The pivotal role of Nick Carraway in Baz Luhrmann’s reimagining of “The Great Gatsby” is played by Tobey Maguire, who co-stars with one of his closest friends, Leonardo DiCaprio.

Maguire recalls, “I got a call from Leo and he said, ‘I just talked to Baz and he’s thinking about doing The Great Gatsby ... He was talking about me for Gatsby and you for Nick. He’s in town… What are you up to tonight?’ So, the three of us got together and hung out for a few hours, and then I picked up a copy of The Great Gatsby and read it for the first time.”

Based on the classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby” follows would-be writer Nick Carraway as he leaves the Midwest and comes to New York City in the spring of 1922, an era of loosening morals, glittering jazz, bootleg kings, and sky-rocketing stocks. Chasing his own American Dream, Nick lands next door to a mysterious, party-giving millionaire, Jay Gatsby, and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), and her philandering, blue-blooded husband, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). It is thus that Nick is drawn into the captivating world of the super rich, their illusions, loves and deceits. As Nick bears witness, within and without of the world he inhabits, he pens a tale of impossible love, incorruptible dreams and high-octane tragedy, and holds a mirror to our own modern times and struggles.

“Nick represents any person on a journey who’s searching for the right path. He’s sensitive, artistic…an observer,” says Maguire of his character.

“Nick is stuck between these two worlds, his allegiance to Daisy and Gatsby and this kind of wild ideal of love that they’ve got, and also this more traditional tie to Tom as Daisy’s husband, though he’s not the nicest guy in the world, nor the most trustworthy,” explains co-actor Joel Edgerton.

“Nick is the innocent who comes into this world and is changed—he becomes terribly affected by the world and by what happens,” notes co-screenwriter Craig Pearce.

In the end, tragedy strikes, and Nick’s proximity to, and involvement with, that tragedy—to Gatsby, the Buchanans, New York City, the parties, the speakeasies —it all causes him to crack-up. “He’s disgusted by everyone’s behavior,” Maguire says. “And this is a character who, in the beginning of the book, is described as someone who reserves all judgments. Essentially, he still wants to believe that people, at their core, are good, so it breaks his heart to learn that they are not. And I think his own culpability and indulgence with these people adds to his disgust.”

“I don’t know if Nick is the moral compass, but he’s definitely our moral conductor,” Luhrmann says. “I think he takes us through the moral landscape of the story, and by the end he’s ready to find out who he is and what he wants.”

“Early on, Tobey was searching for the real Nick and I think he made an incredible discovery,” says Luhrmann. “Much like Fitzgerald was, Nick is something of an outsider, an awkward goose, an honest but out-of-his-element Midwestern guy grappling with life in the East. And Tobey took the grand step of expressing that, at first, in somewhat comic turns, but then, as Nick breaks down and becomes psychologically distraught, so, too, does Tobey’s performance become more psychological until finally we meet, at the end of the film, the Nick that we met at the beginning, a totally destroyed human being, not comic at all. This progression was a very brave choice on Tobey’s part—his Nick moves deftly between comic outsider, observer, broken, and, finally, changed man.”

“Tobey does such an incredible job of portraying Nick,” concludes DiCaprio. “Here he is experiencing life, he’s with these people, but he’s reflecting because he really is an outsider. He never really belongs.”

Opening across the Philippines on May 17 in Digital 3D and regular format, “The Great Gatsby” will be distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

Director Baz Luhrmann says he knew all along which actor he'd like to play Jay Gatsby in his reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel, “The Great Gatsby” from Warner Bros. “Really, it wasn’t difficult to think of someone! Hmmm, I don’t know—complex, romantic, dark, glamorous, great actor…”

Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom Luhrmann had worked on “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” and whom Luhrmann counted as a friend and collaborator, was the obvious choice.

“I’d read the book in junior high school and I was very moved by the story,” says DiCaprio of the project. “When I picked up the novel again, it was when Baz had handed me a copy and said, ‘I’ve got the rights to this.’ It was a very daunting concept; there was a responsibility to make a memorable film that will be forever connected with one of the greatest novels of all time.”

At first, everything we know about Gatsby is drawn from “the bizarre accusations that flavored the conversations in his halls”—he is the fabulous but mysterious party-giver, the man who drifted “coolly out of nowhere to buy a palace on Long Island,” who opens the towering doors to that palace each and every weekend to anyone and everyone, but who no one has actually met. That is, until he invites his new neighbor and the narrator of the story, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), to one of his lavish parties. This begins a chain of events through which Gatsby will ultimately reveal and be ruined by his romantic obsession, Nick’s cousin, “the golden girl” Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan).

