Moulin Rouge: La Goulue for the elasticity of its young dancers, both physically and morally; police officers made periodic checks to ensure that they were all wearing underwear. However, the poster by Jules Chéret advertising the club's delights, was relatively subdued, so the director Charles Zidler hired the young (only 27 years old) Toulouse-Lautrec to create a more vibrant poster. Although "Moulin Rouge: La Goulue" was Toulouse-Lautrec's first attempt at lithography, such was his grasp of the medium's possibilities that it was an immediate sensation. 3000 copies spread around Paris captivated the public with their eye-catching design, bold colors, and innovative, Japanese-inspired use of
Moulin Rouge! necessitated some pick-up shots being filmed in Madrid. In the liner notes to the film's Special Edition DVD, Luhrmann writes that "[the] whole stylistic premise has been to decode what the Moulin Rouge was to the audiences of 1899 and express that same thrill and excitement in a way to which contemporary movie-goers can relate." With that in mind, the film takes well-known popular music, mostly drawn from the MTV Generation, and anachronizes it into a tale set in a turn-of-the-century Paris cabaret. The movie also features editing that several critics compared to a music video, involving swirling camera motion,