Great Gatsby with DiCaprio to open Cannes 2013

The sixth film version of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is to open the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, organisers announced Tuesday. The film will be screened out of competition on 15 May.

The film’s director, Baz Luhrman, said he was thrilled to return to what is widely regarded as the world’s top film festival.

This year’s is the 66th Cannes Film Festival and Hollywood blockbuster builder Stephen Spielberg will head the jury, which announces its awards on 26 May.

Luhrman has previously won two awards, for Strictly Ballroom in 1992 and Moulin Rouge! in 2001.

"F Scott Fitzgerald wrote some of the most poignant and beautiful passages of his extraordinary novel just a short distance away, at a villa outside Saint Raphael," he said in a statement.

Luhrman scripted the film along with long-time collaborator Craig Peace and it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Tobey Maguire.

It will be shown in 3D, the second such showing at Cannes after the animated movie Up in 2009.

Set on the US East Coast in the 1920s, Gatsby stars DiCaprio as Fitzgerald's mysterious millionaire, battling to win the heart of a girl he courted in his youth.

Previous film versions of The Great Gatsby:

• 1926 by Herbert Brenon, a silent version starring Warner Baxter, Lois Wilson and William Powell, which is now lost;
• 1949 by Elliott Nugent, starring Alan Ladd, Betty Field and Shelley Winters;
• 1974 by Jack Clayton, starring Sam Waterston, Mia Farrow and Robert Redford with a script by Francis Ford Coppola;
• 2000 by Robert Markowitz, a made-for-TV movie starring Toby Stephens, Paul Rudd, and Mira Sorvino;
• 2002 by Christopher Scott Cherot, a contemporary-set adaptation, known simply as G, starring Richard T Jones, Blair Underwood and Chenoa Maxwell.