"D'you have any more gumleaf recordings?" Baz Luhrmann asks. The Australian director is tilted back in his chair, tie loose and feet up on a table of monitors and keyboards deep within the Fox Studios Australia lot in Sydney. With the help of three boho-looking members of his music team and a plastic action figure of Beethoven supervising from the windowsill, Luhrmann is scoring a scene in his hugely anticipated World War II epic, Australia. They pause on a shot of Hugh Jackman — who costars with Nicole Kidman — herding cattle in the outback, and begin to debate the availability of various aboriginal instruments. Luhrmann laughs wryly: "What, we can't just buy the whole gumleaf box set on iTunes?"

The group might be as cheery as a high school jam band, but the truth is the stakes are bloody high. Baz (rhymes with jazz, not Oz) has been working feverishly day and night to finish Australia in time for a Thanksgiving release. It's the director's first film since 2001's Moulin Rouge!, and at a reported cost of $100 million and counting, it looks to be Australia's most expensive ever. The national tourism board is basing an ambitious campaign on it (Luhrmann is directing a couple of tie-in commercials), and there are also those hopes and dreams of his countrymen to consider. "It's too much pressha, but my job is making shows, and it ain't over till it's over," Luhrmann tells me. "This is more than a movie for this country; it's a maximalist experience."

The 46-year-old Aussie is one of the only directors in the world who may never max out on maximalism. As the force behind such lavish spectacles as Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, and the ethereal Nicole Kidman TV ad for Chanel No. 5, Luhrmann has found new ways to tell old-fashioned stories, soaking celluloid in color, song, and dance. Australia — filmed on location in an unforgiving western region called the Kimberley — is the saga of an English aristocrat (Kidman) who ventures Down Under in the 1940s and falls for a rough-riding horseman (Jackman). As the country braces for the Japanese bombing of Darwin, a northern port stocked with Allied ships, Kidman and Jackman push cattle — and each other's libidos — on a perilous journey through no-man's-land. "Out of Africa was earnest, whereas ours is, I hope, fun, entertaining, and earnest," Luhrmann says. "People go, 'Can something be entertaining and earnest and fun?' Well...look at Barack Obama!"

With its aorta-red sunsets and vast nothingness, the Kimberley is a character in the movie — like Manhattan in a Woody Allen flick — and sometimes it played the villain: The temperature often broke 100 degrees on set (Kidman once fainted atop a horse) and the crew and actors were menaced by lethal snakes, crocodiles, and spiders. When there weren't dust storms, there were real storms, and at one point it rained so hard that the set flooded and had to be shut down for weeks. All of which only sharpened Luhrmann's focus. Jackman told me about a reshoot in which Luhrmann had him do one line 60 times. "Sometimes that might frustrate you as an actor, but somehow with Baz it doesn't," Jackman says. "He's a true believer, and there's an enthusiasm and genuine fervor and passion for what he's doing — and he demands that from everybody."