“What is eventually revealed is that Gatsby grew up poor. When he was younger, Gatsby had this grand vision for his life. And then, one day, he happens to fall in love with this girl, Daisy,” says Luhrmann. “He’d known other women, so he thought he might just take what he could get from her and go off to the war, and that it’d be nothing. But she’s this extraordinary girl and he gets hooked. He goes away to the war, and she promised to wait for his return, but then the rich and powerful Tom Buchanan sweeps in and steals her away. Gatsby loses his girl, comes back from the war penniless, and so begins his quest to erase and then repeat the past more in line with that grand vision he has always had for himself.”

Gatsby hopes to win Daisy back by “making something of himself.” His entire existence—the ostentatious mansion, the extravagant parties, the library full of books he’s never read, the hundreds of silk shirts he’s never worn, the flashy fast car—is an accumulation for which he cares not, but with which he intends to recapture Daisy’s heart.

“Gatsby is an incredible character to play,” acknowledges DiCaprio. “I think he’s very much the manifestation of the American dream, of imagining who you can become… and he does it all for the love of a woman. But even that is open to interpretation: Is Daisy just the manifestation of his dreams? Or is he really in love with this woman? I think that he’s a hopeless romantic but he’s also an incredibly empty individual searching for something to fill a void in his life.”

DiCaprio sought to bring new depth and an arresting darkness to his version of Gatsby—a version closer to the character in the novel. “When James West first saw footage of Leonardo as Gatsby, he said, ‘Now, this is Gatsby, Gatsby’s dark obsession, his absolutism,’” says Luhrmann, who adds, “He’s the Gatsby who will not let anyone rewrite the script he has written for his life.’”

Although Gatsby is a tragic figure, his “incorruptible dream” and his commitment to that dream, are what ultimately make him inspiring, “worth the whole damn bunch put together” in Nick’s eyes. “Nick realizes that Gatsby, for all his flaws, is ‘great’ because Jay Gatsby has a gift for hope that is unparalleled; even if it is ultimately out of reach or doomed, his purpose is pure and real,” says co-screenwriter Craig Pearce.

“Characters like Gatsby are inherently wedded to tragedy,” Luhrmann observes. “What they seek to attain is unattainable. And they don’t change. We know that Fitzgerald was a fan of Joseph Conrad’s `Heart of Darkness' (1899), which has that Orpheus-like structure where an innocent journeys into the underworld and meets an iconic figure; the iconic figure, in the case of Gatsby, doesn’t transform, he lives and dies with ‘Daisy’ on his lips. In the process though, he inspires us mere mortals to be better, to transform ourselves, to look for a purposeful life. And Nick does. Nick begins the story turning his back on his artistic inclinations in order to focus on making money on Wall Street, but ultimately comes to the realization, through finally writing a story about this guy Gatsby, that he, too, must pursue a meaningful and purposeful life, as Gatsby did.”

And what is it that Nick gives to Gatsby?

“I think Nick is Gatsby’s only real friend in this world,” says DiCaprio. “And that’s shocking to Gatsby… he has no real friends. Nick is the one guy who actually takes an interest in him as an individual, and not as this sort of mega rich spectacle that is ‘Gatsby.’”

Opening across the Philippines on May 17 in Digital 3D and regular format, “The Great Gatsby” will be distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

Australian actor Joel Edgerton (“Zero Dark Thirty,” “Warrior”) stars as Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s (Carey Mulligan) husband, and therefore Jay Gatsby's (Leonardo DiCaprio) rival, in Baz Luhrmann's new big screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby.”

“Tom is the bad guy, he’s a bully, he’s very destructive and he’s also super rich and entitled,” comments Joel Edgerton on his character. “It’s my job to present that, but it’s also my job to present Tom as a real person and not to judge him.

“I know from reading a lot about Fitzgerald that he kind of hated guys like Tom; he’s a guy who embodies the ultra-wealthy kind of characters of that era, and he is married to a woman who actually had a chance at love with someone who didn’t have that money. Instead, she chose Tom,” marvels Edgerton. “I’m fascinated by that. I understand that there’s a love there, but there’s also something deeper about the culture of money.”

“The Great Gatsby” follows would-be writer Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) as he leaves the Midwest and comes to New York City in the spring of 1922, an era of loosening morals, glittering jazz, bootleg kings, and sky-rocketing stocks. Chasing his own American Dream, Nick lands next door to a mysterious, party-giving millionaire, Jay Gatsby, and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy, and her philandering, blue-blooded husband, Tom Buchanan. It is thus that Nick is drawn into the captivating world of the super rich, their illusions, loves and deceits. As Nick bears witness, within and without of the world he inhabits, he pens a tale of impossible love, incorruptible dreams and high-octane tragedy, and holds a mirror to our own modern times and struggles.

Despite Daisy’s unhappiness, co-star Carey Mulligan points out that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to her relationship with Tom. “Daisy and Tom have such a great dynamic. When they walk into a room, they know they are the most powerful people there because of their wealth and status,” she says. “There is a reason they are together and a reason that they were, at one point, really in love. So, that’s what we had fun playing with. I think it’s really easy to make them an unhappy couple, but they’re not necessarily.”

