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It takes a lot of heavy lifting to make a lavish party swing. On the day before The Great Gatsby opens this year's Cannes film festival, the nearby Carlton Hotel has been recast as a chaotic factory of harried PRs and industry factotums. An immaculate woman, all but blinded by the potted plant she is carrying, blunders haplessly through a platter of macaroons that has been left on the floor. The cakes go everywhere; the carpet is carnage. "Merde," exclaims the woman, but she barely breaks her stride.

If high-rolling Jay Gatsby had ever come to Cannes, he would surely have boarded at a joint like this, with its grand beehive domes and tranquil private beach. As it is, the corner suite goes to Baz Luhrmann, a faintly Gatsby-esque construct himself, who changed his name, fled his home and found wealth and fame as a Hollywood director. When I walk in, he is busily supervising the soundtrack that will play at the following night's red-carpet event. Rhapsody in Blue booms out of the laptop. "I just think the level needs to come up during the transition," he instructs his assistant.

This, it occurs, must be his default position. When it comes to Luhrmann, the level always goes up, the volume turned to 10 or above. His film credits include a jubilant Strictly Ballroom, an exuberant Romeo + Juliet, a cacophonous Moulin Rouge! and a galumphing Australia. For the fans, he is one of the most exciting, distinctive voices in world cinema, a gung-ho master of ceremonies who plays the movies as mad opera. But others view him differently. For non-believers, Luhrmann is a vandal, a philistine; the barbarian inside the gates, gorging himself on the free champagne. "The critical fallout is pretty much identical for all my films," he concedes. "It's not just mild disappointment. It's like I've committed a violent, heinous crime against a personal family member."

Baz Luhrmann: 'The critical fall-out is pretty much identical for all my films.' Photograph: George Pimentel/WireImage

This time around his victim is Gatsby, that gilded classic of American letters. Undeterred by the tale's vaunted reputation, the director goes at it free-style, kicking up sparks – and the sight is arresting. Where F Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 source novel gave us the world in a soap bubble, weightless and gorgeous, Luhrmann's Gatsby is more akin to a mirrorball, a spinning, fractured dazzle of wild revels and swooning courtships. Such is the endless noise and colour, in fact, that Leonardo DiCaprio does well to even make himself heard as the elusive title character – a romantic self-made prince, destined to run aground in the Valley of Ashes outside Manhattan.

The star last worked with Luhrmann in 1996, when he played another ill-starred lover in Romeo + Juliet. "Back then he was a boy with a Stradivarius," the director recalls. "He still has the Stradivarius. He's just learned how to play it."

Naturally, Luhrmann sympathises with the character of Jay Gatsby, who dreamed too big and was then brought low. But he also feels a kinship with the tragic Fitzgerald, who set out to write a beautiful, groundbreaking, modernist book and found himself flayed by the critics and hung out to dry. God knows, he can relate to that. He has just taken a cherished, 1920s-set story, hot-wired it with Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey songs, and is now braced for the brickbats.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Baz Luhrmann and Carey Mulligan on The Great Gatsby - video interviews guardian.co.uk

Not that he is one to make his apologies. Look, he says. Fitzgerald was a modernist writer and film is a modernist medium and that's the way it had to be. "And all of my choices – right, wrong or indifferent; all the eyeball-rolling and easy swipes – which by the way I'm used to … well, he also suffered from that. Fitzgerald was, in quotation marks, a clown, just like I am."

For all that, Luhrmann's clownish progress has carried him far. He was born humble Mark Anthony Luhrmann in the remote hamlet of Herons Creek in New South Wales, where his dad ran a filling station and programmed the local cinema. It seems safe to assume that the youthful Luhrmann was more drawn to the pictures than the petrol pumps. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. When tins of Lawrence of Arabia arrived at the cinema, you never forget that moment. And I distinctly remember seeing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which turned me on to Robert Redford and probably led to me the 70s version of Gatsby. But the other thing, just as important in its way, was the TV station. We only had one TV station, ABC, which was a version of the BBC, and to fill the schedule in the 1970s they dumped a lot of classic movies. So you'd have The Red Shoes one day and Citizen Kane the next. And they weren't going: 'The Red Shoes, what a fucking masterpiece.' They were just dropping it in as filler."

