THE RINGMASTER.(director Baz Luhrmann)

The Australian director Baz Luhrmann is an impresario of himself; inevitably, for a protean talent, he is known by many names. At the entrance to his temporary base of operations, in a wood-beamed loft on Wooster Street, in New York, he lists himself as "C von G." It's an abbreviation for Count von Groovy, a nickname conferred on Luhrmann by his cohorts, in acknowledgment of both his sometimes grandiose pursuit of the extraordinary and his image as a swami of style. His more common moniker, "Baz," which Luhrmann, who is forty, started using in the seventies--he was christened Mark--is also intended to add a defiant lustre to a lifetime of self-invention. "I imagined I needed a fabulous name, an exotic name," he explains. "I was always theatrical. I was mythologizing my own existence from the age of ten." His long-time associate director, David Crooks, agrees. "He likes to see himself as a sort of director cum rock star," he says. "He is the consummate actor. It's very rare that he just takes off all his facades."

Luhrmann has been in town to oversee a production of Puccini's "La Boheme," which he first staged twelve years ago, at the Sydney Opera House, for sixteen thousand dollars, and which will open December 8th, in a six-and-a-half-million-dollar Broadway version. His company Bazmark Inq--which has its headquarters in a rambling Victorian mansion known as the House of Iona, in Sydney's seedy Kings Cross area--employs about twenty people, including an archivist, but Luhrmann is the source from which the energy flows. He is the visionary, the director, the huckster who pitches the product. "He is the fire," says Luhrmann's wife and partner, Catherine Martin, whose job it is to give his imaginings material form. (Last year, she won two Academy Awards, for the costumes and for the set design of his film "Moulin Rouge.") Luhrmann, who has a leading man's good looks and a mane of carefully layered and tinted hair, claims to see "no separation between work and life." For the last thirteen years, he has contrived to be always either in rehearsal, in production, or on the publicity trail. "Work is the prayer," he says. He is, first and foremost, an entrepreneur of astonishment. "It's not enough that you move through the world--you must change it to suit your expectation," he says. The root of his romanticism, he adds, is "a belief that things are better, more incredible, more wonderful than they actually are."

Over the last decade, Luhrmann has produced three flamboyant films that turned into box-office hits: "Strictly Ballroom," "Romeo + Juliet," and "Moulin Rouge." His movies are distinctive for both their speed and their sharpness. He says, "You've got to create some sort of experience where the audience goes, 'Gee, I feel aggressed, oppressed, but I'm excited.' It cannot be passive." He adds, "Stories never change. The way we tell them must change, so that we can reenliven the ears and the eyes of the audience." So far, his audiences have been outspoken. "Strictly Ballroom," which is reported to be one of the Pope's favorite movies, merges the David and Goliath and Ugly Duckling myths in a high-spirited and genial musical about competitive dancing. Luhrmann's deconstruction of Shakespeare, which updates "Romeo and Juliet" to the Miami gang wars, was controversial but won high praise from such actors as Sir Alec Guinness, who admired its "powerful visual imagery." Luhrmann hit rougher water with "Moulin Rouge," his attempt to reinvent the Hollywood musical; the film is an acrylic version of the fin de siecle in Paris, souped up with cartoonish characters and an eclectic pop score. The response, as noisy as the movie's soundtrack, was divided about evenly between those who called it genius and those who called it a mess. Collectively, the films, which Luhrmann refers to as "tweeners," for their ability to appeal to the art house and the multiplex, have grossed three hundred and forty-three million dollars, and they were recently released in a DVD boxed set as "The Red Curtain Trilogy"--a reference to the theatricality of Luhrmann's cinematic language. He has also moonlighted as guest editor of Australian Vogue. In 1999, he produced the spoken-word single "Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)," which went platinum in the United States and Britain. And in 2003 he will embark on what he calls his "next big gesture": a film of the life of Alexander the Great.

Bazmark Inq, which Luhrmann founded in 1997, is a sort of artistic holding company for his overheated imagination, with divisions for film, live entertainment, music, and publishing. The company's office is a hive of workers with whom Luhrmann has "a chemical connection," and whose storytelling talents maximize the impact of his work. Bazmark's coat of arms--an emu and a kangaroo--signals a certain lightness of spirit. Its motto--"A life lived in fear is a life half-lived"--broadcasts daring. Part Barnum and part Diaghilev, Luhrmann is also something of an imperialist. He controls the look of every poster, every sign, every piece of information connected to each of his shows, because, as he says, "you're already in the show, even before you've bought a ticket." In the age of the multinational corporation, he aspires to go beyond ...