Luhrmann found the part of Tom difficult to cast. “Honestly, all sorts of actors wanted to play that role, but finding exactly the right quality was really hard,” he says. “Joel is a talented young Aussie guy, and he was coming in to read for Tom Buchanan, but I cannot say that I thought at the time, ‘Well, that’ll be a slam-dunk.’ But from the moment Joel walked in until the moment he left, he was Tom Buchanan.”

Edgerton was so immersed in his character that he continued using his upper-class American accent on set, long after the cameras stopped rolling. Luhrmann recalls, “I forgot what Joel Edgerton—the guy who has the Aussie accent that I know well—sounded like, and I really think it would be very hard to find anyone who won’t see the Tom Buchanan that is on the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s `The Great Gatsby' in the interpretation that Joel found, because he’s boorish and you love to hate him. But he has his own kind of moral universe. And to that he is faithful. As Nick says, ‘I couldn't forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.’ It’s both complex and entertaining.”

“Fitzgerald said Tom Buchanan was one of the best characters he ever created,” adds producer Doug Wick. “Joel owns it all. He owns the bigotry, he owns the energy, and he makes him multi-dimensional. He did a brilliant interpretation.”

Opening across the Philippines on May 17 in Digital 3D and regular format, “The Great Gatsby” will be distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

She wowed critics and audiences with terrific performances in “An Education,” “Drive,” “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” and “Shame.” Now, Carey Mulligan adds another strong female character in her repertoire as he plays Daisy Buchanan in Warner Bros.' heart-stopping romantic drama, “The Great Gatsby.”

Daisy is the phantasmal object of Jay Gatsby’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) obsessions, ethereal and completely captivating, especially her voice, “the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again,” as author F. Scott Fitzgerald describes her in the novel from which the film was based.

Daisy is Gatsby’s “green light,” his “enchanted object” beckoning from across the bay, but forever out of reach, “high in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl…”

“The Great Gatsby” follows would-be writer Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) as he leaves the Midwest and comes to New York City in the spring of 1922, an era of loosening morals, glittering jazz, bootleg kings, and sky-rocketing stocks. Chasing his own American Dream, Nick lands next door to a mysterious, party-giving millionaire, Jay Gatsby, and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy, and her philandering, blue-blooded husband, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). It is thus that Nick is drawn into the captivating world of the super rich, their illusions, loves and deceits. As Nick bears witness, within and without of the world he inhabits, he pens a tale of impossible love, incorruptible dreams and high-octane tragedy, and holds a mirror to our own modern times and struggles.

Carey Mulligan offers, “The main thing about Daisy is her duality. She wants to be protected and safe and live in a certain way. But, at the same time, she wants epic romance. She’s just swayed by whatever is the strongest and most appealing thing. She’s not a grounded person or a genuine person, in a way.”

When we first meet Daisy, she is at a somewhat melancholic juncture in her life. Once a much-admired Southern belle, she’s still very charming and beautiful, but she’s sadly aware that her husband is a serial and unapologetic philanderer, prone to “sprees.” It is thus, when Nick reintroduces her to Gatsby, her lost love of five years ago, that she is tempted into a return to the past.

Director Baz Luhrmann took his time to find the right actress for the part. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that every actor you can imagine was keen to play that part; it’s one of the great, iconic roles. So we found ourselves in somewhat of a ‘Gone with the Wind’ situation, where we were exploring all the possibilities, not so much as auditions but as little rehearsals.”

“We did a big, wide net of a search for Daisy, which is the old-fashioned Hollywood way,” echoes producer Lucy Fisher.

“Leonardo was a constant partner in this search,” says Luhrmann, who immediately solicited his reaction after Mulligan read for the part. “Leo said the most brilliant thing: ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about it… Gatsby has had a lot of very beautiful women thrown at him. Carey’s very beautiful, but she’s also very unusual. Daisy needs to be sort of precious and unique and something that Gatsby wants to protect. Something that he’s never experienced before.’ We looked at each other and said, ‘It’s her.’”

“We knew we’d found our Daisy Buchanan,” DiCaprio recalls of that moment. “Daisy is such an incredibly important character in the film. She has to be a combination of the beautiful innocence that Jay sees in her, but she also has to have that whimsical carelessness. It takes not only a very intelligent actress, but also someone who can do both of these things simultaneously.”

It turns out that Mulligan was equally impressed by DiCaprio. “I remember the first audition that I had,” she says. “We were doing a scene right towards the end of the film, and Leonardo was playing Gatsby, and he was playing Tom Buchanan, and Nick Carraway. So, he’d sit in one chair and play his character, then he’d jump in another chair and play Tom, and then be standing up and he’d be Nick. He was learning all the different lines. He was incredible.”

