Bollywood great features in The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is an American classic. But that hasn’t stopped Australian director Baz Luhrmann from bringing his trademark style to the tale, set to a provocatively modern soundtrack.
Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan also plays a small part in the movie, as a shadowy organized crime figure who helps the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby make his money. With Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, the movie depicts the wild glamor and energy of Roaring Twenties America, while also evoking a “hollow” feeling at the heart of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s era-defining 1925 novel.
Gatsby has fascinated generations of filmmakers, from the silent era the Oscar-winning 1974 adaptation by Jack Clayton, with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in the main roles.
Luhrmann, director of several award winning movies, chose DiCaprio to play the sharply-dressed Gatsby in the latest version. “I think everyone has some sort of connection to Gatsby,” the 38-year-old actor said ahead of the film’s release in the United States today, a few days before it opens the 66th Cannes Film Festival in the south of France. “He is a character that has created himself according to his own imagination and dreams and has lifted himself from his own bootstraps as a poor youth in the Midwest and created this image that is the great Gatsby.
“It’s a truly American Story in that regard,” said DiCaprio, who so-stars in the movie with Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan and Joel Edgerton.
He was presenting the movie at New York’s Plaza Hotel, one of the film’s settings.
In his short novel, Fitzgerald used the character of the fabulously wealthy but mysterious Gatsby to portray America in the prosperous 1920s, before the shadow of the Great Depression began to loom.
“Here is this emerging democracy that is America in the 1920s and he wants to emulate the Rockefeller of that time period and of course creates his wealth in the underworld, but this is the new land that is America,” said DiCaprio.
Shot in Australia, Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is a sumptuous production that seems to follow Gatsby’s own rule for the parties he throws of constant excess.