Luhrmann will then take some of his cast, which includes Paul Mercurio, Gia Carides, Bill Hunter, Barry Otto and Tara Morice, on a six-week world promotional tour.

The journey is just beginning.

Six years ago, Baz Luhrmann stood on a stage in Bratislava , Czechoslovakia, to accept a Best Direction award for - you guessed it -Strictly Ballroom at the World Youth Theatre Festival. The Strictly Ballroom road has been a long one. While there is now a hunger for this three-minute pop song of a film, Luhrmann admits to being weary.

“I’m very tired of it,” he said recently from Melbourne, where he was involved in post-production for a film clip from the soundtrack album. “The reason I really wanted to do the film was to finally put it to bed because when you make something that works ... it has a life of its own; you can’t really control it. I really wanted to put it into a final form, whereby at least I could say, ‘That’s it; I’m happy; it’s actually a full piece. It can be left alone.’ ”

Strictly Ballroom has been in Luhrmann’s life for nine years, since he and a group of fellow acting students at the National Institute of Dramatic Art(NIDA) created it as a second-year project. That group took the show to Bratislava in 1986, and Luhrmann trotted out another version for the Australian Bicentennial Authority’s Six Years Old independent theatre company- a project for which the director copped a fair amount of flak.

Luhrmann entered NIDA, Australia’s foremost acting school, in 1982 after landing a role opposite Judy Davis - one of NIDA’s famous graduates - in the film Winter of Our Dreams.

He had moved from his family home in the tiny timber town of Herons Creek, near Wauchope in NSW, and completed high school living in a flat in Sydney. “There was a degree of domestic turmoil in my family,” Luhrmann said of his move to the city.

Strictly Ballroom is a film of light, humour and hope. It bears little resemblance to the young man who walked around under a dark cloud in the old Kensington home of NIDA. According to fellow students, Luhrmann was at first a brooding figure. Early in their first year of the course - 1982 - an improvisational class was held. The young actors were asked to take on a variety of emotions. One, who could play “happy” with no problems, stood uncertainly to do “anger”. He summoned up thunderclouds and so on, and got through.

Soon after, Luhrmann took to the floor. Anger seemed to be his bag. He snaked around the room, stopping in front of classmates to abuse them in language most fruity, picking up verbal and physical tempo as he went. Finally, he lurched to the window and swung his fist into it, shattering the glass and badly cutting his hand and wrist. He was parcelled off to the Prince of Wales Hospital in an ambulance.

Nick Enright was the head of acting at NIDA when Luhrmann auditioned and was accepted. “I was terribly impressed by his determination and also by the kind of focus he had, which he has never lost,” Enright said. “He had a real sense of purpose.

“I was very fond of him, but my initial concern used to be that the very qualities that made him so remarkable were a little intimidating for people. You have a Scout leader sense of responsibility. I used to be concerned, but that evaporated. He developed a sense of play.”

Glenn Keenan, who studied with Luhrmann and helped create, and played, the lead role of Scott Hastings in the original Strictly, agreed about the intimidation. “He was a person with sharp edges ... I was probably naive, but it was like he could drag out a flick-knife at any time. In the early days (of NIDA), we were encouraged to be or find ourselves.”

It seems that Baz found Marlon Brando or James Dean. A little later, he found Baz.

Nell Schofield was aware of the character underneath. While they were accepted into NIDA in the same intake, the pair had formed the Bond Theatre Company after missing out on selection the previous year. “He was always intense, always dark and brooding, but he had a fabulous sense of humour if you could crack that kind of angry young man persona,” said Schofield, who now works as a reporter on the ABC’s Review program.

“It came through in his work ... the sense of comedy was highly developed. There was always a love of life, sequins and tutus. But he is absolutely, totally ambitious and determined. One of the wonderful things about him, and a reason why he is a good director, is that he is magnetic. The first time I met him, I was drawn like iron filings.”

Schofield said Luhrmann’s energy level appeared to have remained constantly high, while his humour was an important way of easing workplace tension. “He has a great laugh. It’s a scratching, mad thing seemingly drawn from another body. There’s the serious, serious, dedicated Baz, and this laugh that comes from another person inside him.”

The advice the young Baz received from Judy Davis before starting NIDA was”watch out, hang on to yourself”.

Luhrmann said: “I’m still fairly intense, but when you were young, you decided - I did, anyway - that whatever I did, I wanted everything I could get; I wanted to go as far as I could; I wanted to experience everything; eat every kind of food.

“NIDA is not a very real environment. It’s very intense itself. You’ve got all these creative young people; you’ve got everyone vying for different roles and all you eat, breathe and sleep is drama. I couldn’t deny I was intense.

“If I had my time again at NIDA, I think I’d try to enjoy myself more.”

