‘I just thought her story should be told’
◆ Star Cailee Spaeny and director Sofia Coppola talk to Jessica Rawnsley about Priscilla, which charts her tumultuous relationship with Elvis Presley
There was a period in the sixties and early seventies when her beehive and darkly kohl-lined eyes were ubiquitous. Glossy photographs of Priscilla Presley appeared everywhere, the wife of the king of rock’n’roll, Elvis Presley. But few knew the woman behind the headlines, or the reality of the life she led.
Director Sofia Coppola’s biopic, Priscilla, brings that story to the screen for the first time – charting the tumultuous relationship between Elvis and Priscilla, from its first blossoming to its slow disintegration. Priscilla is played mesmerisingly by Mare of Easttown’s Cailee Spaeny while Jacob Elordi, best known for Saltburn and Euphoria, plays Elvis.
Unlike other biopics, the film was made with input from the real Priscilla and is based on her 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me. The lens is trained on her as she grows from school girl to wife and mother, Elvis on the periphery, her experience as a woman at the fore.
“When I read Priscilla’s book, it was an insight into their relationship that I had no idea about,” says Coppola. “We see so many pictures and it looks like this fairy tale and then to hear what her experience was like was really surprising and interesting. She’s so famous in images but we don’t really know anything about her and what her life was like. And I was so surprised with how relatable it was.”
“I grew up an Elvis fan,” Spaeny, 25, says. “I was born in Tennessee and raised in southern Missouri, I went to Graceland (his mansion) on family vacations. And obviously, I knew Priscilla because they go hand-in-hand in all the iconic photos, but I didn’t know her side of the story and her journey with him.
“I found it so exciting to be able to tell this story this way for the first time. And she goes through things that I think a lot of young women can relate to. I was nervous to dive into the role and find an entry point of how I could resonate with her, but I found as I was reading the book and playing the role that there were so many things that I felt I connected with emotionally.”
For Coppola, her focus was Priscilla’s “evolution as a person, going from a girl to a woman”.
“All girls go through these different stages,” the 52-year-old director continues, “her first kiss, becoming a mother, and things that I think are pretty universal. And then showing how she dealt with these stages and
what she went through. And then also showing the highs and lows of this really complicated, romantic relationship and the light and dark side of that.”
For despite the very real love they shared, and the ostensible glamour of being the wife of the King, theirs was a volatile, fractured relationship. Priscilla was 14 when she met the 24-year-old Elvis. She soon moved into his palatial Memphis mansion, Graceland, where she was isolated and alone while he toured or went to Hollywood to make movies. We see her ennui in this gilded cage, perpetually waiting for him to return home or to become old enough to marry him. There was a drug dependency he instigated, with Elvis himself hooked on opioids, as well as emotional abuse and controlling, coercive tendencies.
The Priscilla we meet at the start of the film is wide-eyed, innocent, naive. Controversy has long swirled around the age-gap between the two and Elvis’s initial fascination with her. Much of Coppola’s directorial canon has mapped similar themes: romantic age disparity, obsession, lonely girlhood, paradoxes of power – in films like Lost In Translation, Marie Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides.
“She seemed to be this image of innocence and purity, and he really kept her away from Hollywood and looked at her, I think, as a symbol of some kind of purity,” says Coppola. “I wanted to show it with sensitivity and from her perspective, and try to show what her experience was like without judging it. I just thought her story should be told.”
“Reading the book, there were obviously details that were shocking,” adds Spaeny. “What’s so interesting about telling the story is that we just got to put the truth on screen and sort of let the audience decide how they feel. And there’s so much that sits in this grey area that isn’t usually shown.
“I tried to play the scenes straight,” she continues, “like ‘what would she actually be feeling in this moment?’"
Creating a film in which the protagonist is still alive and involved in the process presented a unique challenge to both Coppola and Spaeny.
“The most nerve-wracking part was showing it to her for the first time,” admits Coppola.
“I really wanted her to feel it represented her experience. And when Priscilla was moved by it and told me ‘Oh, this is my life,’ it really meant a lot to me. And she felt like Cailee really captured her.”
For her part, Spaeny says Priscilla was wholly supportive throughout. “She was so great because she took the time to meet with me and get on however many phone calls I felt like I needed before I started,” she relates.
“But she never came on set because she was too afraid it would make me nervous, which was the right thing to do because I don’t know if I would have been able to get words out of my mouth if she was standing right there.
“I was in really safe hands telling the story with someone like Sofia who has such a sensitivity to representing female characters, and really did her research in terms of taking the time with Priscilla herself. And this was really about making sure that she felt represented when we told the story because she hasn’t had that in her life yet.
“So it was just a beautiful journey to go on with Sofia and Priscilla and Jacob to make sure that we told the story, and in a way that she felt safe.”
I wanted to try and show what her experience was like without judging it
Priscilla is in cinemas now