this story about “Elvis” director Baz Luhrmann first appeared in the “The Race Begins” issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
He started with Elvis as a metaphor and ended up looking at Elvis the man. At least that’s how Baz Luhrmann describes the trip with “Elvis,” his wacky semibiopic about the poor kid from Tupelo who shocked the world, became the king of rock ‘n’ roll, got it all, squandered it all on drugs, lethargy and bad movies, and every once in a while, I’d get it all back.
An over-the-top two-hour, 39-minute musical epic featuring Austin Butler’s bizarre recreation of Elvis Presley and Tom Hanks’ bizarre take on his brilliantly manipulative and predatory manager, Colonel Tom Parker, “Elvis” is big, bold, and silly. , messy and somewhat wonderful, taking liberties with the Elvis story but selling it so dramatically that it grossed $286 million in theaters after opening at the Cannes Film Festival.
As we began our Zoom interview, I couldn’t resist showing Luhrmann a large square of orange cloth.
I have to tell you that I am a little older than you and I saw Elvis in concert in 1976.
Nope! Where?
At the Anaheim Convention Center in Southern California. And my wife saw it before that, in 1973, and she sat in the front row and got the scarf from her. So what I’m holding in my hand is a real Elvis scarf.
For! God, ’73 would have been so interesting. That was the Hawaiian special, which was the last time he really looked cool. And then he’d turn it off, like, “I’m so tired of playing Elvis Presley.”
Yeah. When I saw it in ’76, it wasn’t a good show. But there was an incredible moment with the song “Fever”. It was Elvis for those three minutes, and then he was gone.
That’s why I end the film the way I do (with Elvis’ tremendous rendition of “Unchained Melody” from one of the final concerts before his death in 1977). The estate, everyone, tries to hide that footage. I really had to fight putting that up, because they’re like, “Oh my gosh, we want to kill those images.” I said, “No, no, you don’t understand. Yes, the body is corrupted. He is a disaster to reach the piano, he can barely stand up. But when she sings, she may sing the best thing she’s ever sung in her life.” And then he looks out at the audience and he smiles, and Austin smiles and we have Elvis.
Was Elvis’s music a presence in your life before this or was he just a guy on the radio and in bad movies?
I’ve been re-examining this. In my teens we lived in this small rural town in the middle of nowhere (Herons Creek, in New South Wales, Australia). And while he was making the movie, he was interested in Elvis as a canvas. He was more motivated like Shakespeare taking Richard II and exploring a bigger idea, or “Amadeus”; yes, it is about Salieri and Mozart and the presumption that Salieri made Mozart write the Requiem in order to kill him is absurd. But it allows you to explore the larger idea of jealousy. So that’s where I came from, that and Colonel Parker and Elvis as the sale and soul of America.
It was only after making the movie that I realized how he was with me my whole life in so many moments, whether it was when I was a kid doing ballroom dances in a rural town and asking the guy to play “Burning Love” because it could really cheer me up. to the people, or my grandmother doing the white jumpsuit for the Latin dance. And then I remembered that at the movie theater my dad ran, we always had an Elvis matinee. So I had a fandom, youthful, and then I put it away when I got into Bowie and Artaud and Brecht, because it wasn’t right to love Elvis if you were doing Bertolt Brecht.
You are interested in Elvis as a canvas, as a metaphor. And yet the movie is not going to work unless you can also show us Elvis as a person.
You’re right. And without Austin, I don’t think we would have made it. He lived Elvis 24/7 for two years. His work ethic was on another level and he found the humanity, empathy and inner life of Elvis, the shy, geeky and insecure boy who is very embarrassed when his father goes to jail, who lives in one of the few white houses. houses in the black community, but that he also has trucker sideburns and was fluent in fashion even before that word existed. He was intimidated and attacked, but he didn’t back down, he doubled down.
You double down on yourself, too: There are plenty of moments where you gleefully take liberties with the true events of Elvis’s life.
Mm-hmm. I moved time and place and did what we call compressions. Theater director Peter Brook wrote a book called “The Empty Space” where he said: “Look, if the pointy shoes of the 1840s in France make you feel anything, then change the shape of the shoe. You have to show what it feels like to be there.” Well, how did it feel to be there with Elvis? It’s hard to really imagine the terror he instilled in the older generation.
It’s funny because in Cannes, where your film premiered, I spent time with Riley Keough (the actress and daughter of Elvis’ only daughter, Lisa Marie). I asked her if she resented the way she changed the facts and she told me that she loved it because she treated her grandfather and her family with a lot of respect. He was crazy.
I got together with family early and then got away from them for a bit because of the pandemic. They couldn’t dictate anything, but (Elvis’s ex-wife) Priscilla, quite rightly, probably thought, “Well, Baz can be a little crazy. What is he going to do with our lives and how could this child do to my husband? Then we showed it to him, but the screening was while he was flying to Los Angeles. I went through some scary screenings, but it turned my stomach. When my plane landed I called the theater and a security guard was there. I said, “Priscilla left?” And the guard said, “No, she’s still there crying.”
I got an email a few hours later, and it was the best moment of the whole trip. She said, ‘I know I was hard on you,’ and then she went on and said other things I won’t share. It was a weight lift. And we all ended up in Memphis and we had a cookout in the back of Graceland. (laughs) Can you imagine being in the Jungle Room having a cocktail?
Read more of the Race Begins issue here.
