In an interview today with The Hollywood Reporter, Baz Lurhmann is not only refusing to admit that Australia was a flop, but he's talking up his next project, an adaptation of the American classic The Great Gatsby. Not only will he tackle the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel as his next project, but it'll come a lot sooner than it took Australia to make it to theaters.

"People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and 'The Great Gatsby' can provide that explanation," Luhrmann said about the timeliness of the project. "If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money,' they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time they'd be willing to."

We've already seen an adaptation of The Great Gatsby, of course, back in 1974 starring Robert Redford. But Luhrmann is right that the movie is due to be revisited; the scale of wealth in the last decade has reached levels that might have even made Gatsby blush, and with the way the economy is headed, the story might have the same melancholy resonance that the novel did at the end of the Roaring 20's. It's still probably going to be damn near impossible to cast, and Luhrmann might not be the storyteller he used to be, but it's still an experiment I'd like to see tried. After all, if the movie doesn't work, we'll always have the novel to love.