Usually you read about movie directors when they are promoting a film that’s about to hit theaters. “Tell rhymes with sell,” as Luhrmann puts it. But Luhrmann has always been unusual. To varying degrees, all of his films have embraced romance and decadence, fantasy and ribaldry, the body and the bawdy. But each has attempted something new: a dance movie (“Strictly Ballroom”), a screenplay entirely in Elizabethan English (“William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet”), a musical (“Moulin Rouge”) and so on. Last fall, I proposed to Luhrmann that he give me a sense of what his life is like in the in-between time — the months of rebooting and reassessing, navel-gazing and nail-biting, that follow the birth of one film and precede the conception of another.

When I first reached him, he was in Los Angeles, taking meetings — “doing the dance,” he said — while finishing up the final weeks of “tearing around the world with my little child, ‘Gatsby.’ ” His 3-D adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” drew plenty of withering reviews, but it is by far his most profitable film. Made for about $105 million, it has taken in $350 million in worldwide box-office and millions more from the home market, which Luhrmann knows means opportunity. “I’m currently unemployed, but I have a few things up my sleeve,” he said during that first phone call. But still, this was an uncomfortable time. After such a “big, fat, financial hit,” he said, a director was supposed to “call it the way you want it, and we’ll give it to you.” But what did he want? He wasn’t sure. He suggested we meet at the Macdougal Street townhouse, where he and C.M. live most of the time with their children, Lillian and William, to discuss it.

Luhrmann loves New York. It soothes him, he said, “no matter how much pressure I’m under. It’s my favorite place in the world to live.” Sydney, Australia, where he and C. M. keep a grand estate they call the House of Iona, is lovely. But they are like rock stars there — Luhrmann directed four of the country’s 10 top-performing films (as measured by Australian box office). He’s grateful for that, yet it means that for him there is no disappearing in Sydney. In New York, by contrast, “you can walk into a random bar, order a sherry and talk to the barman or someone next to you, and you’ve had an engagement — an anonymous talk.” Walking around Manhattan “has a profound calming effect on me,” he says. “It’s almost narcotic.” He quotes a line from “Gatsby”: “ ‘I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.’ New York, to me, is like this giant party.”

Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue and a close friend of Luhrmann’s, told me that there’s something else that draws Luhrmann and C. M. to New York City. “Everyone here is pretty much from somewhere else, and you’re not judged on your background or your accent or where you went to school,” Wintour said. “You’re judged on your talent. There’s that sense here that almost anything is possible, and I think that’s what Baz and C. M. really respond to: the cultural mix, that sort of perfect chaos.”

But the chaos can wear a man out. “The Great Gatsby,” which took five years to write, produce and direct, left Luhrmann “just completely spent,” his wife said. “Like a wrung-out old sock.” The production was troubled first by financing issues and then by typhoon-like weather during the shoot in Australia, which doubled for Long Island because filming there was cheaper. Then came the blowback from critics, which Luhrmann expected all along. “Oh, they’re going to kill us,” he and Craig Pearce, his co-writer, said to each other while huddled together at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan, polishing the script. Luhrmann’s work has often been savaged by critics early on, only to have a lingering cultural effect — influencing fashion and street culture and other forms of entertainment — that the initial criticism never anticipated. “Romeo and Juliet” was widely panned in 1996 even as it made romantic leads of the fresh-faced Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and arguably began the pop-music-as-backbeat trend in film and television. As for “Moulin Rouge,” of the reviews of three films that ran in The New York Times the Friday it opened in 2001, Luhrmann’s was by far the most scathing (and one was of Jennifer Lopez’s “Angel Eyes”). “There is not a single moment of organic excitement,” the reviewer, Elvis Mitchell, wrote. Still, the film, which starred Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor as star-crossed lovers in Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris, was nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Picture (it won two, for art direction and costumes). The film’s success paved the way for “Chicago” the next year and countless other movie musicals since.

“In ‘Moulin Rouge,’ Luhrmann figured out a way for you to experience turn-of-the-century bohemianism as the radical impulse that it was, instead of something quaint,” said Owen Gleiberman, a critic at Entertainment Weekly who made news in 2009 by declaring that he was wrong to pan the film in 2001 (he criticized its rat-a-tat pacing and called its gaudy dance floor “a bad-trip version of Studio 54 crossed with the ‘Star Wars’ cantina”). On reflection, Gleiberman told me, he realized Luhrmann’s brilliance lay in the very thing that irritated him at first: an audacious willingness to shock the audience — alienate them, even — so as to make them long for sweetness. The film, Gleiberman said, “dares to create this landscape that is almost toxically cynical, and then it dives into that cynicism and pulls out love. It’s the great musical of our time.”