Catherine Martin

AS BAZ LUHRMANN UNVEILS HIS LATEST LABOR OF LOVE, A REVOLUTIONARY STAGE PRODUCTION OF LA BOHEME, DONNA KARAN TALKS TO HIS NOT-SO-SECRET WEAPON, HIS PARTNER IN LIFE AND IN CRIME, CATHERINE MARTIN.

DONNA KARAN: Hello, Catherine!

CATHERINE MARTIN: Hi, Donna! How are you?

DK: I'm fine, thank you. What a pleasure to speak to you! So, first things first: Do you prefer Catherine or CM?

CM: I don't mind either way. Baz (Luhrmann, Martin's collaborator and director of Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge, and now La Boheme] started calling me CM, and it has just become my name. Only people who knew me prior to Baz call me Catherine. And sometimes my parents call me Catherine when I'm in trouble.

DK: [laughs) There's a funny coincidence--we each have fittings to do after this conversation, right? You for the costumes that will be worn in the San Francisco previews of La Boheme, which opens on Broadway in early December, and me for the two fashion shows I have coming up this week, for my spring and summer 2003 collections.

CM: Yes. We've brought all our La Boheme costumes over from Australia, and there are some very interesting things that have come out of those bags. I look at some of them and ask, 'What drug were they on when they made that?"

DK: [laughs) Catherine, I'm a huge, huge fan of yours. Often when I want to go to another space, I put on one of the movies that you contributed to: Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge [for which Martin won two Oscars]. So tell me, how did all this begin?

CM: Well, when I was a teenager I wanted to be a fashion designer. I was very rebellious--

DK: --How were you rebellious?

CM: Well, I didn't go to school.

DK: Oh, that is rebellious. I didn't go to school either. How did your parents react?

CM: [laughs] One day one of my French teachers, who was also a Ph.D. student of my father's, asked him if we'd been away in Europe because he hadn't seen me in school. I got into very big trouble. It was the year before my final year of high school. My parents took me to a psychiatrist and got him to say--because they wanted to keep me in school--that I'd had some sort of psychotic episode.

DK: You did--you wanted to be a fashion designer! [both laugh]

CM: Anyway, I went back to school for my final year and I did very well. But I knew I wanted to work in the fine arts, so I went to art school, and it was really hopeless, because I had no ideas. I'm really great when there's a collaboration or an inspiration or a starting point, but I was 17 in a room with nothing, and I found it very difficult.

DK: Just that blank piece of paper.

CM: Right. So I dropped Out of art school and worked for a small fashion design house in Sydney called Jaoquin. I made millions of pockets, did hundreds of French seams and hems. Then I heard a radio advertisement for a theater company that was looking for someone to design their show. I rang up, and I must have been the only person to call, because I got the position. I did a rather incompetent job, but I started thinking that I could do it for a living. I knew that at the National Institute of Dramatic Art [NIDA]--which is where Baz studied as an actor, and where Mel Gibson and Cate Blanchett also studied--there was a three-year course for set designers. To audition you had to pick one of three plays--The Royal Hunt of the Sun, American Buffalo, or The Taming of the Shrew--and design the set, build the models, and do some costume drawings. I picked American Buffalo. I remember having models of cowboys and Indians sitting in the seats as audience members. [laughs]

DK: You were bringing the stage into the audience--so by then your style was already germinating.

CM: Yes. I think I'd always been impressed by being immersed in themed environments. Maybe it was that my parents took me to Disneyland when I was six. [both laugh] I like the fact that you are helping the audience understand the story. Anyway, during my second year at NIDA, I met Angus Strathie, who ended up co-costume designing with me on Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge, and now on La Boheme.

DK: Do you co-set design, or do you work alone in that capacity?

CM: I've worked alone as a set designer, which is strange because my first love really is clothes. On Moulin Rouge I was originally going to do both things myself, but circumstances were such that it ended up being too much. It became apparent to me that I would need a creative partner who really knew where we were going. And that was certainly Angus. I always think two ideas are better than one.

DK: Speaking of partnerships, let's talk about the collaboration that led to your relationship with--

CM: --Mr. Luhrmann. [laughs] It was my second year at NIDA, and I had projects with a lot of different people. Baz had gotten a grant from the government--he'd already graduated--to do a bunch of bicentennial projects, so he was looking for contemporaries to design with. Angus and I met with him and I thought he was very interesting. We talked about a sort of environmental musical called Lake Lost. And then this other director named Jim Sharman, who directed The Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975] and Australian productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, was going to direct Jean Genet's The Screens. He wanted me to do the set, but I'd already agreed to work on Lake Lost with Baz. And I was going, "My career is over." [Karan laughs] How could I be so idiotic? But I said I'd do it for this guy, and I have to do it." So I went to Jim and said, "I can't do it. Why don't you get Angus to do your job, and I'll do Baz's?"