Filming of Australia starts in Darwin 

The US Navy is likely to cause more trouble on the night streets of Darwin than the set and crew of the epic film Australia, says director Baz Luhrmann.

Speaking on Darwin wharf, where four days of filming of the movie starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman will begin on Monday, Luhrmann said his team started at four every morning.

"We're lucky to finish at seven, and then you need an hour to do wrap down and reboot. You've got to be in bed by 9 O'clock and then you go again.

"It's pretty relentless. You'd have more trouble from the US Navy than from ourselves I think."

But the engaging director of such box office triumphs as Moulin Rouge, Romeo and Juliet, and Strictly Ballroom had a disclaimer.

"The crew have been incredibly exhausted so last night I would like to go on record and just apologise to the local nightclubs (in Bowen) because I think there might have been just a little bit of loosy goosy and having a good time shall we say," he said.

The tiny Queensland town of Bowen is `playing' most of Darwin in the movie.

"But we've done the ins and outs, the beginnings and ends in Darwin," Luhrmann said.

These include a dramatic scene with a little Aboriginal boy on the stairs leading to the wharf, the arrival and departure of Kidman and a rescue scene which takes place under the wharf.

The outback epic centres on Lady Sarah, played by Kidman, who becomes the proprietor of a cattle station before World War II.

She enlists the help of a "rough-hewn" drover, Jackman, in a fight against cattle barons who plot to take over her land.

The pair drive 2,000 heads of cattle across the Top End and get caught up in the Japanese bombing of Darwin.

Luhrmann agreed the film could be described as part Crocodile Dundee, part Gone With The Wind.

"They sold pretty good tickets, I like that," he said.

"The film is called Australia not because it's in Australia but it's a metaphor for ... a thing that comes from a far away place and in the 1930s the far away of the far away was the Northern
Territory.

"If you're talking about drama is the landscape, we've got it in spades."

Shooting so far had revealed a lush and exotic lifestyle, Luhrmann said.

"It was a little bit of Asia, a little bit of the Wild West, a little bit of Africa -  all mixed in creating a natural and truly unique environment.

"If Darwin was like that in the 1930s where was I?"

Luhrmann conceded that shooting in Darwin was four times as expensive as filming in a Sydney studio, but he said the film - if a huge hit - would be a tourist winner.

"It takes it to another level because it becomes globally mythologised," he said.

"If the film does play, if it's half good, I mean Lord of the Rings is the best example in the world ... the response as far as tourism was unprecedented and unimaginable."

NT Chief Minister Clare Martin agreed.

"The economic benefit we will get I think will far outweigh the ($220,000) we put in (as a sweetener)," she said.

"I think we got away cheap."