And the broken window? “It was an impro, and we had to get angry. And I was a little angry at the time, about a whole lot of things. This was in the early years. I remember getting up in the improvisation and thinking, ‘If they want to see anger, I can do anger. I’ll really push it to the edge, but I won’t lose control.’ I don’t, to this day, think I lost control, except, when I hit the window, I didn’t pull my punch properly. It shattered my hand quite badly. Blood went everywhere, all over people. You can imagine a class full of actors... absolutely hysterical.”

Keenan noted that Luhrmann’s manner changed dramatically as they worked on the original half-hour Strictly Ballroom. He recalled being summoned to an upstairs rehearsal room after Baz had learnt that Keenan had been a ballroom dancing champion as a child.

Luhrmann had tried to sell his idea of a show based on the colour and bitchiness of the ballroom, but called on Keenan to do some number-crunching. The students were to vote on which projects they were interested in.

“Baz had tried to sell his idea to the class with a sort of cardboard sheet with a bit of tulle stuck on it and the words ‘Cha Cha’ emblazoned across,“Keenan said. “I think he was worried that he hadn’t won many people over.”

With a cast that included Keenan, Luhrmann, Schofield, Tony Poli (Phoenix), AFI award-winner Catherine McClements and Sonia Todd (Police Rescue ), the show came together inside its $50 budget.

Nick Enright said that Baz gravitated to the auteur position during the process.

“I was terribly impressed by the show,” he said. “It was an astonishing piece. It went for 32 minutes, I think. I remember ringing people (encouraging them to see it). It was, in many ways, the most remarkable piece of work we produced in all the years I was there.”

Luhrmann had established himself in his first theatrical family. He has since surrounded himself with people he works with regularly.

The family relationship was strained slightly after the glory of their Czechoslovakian performance. On their return, the other members of the group signed over the rights of the show to Luhrmann. They understood that the document allowed him to produce the show on stage and that they would receive a percentage of box office.

When word of the film project leaked, the group was concerned that they had not been advised, nor included in the process. A series of tense meetings followed between representatives of the group, the film’s producers and Luhrmann’s agent. Eventually, a deal was struck whereby the creators of the first production split $24,000 and would receive a small percentage of the producers’ net profit.

None of the original cast was in the film version. While some of them admitted that on a personal level it was hard to let go of the characters they had helped breathe life into, professionally they were used to accepting casting decisions.

Luhrmann admitted to being very unhappy about the “doing the deal” process. It was also difficult to take the project to another level without the first Strictly family. “They were a very special group of people ... it’s hard to use that word without sounding corny ... but they really were,” he said. “I was involved with one of them in a relationship, and others of that group were my very good friends, and it evolved out of that. In a sense, nothing has ever recaptured that ... although Cannes was amazing and Czechoslovakia was amazing, too ... but nothing ever recaptured the first moment of coming out on stage, the rush and feeling the magic of working together.”

Luhrmann played to perfection a daggy Catholic dancer in the original. Although the character was different, Barry Otto’s Doug Hastings was a similar creature, again beautifully realised in the film.

WHILE Luhrmann was at pains to acknowledge the contributions of the originals, he also pointed to the work of the Six Years Old cast (Tara Morice from that company was in the film, while fellow actor Craig Pearce co-wrote the screenplay), and the actors in the film. “Think of Pat Thompson (who died shortly after filming), Barry Otto ... Bill Hunter. We haven’t seen comic performances like this, in that style.”

Luhrmann’s immediate working family these days includes the film’s production designer Catherine Martin and associate production designer Bill Marron. They were involved in Luhrmann’s production of La Boheme for the Australian Opera. The production is being revived in September.

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Luhrmann has the ability to polarise. Among the sea of tributes for Strictly, Time magazine panned the film, believing it to be unforgiveably shallow.

In Australia, there is already minor anti-Baz buzz in the industry. Luhrmann said that having been put into a high-profile position, he expected to be shot at. The bitchiness he portrays in Strictly Ballroom would not be out of place in a movie about the film industry.

For Luhrmann, though, that is not the chief failing of the Australian industry.

“The single shortcoming in the Australian film industry is the fact that we don’t allow the time to develop our texts. We do not take the time to evolve our scripts; to send it back and rework it, to workshop it, to rework it. Strictly had a life as a play. It then had two years of screenplay writing.

“Where Strictly is unique is it’s a totally Australian cast ... and I had to fight (for that) ... financed by an Australian company. Even Crocodile Dundee was (produced by) an American studio. It (Strictly Ballroom ) has sold to every country in the world and is in profit before it even opens.

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“We can make strong ideas here, with our own people and our own ideas and the world wants to buy them. All this bulls--t we’ve been getting for years that, ‘You’ve got to package for the market, you’ve gotta place it. Sure, I love it, but give me a girl with a big American accent in a bikini.’ That’s destroyed our industry.”

Baz Luhrmann will continue to work with his creative family. A result of that work has been a drawing together of his natural family, split for so long like the timber in Herons Creek.

“That’s a strange thing with Strictly Ballroom. I don’t want to sound too much like a voodoo man, but it has a strange magic.”