TAKING CARE OF ELVIS
How Baz Luhrmann’s big-screen tribute to Elvis Presley, filmed on the Gold Coast, brought the King of Rock ’n’ Roll’s family to tears
It was the lobster roll that clinched it. Specifically, it was the lobster roll from Rick Shores – that soaring glass restaurant perched on the rocks at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast – that sealed the deal for Baz Luhrmann to film his epic, rock ’n’ roll fever dream, Elvis, in Queensland. Or at least that’s how Luhrmann tells (part of) the story behind his decision to bring his huge production crew, his stars like Austin Butler (Elvis Presley), Tom Hanks (Colonel Tom Parker) and Australian actor Olivia Dejonge (Priscilla Presley) to the place he and his wife, costume and set designer Catherine Martin, now both fondly call “The Goldie”.
I spoke to a relaxed Luhrmann just prior to the film’s debut at the Cannes Film Festival. The global buzz around his ambitious – what Luhrmann film isn’t? – homage to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll suggests Luhrmann’s Elvis is a solid-gold, hip-shaking hit.
Spanning 20 years of Presley’s life, the film has its Australian premiere on the Gold Coast tonight; the only place Luhrmann says he considered for the celebration: “We consider the Goldie our new home, half my tribe is still there, my two kids are still there, we still have a house there, half my team has houses there now; we’ve all fallen in love with it,” he says.
And it’s been quite the love story, a two-year affair beginning with a London wooing, sealed with the aforementioned lobster roll, and surviving, alongside the usual challenges of such grand-scale filmmaking, a global pandemic.
“We were living in New York, and the obvious place to shoot it was North Carolina because there’s good studios there, but it was just impossible because of the epic nature of the film, it’s just too big. So then we were thinking of going to Sydney to shoot it, but then Disney bought Fox so that was knocked out, and then I got an invitation to meet with Annastacia (Palaszczuk) who I did not know,” Luhrmann recalls of his eventual meeting, in April 2019, with the Queensland Premier.
“So I met with Annastacia and her team in London, and I thought this is a real go-getter of a person, because she was just so enthusiastic, as was her team, just out there selling Queensland to the world.
“They were telling everyone how great it was and one of her team said that the Gold Coast was the hipster capital of Australia and I was a bit like, ‘that’s not how I remember it’,” Luhrmann chuckles.
“So we Googled it and I thought ‘mmm’, and I said ‘I’m going to go down for a quick, investigative trip’. We went to Burleigh, and we went to Rick Shores for lunch, and I said to the friend I was with ‘Let’s just take our shoes off and go down to the water’. So we do that, and it’s so beautiful, and we have the lobster roll and it was … well, I think it was the Rick Shores lobster roll that basically sealed the deal,” he smiles.
And so, by March 2020, pre-production began at the Coast’s Village Roadshow studios – only to shut down when the film’s biggest star Tom Hanks, and his wife Rita Wilson, contracted Covid.
Unlike today, when news of a Covid diagnosis is largely met with a shrug and a “get some rest”, news of the couple’s diagnosis was met with global headlines.
“We honestly thought the film was over,” Luhrmann recalls. “We were living in a house on the river at Nerang; Catherine and I were here, our kids were here and Catherine’s parents were here, so we were very entrenched and then Tom and Rita got Covid.
“At the time Dr John Gerrard, who we
(Priscilla Presley) said that if Elvis was here, if he was watching he’d say ‘Hot damn!’
absolutely love by the way, was then the director (of infectious diseases) at the Gold Coast Hospital, and he turned up with Hazmat suits; Tom went back to the United States, and we thought it was probably all over.”
Gerrard is now the state’s chief health officer, and with his ongoing advice, alongside local and state government support, Hanks returned in September 2020 to continue filming.
