Pre-production on director Baz Luhrmann’s ambitious adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby is well underway, and Steve recently got an update on the $150 million 3D project from star Joel Edgerton. The Warrior star is set to play the role of Tom Buchanan alongside an A-List cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway and Carey Mulligan as Daisy. Edgerton revealed that filming begins in a couple of weeks in Australia and will continue through Christmas.  Hit the jump to read what Edgerton had to say about the film, including talk about a preparatory exploration workshop in New York.

Steve sat down with Edgerton to talk about his upcoming film Warrior, and when asked about The Great Gatsby the actor had this to say:

“I can tell you as much as I know about Gatsby.  We have been sort of in pre-production where we did a really great kind of exploration workshop in New York.  I’m off on Monday and back to Australia where everything is getting prepped and ready.  We are going to continue rehearsals and then we start shooting in a few weeks.  Then it is all systems go until Christmas.”

To call the project ambitious is a bit of an understatement. Luhrmann has a fairly huge budget, as well as 3D cameras, so it’ll be interesting to see what his take on the material looks like. For those who need a refresher, here’s a synopsis of Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel:

The exemplary novel of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgeralds’ third book, The Great Gatsby (1925), stands as the supreme achievement of his career. T. S. Eliot read it three times and saw it as the “first step” American fiction had taken since Henry James; H. L. Mencken praised “the charm and beauty of the writing,” as well as Fitzgerald’s sharp social sense; and Thomas Wolfe hailed it as Fitzgerald’s “best work” thus far. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when, The New York Times remarked, “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s that resonates with the power of myth. A novel of lyrical beauty yet brutal realism, of magic, romance, and mysticism, The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.