“The expectations are enormous, and the pressure of that isn’t comfortable,” says Baz Luhrmann of Australia – his first film for seven years and a project that, extraordinarily, is even more ambitious than his last, Moulin Rouge! “Will this film be a success? I don’t know. Could it be that almighty mistake one is bound to do at some time? Possibly, but we’ll do everything we can to make it as good as we possibly can.”

Shooting from April to December 2007, Luhrmann’s vast epic stars a (pre-pregnancy) Nicole Kidman down under during WWII. The Aussie awards-botherer plays English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley, who is in Oz to sell inherited land the size of Belgium. But the kingdom of the kangaroo is a treacherous place, so to travel its barren landscape she finds herself accompanied by coarse cattle man Hugh Jackman. And hey, guess what? They fall in love.

Thing is, it’s not all African Queen by way of The Adventures Of Priscilla Queen Of The Desert mixed with There Will Be Blood. That’s because there’s Pearl Harbour as well – the travelling duo hurtling headfirst into Japan’s 1942 bombing of Darwin that took place months after planes had flattened the US strongpoint and gave Jerry Bruckheimer an idea for a quick buck. The US raid may have dwarfed Australia’s, but with more bombs being dropped in the latter attack its impact is indisputable – and Kidman is well aware of the film’s significance. “Last night I was crying in a dream and I think it was a bit of anxiety about finishing,” she said on the final day of shooting. “I am very ingratiated having done this film. I have wanted to do it since I was 14 and I didn’t know what it was, but I knew there was something.”

Veteran Aussie actor Jack Thompson plays bookkeeper Kipling Flynn and is also in no doubt as to the magnitude of Luhrmann’s latest. “Baz is attacking this film on a fabulous scale,” says the man who knows his way around big shoots, having played Anakin’s stepdad Cliegg Lars in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. “I was talking to Hugh Jackman and I said I was amazed at the scale of the production and that I thought it would be a landmark Australian film. He leaned over and whispered, ‘Yeah. And you know what? We’re in it!” Better than being in Crocodile Dundee In Los Angeles, right?