King Kong Composer: Baz Luhrmann Is Fearless

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby has been getting some mixed reviews from the critics, but one man who is a definite fan of the filmmaker is composer Marius de Vries.

De Vries, whose current production is the stage version of King Kong, worked with Lurhmann on his 1996 hit Romeo + Juliet.

“The experience of doing Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge with Baz was very influential,“ de Vries said in a recent interview on theMusic.com.au.

“He's got a wonderful musical imagination and fearlessness when it comes to things. I think we learned a lot from each other. It was thanks to him that I had the opportunity to get up to that sort of behaviour on the screen, as much as it is to Global Creatures that I'm getting the opportunity to do it on the stage. I'm always grateful.”

De Vries also praised the impact of having a modern electronic score on the King Kong production, particularly the contribution made by Aussie dance pioneers The Avalances.

"Some of them have been comprehensively scrambled and others have been made more widescreen. Sometimes we've kept a contemporary sonic language but kept the original orchestrations the same and sometimes we've really bent the songs to fit in.

“I think when one of your first gestures is created by an act like The Avalanches you know you're going to get stylistic collisions. They were among our first collaborators and they very much encouraged that."

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