Aussie Does It

It's 11 minutes or so of "Australia," delivered fresh from the actual Australia. The footage is from random scenes, personally cobbled together by Baz. (Everyone calls him Baz, rhymes with jazz.)

There's no dialogue, only an overdub of music that Baz picked off his playlist: There is the theme from "Gone With the Wind," followed by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's wistful Polynesian "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," followed by a lot of didgeridoo. It's Baz's first movie since "Moulin Rouge," the 2001 musical that also starred and more or less reinvented Nicole Kidman. Though it is not a musical, "Australia" evinces some of the "Moulin Rouge" meticulousness and theatricality, only it's more broadly epic, seemingly inspired by stuff like "Out of Africa" and "Oklahoma!" or "The African Queen" and an Indiana Jones movie, and what else? Everything else.

Right exactly on time, there's a soft knock on the door and Kidman enters and the publicist leaves.

"Oh, really? You saw part of it?" Kidman asks. "I haven't even seen that. How come I haven't seen that? What's in it?"

Lady, you're in it.

"What else?"

Well, it's a blur. Baz has described it as his single-handed attempt to revive "a moribund genre," the epic romance. There's lots of kissing. (Kissing Hugh Jackman. Hugh-completely-jacked, man, in the role of "the Drover," rockin' a tight henley undershirt, except when he's peeling it off.) There's kissing, and galloping, and sweating, and bombs exploding, and cattle stampeding, and people running for their lives. There are kangaroos, aborigines, and "Wizard of Oz" clips of Judy Garland clicking her ruby slippers.

She reacts in mock surprise, as though this is news: "Kissing and galloping! Oh, my. You could put all that on a poster, couldn't you? 'There's kissing and galloping and sweating and' -- what else did you have in there? That sounds like a movie I might like to go see."

She's wearing a tight black sweater with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, tight midnight-blue jeans and a chic version of combat boots. Up close, with only a little makeup on, she's Google Maps: freckled points of interest on translucent skin that shows off the circulatory traffic patterns. Her strawberry blond hair is almost gray-white where it rims her forehead and temples, with the rest piled atop and spilling down in peachy ringlets.

She orders a decaf cappuccino and curls into the couch. She flew in from London (from the set of "Nine," a movie version of the Tony-winning 1980s musical), made a stop in Tennessee and came to Los Angeles.

In a few hours she's supposed to give a speech at Elle's Women in Hollywood awards. She'll get gussied up (tight deep-green Prada cocktail dress with a jade necklace and shimmery pink pumps) and the hair will be made impossibly straight, presto-magico.

" 'Women in Hollywood,' what does that mean anymore?" she asks in her soft Australian lilt, mulling over the speech she has to give, but has yet to finish writing. "There is no Hollywood, really, right? It's this place you sometimes go to, but we don't even make movies here, mostly." (Tens of thousands of women in L.A. who are working their butts off in the film industry might beg to differ, but we get her drift.)