“I know how painful and hard it was for people, and I really felt for everyone, but (from a shooting perspective) the fact that Queensland was pretty much locked off from the rest of Australia and the world meant that we could keep going. Overseas everything was shutting down, in London, everything just stopped – I mean, Batman stopped, but we were just so fortunate and grateful our show could go on.”
And what a show it is: Presley’s story is told through the eyes of his wily manager Parker; spans three decades, the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s; has some 90 costume changes for Butler; and covers several locations including Mississippi, Memphis, Tennessee, Las Vegas, and Hollywood – but all filmed at the Gold Coast’s studios and surrounds.
It also took Luhrmann deep into the heart of Presley himself, the director and his team spending several months before filming researching Presley’s life from his childhood in dirt-poor Tupelo, Mississippi, to his auspicious meeting with Parker, and the rock and rollercoaster ride his life took from that moment on.
“I first entered the Elvis world through the movies,” Luhrmann recalls.
“We grew up in a tiny town in NSW (Heron’s Creek, population in the 2016 census: 247) and for a time we ran the local cinema. We had Elvis matinees, so I saw those movies, but he kind of went out of my life, as I got more into artists like David Bowie, but as I got older I started to realise how great he was, what he actually did, what he represented, and how dangerous he was when he erupted in the ’50s. Because he was this cross-fertilisation of things. He grows up in one of the few white houses in the black community, so he loved that music, but he also loved white country music.
“His music was such a lightning rod in America. He was not political but he did his own thing, like playing the Memphis fairground on ‘coloured night’. They were going to put him in jail. He had a deep love of the black community, of gospel, and that made him very dangerous in some people’s eyes. He’s this poor white kid that grows up in a black community, like Eminem.
“Kids today might know him as a Halloween costume, you know, the whole white jumpsuit thing, but in the ’50s, he was the original punk rocker.”
Luhrmann travelled extensively on his search for the man behind the Presley myth, tracking down childhood pals like Sam Bell, Presley’s next-door neighbour in Tupelo, speaking to people who “knew him, really knew him”. He also spent time at Graceland, with the blessing of the Presley estate. All of this immersion, research, reading and meetings with people who knew Elvis before 19-year-old Presley’s first electrifying appearance in 1954 at the down-homey “Louisiana Hayride” theatre, where he shook the whole of America up – meant Luhrmann was well placed to authentically tell the story. He just had to find his Tom Parker. And his Elvis.
Harry Styles. Ansel Elgort. Miles Teller. When
news got out that Luhrmann was casting Elvis, it seemed like every young, up and coming or already established, hot young actor auditioned for the role. It was vital, Luhrmann knew, to get it right. It could not be an impersonation, like so many carbon-copy Elvises out there. It could not be a smoke and mirrors, shimmering mirage; all sequins and no soul. It had to be something deeper. Something magical. Something that if you closed your eyes made you believe that Elvis had entered the building. Something you couldn’t quite put your finger on but knew it was right the moment you saw it. Something – or someone – that Luhrmann saw when he pressed play on a video he’d been sent.
“I didn’t find Austin (Butler), he found me,” Luhrmann says of the young star.
“He sent me of a video of himself playing piano and singing Unchained Melody, and I watched it and I thought ‘whoa’, and then Denzel Washington called me and he said to me about the same young man, Austin: ‘I’ve just been on stage (in the 2018 Broadway production of Eugene O’neill’s The Iceman Cometh) with this young actor and he may have the greatest work ethic I’ve ever seen’.”
Butler would need that work ethic as Luhrmann workshopped the role with him extensively. “Austin basically stayed in character for two years,” Luhrmann says.
For Catherine Martin, the award-winning costume and set designer who has worked with Luhrmann, her husband, on epic productions like Moulin Rouge!, Australia, and The Great Gatsby, taking on the costuming for Elvis felt “a little bit like a character in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where I’m just keeping one step ahead and there’s this huge boulder coming toward me”, she says.
