Michael Cieply

With Avatar, 3-D conquered the world. With The Great Gatsby, it may finally grow up.

In a daring test of both himself and the movie audience, Baz Luhrmann ? the Australian director of films like Australia and Moulin Rouge! ? is planning to release a star-packed, high-budget version of F. Scott Fitzgerald?s much-admired novel of the Jazz Age next Christmas. In it Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan is Daisy Buchanan and Tobey Maguire is the narrator, Nick Carraway.

In 3-D.

Luhrmann?s film will come three years after Avatar, a science-fiction epic directed by James Cameron, became the biggest hit in movie history, with $2.8 billion in worldwide ticket sales. Avatar proved that a new generation of 3-D technology could immerse viewers in a credible fantasy world, the fictional planet Pandora.

But The Great Gatsby, written by Luhrmann with his long-time collaborator Craig Pearce, will tell whether 3-D can actually serve actors as they struggle through a complex story set squarely inside the natural world.

If The Great Gatsby succeeds, it may open the door to a new generation of sophisticated movie dramas that will match the spectacle value of the animations (Happy Feet Two), action films (Underworld: Awakening) and elaborate fables (Hugo, The Adventures of Tintin) that now fill Hollywood?s 3-D release schedule. It might also supply what has been missing in the Oscar season ? the heat of a film that decisively breaks a barrier, like Gone With the Wind, the first all-colour best picture, or The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, perhaps the first Oscar winner to be anchored in its make-up and fantasy effects. ?The ?special effect? in this movie is seeing fine actors in the prime of their acting careers tearing each other apart,? Luhrmann explained in a telephone interview this week.

He spoke of using 3-D not to create thrilling vistas or coming-at-you threats, but rather to find a new intimacy in film. He referred particularly to a climactic scene in which Daisy?s husband, Tom Buchanan (played by Joel Edgerton), confronts DiCaprio?s Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza hotel, all in three dimensions.

?How do you make it feel like you?re inside the room?? he asked.

Luhrmann?s experiment will have to overcome the ambivalence of viewers who have yet to fully embrace 3-D technology, especially in North America. The success of Avatar notwithstanding, 3-D has faltered somewhat in high-profile efforts like Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Green Lantern, and studios have had to work hard to convince consumers that there is a real reason for it beyond Hollywood?s desire to charge higher prices. (Tintin and Hugo have done well in their 3-D versions.)

As a result, audiences have become increasingly picky about 3-D, although moviegoers overseas?where films can now make up to 70% of their profits ?have been more enamored of the technique because it is newer to them.

Luhrmann said that the idea of filming Gatsby, which he will release along with Warner Brothers and Village Roadshow, occurred to him about a decade ago. He had finished Moulin Rouge!, a flamboyant mash-up of musical cultures, and was traveling from Asia to Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railway with, by his description, ?some bottles of red Australian wine? and earphones.

On the earphones, Luhrmann said, were two recorded books. One was ?The Great Gatsby.? After listening for a day or two, he began to wonder why Fitzgerald?s novel, which he said he found ?exquisite,? had seemed to elude filmmakers, one after another.

Luhrmann had seen the 1974 version directed by Jack Clayton, in which Robert Redford played the lead. Mr. Redford ?was the coolest thing in the world,? he recalled. But the film, he said, didn?t really tell him ?who Gatsby was.?

In 1949 Alan Ladd played Gatsby, the socialite-ruffian, in a version directed by Elliott Nugent. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther said its problems were a ?weak script,? direction that seemed ?completely artificial and stiff,? and Ladd?s reversion to ?that stock character he usually plays.?

Luhrmann looked in vain for a print of the first cinematic Gatsby, a silent film directed by Herbert Brenon, with Warner Baxter as Gatsby. It was released in 1926, just a year after the novel was first published.

Motion Picture News was impressed. ?It?s a sophisticated story, told with first-rate lights and shadows,? wrote its reviewer, Laurence Reid.

Still, it has been left for Luhrmann to unlock the movie potential in a small book whose themes ? social climbing, Prohibition thuggery, faithless marriage and the self-conscious modernism of almost a century ago ? are squeezed into a compressed yet strangely operatic plot. (An opera there was, too, in 1999, commission by the Metropolitan Opera and composed by John Harbison.)

It was a lecture by Cameron, then working on Avatar, that persuaded Mr. Luhrmann 3-D might help him find what had been missing in Gatsby. To examine the potential of actors in 3-D without the gimmickry of contemporary action sequences, Luhrmann turned to Alfred Hitchcock?s 3-D version of Dial M for Murder, from 1954. It wasn?t easy. He found only two projectors, one in New York, one in Burbank, Calif., that could still play that film.

The sensation of moving through it with Ray Milland, Grace Kelly and Robert Cummings sealed the deal ? both for himself and for DiCaprio and the troupe, who also studied the Hitchcock film. Michael Lewis, chief executive of the 3-D technology provider RealD, said, ?This is the final stage in the maturing of the medium.?

Other filmmakers are pushing forward with grown-up dramas in three dimensions, but fewer than might be supposed, given the hoopla that surrounded Avatar when it was released in December 2009. Steven Soderbergh almost shot Contagion in 3-D, but pulled back when it proved difficult in tests to get close-ups and other critical shots. Cameron?s Titanic, a drama with considerably more action than Gatsby, will be rereleased in 3-D in April. RealD, which collaborated with the Royal Opera House on a 3-D version of Carmen, will follow up with Madama Butterfly in the next few months, Lewis said.

Adult interest in 3-D has ?settled into a very, very good place,? Dan Fellman, Warner?s president of domestic distribution, said. Mr. Fellman said he became sold on the potential of Mr. Luhrmann?s film?which was shot in Australia, with a budget of roughly $125 million before government rebates?after viewing scenes that took what he called an almost ?subliminal? approach to the medium.