Mulligan portrays Daisy as complex, more than just a vacuous heroine. “I think that when Daisy says something, she really means it, but five minutes later she might not mean it at all,” Mulligan observes. “She’s almost living in a movie in her own life, looking in on herself, which makes for a rather thin personality that was probably typical of women in her circumstances, and interesting for me to play.”

Opening across the Philippines on May 17 in Digital 3D and regular format, “The Great Gatsby” will be distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

“The Great Gatsby” writer/producer/director Baz Luhrmann and collaborators Shawn “JAY Z” Carter, an executive producer on the film, and Anton Monsted, its executive music supervisor, revealed the lineup for the movie’s soundtrack which encompasses the broad spectrum of musical styles represented in this energetic re-telling of the classic text. The joint announcement was made recently by Warner Bros. Pictures and Universal Music Group’s Interscope Records.

Drawing on his unique and unrivalled position in popular culture, JAY Z (with collaborator and the film’s executive music consultant Jeymes Samuel) has worked with Luhrmann and his team on the project over the past two years, translating the Jazz Age sensibility of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel into the musical equivalents of our own times, through the blending of hip-hop, traditional jazz and other contemporary musical textures.

Luhrmann stated, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is peppered with contemporary music references specific to the story’s setting of 1922. While we acknowledge, as Fitzgerald phrased it, ‘the Jazz Age,’ and this is the period represented on screen, we—our audience—are living in the ‘hip-hop age’ and want our viewers to feel the impact of modern-day music the way Fitzgerald did for the readers of his novel at the time of its publication.”

“The Great Gatsby is that classic American story of one’s introduction to extravagance, decadence and illusion. It’s ripe for experimentation and ready to be interpreted with a modern twist. The imagination Baz brought to ‘Moulin Rouge!’ made it a masterpiece, and ‘Romeo + Juliet’s’ score wasn’t just in the background; the music became a character. This film’s vision and direction has all the makings of an epic experience,” JAY Z said in a previous statement.

JAY Z’s own “No Church in the Wild,” which he was recording when he and Luhrmann first came together, is included in the film, along with his original “100$ Bill.” The first single to drop will be the hauntingly melodious track “Young and Beautiful,” from recent Brit Award winner for Best International Female Solo Artist, Lana Del Rey; the music video and song release are scheduled for April 22nd and April 23rd, respectively. Del Rey collaborated with Luhrmann in creating the song.

Del Rey said, “It was an honor to work with Baz Lurhmann on his amazing adaptation of one of the most extraordinary books ever written. The movie is highly glamorous and exciting; Rick Nowels and I were thrilled to write the song for the film.”

Luhrmann also worked personally alongside good friends and collaborators Florence Welch, of Florence + The Machine, and The xx.

The highly eclectic soundtrack also features songs performed by such artists as Beyoncé x André 3000; Fergie + Q Tip + GoonRock; Coco O. of Quadron; Gotye; Nero; and Sia.

Moviegoers will also recognize a few favorites with a new twist, such as Jack White’s interpretation of U2’s “Love Is Blindness,” Beyoncé x André 3000 collaborating on Amy Winehouse’s “Back To Black,” and Bryan Ferry’s new take on a couple of classics: his own “Love Is The Drug,” and, with Emeli Sandé, Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love.” New songs by Florence + The Machine, Lana Del Rey, Nero, will.i.am and The xx were written for scenes in the film, and appear on the soundtrack.

The score is composed by Luhrmann’s regular collaborator, Craig Armstrong, who worked with the director on “Moulin Rouge!” and “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.”

Beginning May 7th, the album will be available at digital retailers (available for pre-order on April 23rd). Internationally, the soundtrack will be released in physical, digital, deluxe and standard formats on May 6th.

Both the standard album and the deluxe edition will be released worldwide by Interscope Records.

The full track list for “The Great Gatsby” standard soundtrack album is as follows:

1. 100$ Bill - JAY Z

2. Back To Black - Beyoncé x André 3000

3. Bang Bang - will.i.am

4. A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got) - Fergie + Q Tip + GoonRock

5. Young And Beautiful - Lana Del Rey

6. Love Is The Drug - Bryan Ferry with The Bryan Ferry Orchestra

7. Over The Love - Florence + The Machine

8. Where The Wind Blows - Coco O. of Quadron

9. Crazy in Love - Emeli Sandé and The Bryan Ferry Orchestra

10. Together – The xx

11. Hearts A Mess - Gotye

12. Love Is Blindness – Jack White

13. Into the Past - Nero

14. Kill and Run - Sia

The deluxe soundtrack will feature the above songs, plus three additional bonus tracks.

Opening across the Philippines on May 17, “The Great Gatsby” will be distributed in Digital 3D and regular format by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.