YOUTH IN REVOLT

How Isla Johnston became Baz Luhrmann's next movie heroine: Joan of Arc.

- Chloe Schama

HIGH STAKES Luhrmann's auditions for Jehanne d'Arc, which will start filming next year, were unlike anything Johnston, 18, had experienced. She wears a Loewe dress. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.

On an overcast afternoon in mid-September, Isla Johnston, the 18-year-old star of Baz Luhrmann's much-anticipated film based on the life of Joan of Arc, is wandering through The Met Cloisters. The museum—a 1930s amalgam of medieval monasteries and priories, transported to the far northern tip of Manhattan—is a fitting setting for her Vogue shoot. Luhrmann's films are steeped in history and famous for thrilling atemporal digressions—Shakespeare's Verona as a modern-day urban beachscape, raucous crowds in the Moulin Rouge stomping their feet to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

And yet as Johnston enters a 12th-century structure, lifted from a Cistercian abbey south of Bordeaux, the veil of history descends: The space seems to reverberate with the murmurs of Benedictine monks, the light filtering through the arched-stone window as it might have a millennia ago.

Luhrmann's Jehanne d'Arc (a working title; he intends to begin shooting next year) will tell one of the unlikeliest of hallowed stories: that of a 17-year-old girl from the French village of Domrémy, possessed by divine voices and visions that instructed her to do no less than save France. Since 1420, France had been under the claim of the English Crown; the enfeebled 26-year-old French heir—the future Charles VII—was in retreat, broken, and insecure. Orléans, a strategic city, had been besieged; it was Joan who broke the blockade in 1429, creating a turning point in the conflict and allowing the French monarchy to eventually regain control. Charles VII, Luhrmann told me, had been about to flee. “If that happened, we'd all be eating English sarnies in France,” he explained. “There'd be no more baguettes. Can you imagine that devastating reality?”