talk he does. "I've never been able to give a short answer in my life," he warns when we meet at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Luhrmann freely drops names of friends and people he has worked with: composing songs with Burt Bacharach and Bernie Taupin; working on a screenplay with Francis Ford Coppola; how he was under a tree wearing a bucket on his head as protection from falling coconuts when he heard that Moulin Rouge! had been selected for the Cannes Film Festival: "It was a crazy blur of a circus." Then he launches into a story of how he gate-crashed a party thrown by film mogul Harvey Weinstein at London's Sanderson Hotel. "I ate all the sandwiches in the house and had free drinks all evening," he says happily. He also, he says, has had bouts of massive depression and, somewhat bizarrely, reveals that he has abstractly contemplated suicide. You can't get out of bed and you just go, 'What's the point? There's never going to be anything new. It just seems like darkness. What's the point of going on? But I'm stuck with hanging around because I have kids. I'm not going to go because I'm a coward; I look at blood and faint, so I think, 'How would I do it? Jumping? Oh no, I'd never have the bravery to do it. But I don't want to make too much of a drama of it because I assume everyone goes through it. On the brighter side, he is particularly cheered to have read in The New York Times that morning that The Great Gatsby paperback is the top-selling book on Amazon. "F Scott Fitzgerald will have sold more copies of that book in the past week than he sold in his entire lifetime," he says. How about that? Then another thought occurs to him. He wrote a lot of The Great Gatsby just outside Cannes while his wife was having an affair. Could he ever have imagined that 88 years later the book was going to be opening at the Cannes Film Festival? And in 3D. He laughs delightedly.