Like Luhrmann, Martin spent months researching the clothes, jewellery and accessories worn during each era the film spans, and because so much of Presley’s life was documented in photos and on film, Martin was able to recreate much of Presley’s wardrobe and look, but the mountain of material to work with proved both a blessing and a curse.
“What’s that saying? You can’t eat an elephant all at once,” she laughs. “I think I underestimated it in terms of understanding the sheer volume and epicness of the film, and what was available to me to work with.
“But there’s another layer, because while everything has to be historically thought about, and as accurately represented as possible, there also needs to be a synthesis between those historical garments, Austin, and what he brings to the portrayal of Elvis … Then you must give the spirit of the man, the humanity of the man, and not get too locked up in what sort of shoes he was wearing.”
Butler, Martin says, slipped into the Elvis wardrobe like a second skin.
“Austin was incredible for the whole shoot, but there was a moment, when I saw him walk on to the set one day in the ’68 Special leather suit, and it was in his walk, the way he held his head, everything – he was Elvis. There was nothing else to say, we were seeing Elvis and it took my breath away.”
Then, of course, there’s the somewhat rumpled, disreputable Parker, who had his own slightly dishevelled, good ol’ boy look.
“Tom (Hanks) doesn’t like the Colonel to be referred to as disreputable, but we have a narrator who might not always tell the truth, and his clothes reflect his personality as well. Because on the one hand, he is the world’s worst dresser, but on the other hand he used his clothes to manipulate people, and catch them off guard,” Martin says.
Martin and her team also worked on Presley’s legendary jewellery collection – his watches and chunky rings, and of course the necklace he gave out to those he trusted the most, the one with the TCB and lightning bolt logo, which meant they were Taking Care of Business. Elvis’s business.
The TCB logo had its roots deep in Presley’s southern childhood. As a kid he loved the comic book hero Captain Marvel, in his signature red cape and lightning bolt logo, and later Presley would incorporate the lighting bolt into his TCB design.
Taking Care of Business was important to Presley – and to Luhrmann, who is, in his own way, taking on that mantle; doing his bit to keep Presley’s place in contemporary culture.
“I do feel it, the responsibility of doing this right,” Luhrmann reflects. “I did feel a responsibility not to celebrate him or say ‘isn’t he the greatest’, but to represent him fairly – in recent times he has been unfairly maligned.”
For Luhrmann, Martin, and the Elvis team, that meant getting the blessing of Presley’s former wife, Priscilla Presley, daughter Lisa Marie Presley and granddaughter Riley Keough.
“Their connection to Elvis is deeper than anyone’s, so it was very important to us that they saw it and they understood what we were trying to do,” he says.
Luhrmann needn’t have worried – the women watched the film together pre-release, and all three have gone on record to enthusiastically endorse it. Lisa Marie posted on Twitter: “Let me tell you that it is nothing short of spectacular. Absolutely exquisite. Austin Butler channelled and embodied my father’s heart and soul beautifully.” For her part, Riley Keough said she cried watching the film, and Priscilla Presley has also said watching Luhrmann’s Elvis “brought her to tears”.
And, although Luhrmann says he doesn’t usually pay much mind to such things, he at least entertains the thought that Presley himself may have approved.
“When we were waiting to hear what Priscilla thought – she was watching a screening of the movie, and she was understandably very sceptical about what we were doing – and I was just so nervous waiting to hear from her, it was so important to me,” he says.
“Anyway, the person I was with had an Uber Eats order, and you know how they (Uber Eats) say ‘Someone is taking your order’ with the person’s name who is looking after it? Well, ours comes and it says ‘Elvis is taking care of it’.
“Half an hour later, I get an email from Priscilla, and she tells me that she loves it, that she felt like she was watching Elvis in every move, every breath. She said that if Elvis was here, if he was watching, he’d say ‘Hot damn! You are me’ to Austin.”
It was in his walk, the way he held his head, everything – he was Elvis … we were seeing Elvis and it took my breath away