Baz Luhrmann with Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of The Great Gatsby. Photograph: Daniel Smith

Beyond the doors lay Herons Creek, dust-blown and desolate. The railway station closed for good in 1974. The apostrophe has been missing since time immemorial. I don't mean to talk down the director's hometown, but it sounds to me like the arse-end of nowhere.

"Fair comment," says Luhrmann. "Maybe it wasn't the arse-end of nowhere, but you're right, it was a tiny little town. Eleven houses. But it was an unusual upbringing. We lived on a gas station but my father insisted that we be educated. So we did ballroom dancing, we did scuba-diving. We had artists live with us, painters live with us. I mean, my father was a bit of a nut. Very obsessive, massive work ethic. And yes, if you're going to ask if I was that little boy in the cottage reaching out to the castle on the hill, then yes! Yes!" He pulls a face. "It's impossible for me not to sound pretentious in print. I'm not very good at doing faux-humble. It's a characteristic I should practise more. There are people who do it very well and are written about more kindly."

Does anybody still call him Mark? "Hmm," he says, momentarily stumped. "No. I mean, look, I know Bono and I know Sting. No one ever calls them Paul and Gordon. I changed my name by deed-poll when I was still at highschool."

Seriously? Whatever for? "Well, I got beaten up a lot because of my crazy hair. Basil Brush, you know? All I can say is that I got really put upon and the nickname was just a part of it. I don't know what possessed me to take upon the name that was the source of such derision, and try to claim it as my own." He marvels at his own hubris. "I changed my name by deed-poll when I was still at school. So I obviously had grandiose plans, even then."

Xan Brooks reviews The Great Gatsby Guardian

He initially dreamed of being an actor, studying drama at Sydney and bagging minor roles in Aussie soaps and second-league features. His directing debut, the semi-autobiographical Strictly Ballroom, spun out of a play he had written and staged in Sydney, became a break-out and sent him on his way. He tossed Shakespeare into a modern-day, thinly veiled Miami in the electrifying Romeo + Juliet and sent Nicole Kidman wafting, purring and simpering through bohemian Paris in Moulin Rouge! (the exclamation mark is Luhrmann's own). The epic Australia – a big cheesy cattle opera, piled with big skies and reeking of cow-sweat – remains his only major stumble.

"After Australia, I wanted to do something smaller and more manageable," he says ruefully. "And so I chose Gatsby – which really is not, although it is in one way. What is it they say? 'I love large parties. They are so very intimate.'"

Last September, Luhrmann turned 50. He has a wife and kids and celebrity friends whom he name-drops with gusto. He has films on the CV and presumably millions in the bank. His hair, for that matter, is no longer a brush. It is sleek and silver, like the pelt of some distinguished old otter. His grandiose, Gatsby-esque plans have largely come good. And that, I tell him, must feel pretty fine.

Luhrmann with Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio at the Cannes premiere. Photograph: Matt Baron/BEI/Rex Features

The director mulls this over. He crosses his legs one way, then crosses them the other. "Well," he says. "It's a bit like the scene in Strindberg's A Dream Play. There's this woman who's hoping for a green fishing net. She eventually gets it and is asked if it's good. She says: 'Oh, it's good, it's just not what I thought it would be.'" Abruptly he grins. "Come on – you know what it's like, you know how kids are. My idea of what I wanted was exactly the kind of Jay Gatsby life that a 15-year-old boy would imagine. I didn't imagine the levels of responsibility it would entail. I didn't imagine I'd be spending four years on a movie." He shakes his head. "Don't get me wrong. I'm not whining. Life is good. It's just not what I thought it would be."

Outside in the hall, the PRs are flitting, the security guards are jumpy and the macaroon crumbs have yet to be cleared from the carpet outside suite 123. Try as I might, I can't shake the Gatsby motif. I'm still hunting for the director's fatal flaw, some omen of ruin; Baz Luhrmann's version of the Valley of Ashes. The macaroon crumbs, on balance, will have to suffice.

The Great Gatsby is on general release.