THE MAN BEHIND THE MUSIC
Baz Luhrmann movies and their soundtracks are inseparable. Here, the director’s musical supervisor, Anton Monsted, talks to Charlie Calver about how he accidentally found his calling.
For the past four weeks, Anton Monsted has been living in the past. Literally the past, as Monsted, music supervisor to Baz Luhrmann, bunkers down in an editing suite at Sydney’s Fox Studios, where he is putting the finishing touches on the joyous, propulsive and above all large, soundtrack for Luhrmann’s latest extravaganza Elvis, set in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. But this month has also been a journey through Monsted’s own memories, too, something he explains while he ferries me across the labyrinthine back lot in a golf cart.
On the right, Monsted points out the building where he assisted Luhrmann as a 21-year-old, while the director was writing Romeo + Juliet. That was before Fox Studios existed and before Baz Luhrmann was a household name. In fact – a full-circle moment – it was only because Monsted came across a copy of the 1994 Vogue guest-edited by Luhrmann while on holiday that he ever encountered the filmmaker at all. At the time, Monsted was on vacation with his girlfriend – now wife – storyboard artist and illustrator Nikki Di
Falco, who said: “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to work with these people.” Monsted read the issue too, but wasn’t fazed. “I was like, ‘They’re interesting creative people, but whatever,’” he says with a laugh. “I’m going to go back to what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.”
The rest of his life – which was meant to involve a career in academia – never happened. True to her word, Di Falco wrangled an internship with Catherine Martin, and a year later she was assisting on a Romeo + Juliet pre-production workshop with star Leonardo DiCaprio in Sydney. “I was called in as the boyfriend-slashhandyman,” Monsted recalls. “Could I paint some walls? Rip up some carpet? And maybe when Leo came to town, could I drive him around and help out?” Monsted was handed an envelope of cash, a set of car keys, a chunky mobile phone and told: “Just look after Leo, show him a good time.”
“He was an up-and-coming actor, but he wasn’t famous,” Monsted says. “We went out to lots of places. We went rollerskating, to bars
and out and about in Sydney as people do in their early 20s, and had a great time.” And so began the real rest of Monsted’s life.
He wore plenty of informal hats on Romeo + Juliet including writing assistant, general assistant – “driving Baz around and making him lots of cups of tea” – and, ultimately, music supervisor. It was music, Monsted says, that cemented their relationship. Through burned CDs and mixtapes, the pair shared their favourite songs, albums and artists, and these bootleg back-and-forths would directly influence the film’s eventual soundtrack. “The musical dialogue that Baz and I started having back in 1995, we’re still having a continuation of that same dialogue in 2022,” Monsted reflects.
Back at Fox Studios, we’re driving past some of the towering buildings that open up to reveal sets built for films including Star Wars and The Matrix. For Monsted, they bring back memories of making Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby. Moulin Rouge! was Monsted’s first formal appointment as music supervisor. Luhrmann told him: “If you want to walk through that door, you have to be ready to take on that responsibility, but the door is open if you want to do it.”
The rest, as they say, is history. From the heady, explosive medleys of Moulin Rouge! to collaborating with Jay-Z on The Great Gatsby soundtrack, Monsted and Luhrmann honed a way of using music – defined by modernised versions of period-specific material – that would set Luhrmann’s films apart, and ultimately, put the pair in a position to take on the musical behemoth that is Elvis Presley.
The golf cart pulls up in front of an unassuming office building – we’ve arrived at the current centre of the Elvis universe. Monsted ducks inside to check if it’s a good time for a tour and two minutes later returns. What follows is a peek behind the curtain of the magical world of movie-making. Monsted walks through a room of people glued to screens into another with a shrine to Elvis in one corner and then up to the stage door, a small theatre with seats, lounges and two rows of desks. At one, Monsted explains, all the vocal and sound effects are split into granular levels of detail required to make the movie sound like a movie. At another, every song in the film is stored – the Holy Grail of Luhrmann and Monsted’s ongoing musical journey. Music has been at the core of every Luhrmann film, but for Elvis – a biopic about one of the most famous and consequential musicians of all time – the stakes are miles high.
“I think about this a lot,” Monsted says. “I think about that fan and fundamentally you don’t want to upset their relationship with Elvis’s music by doing something that’s alien to them. But, at the same time, you’ve got to make decisions that can speak clearly to an audience today, so that the vitality of the music and the vitality of Elvis’s performances all shine through to a contemporary audience.”
To do this, Monsted and Luhrmann implemented three avenues of music in the film. The first is Elvis Presley masters – “Some of the greatest recordings that we have in popular music.” The second is music created by Elvis and his contemporaries that has been re-recorded by the cast, including Austin Butler as Presley. When Monsted first heard Butler in character he was Elvis – “in a good way” – because of how indistinguishable their two voices were. “It’s funny,” he says, “Baz and I found ourselves going, ‘Is that Austin or Elvis?’” When Monsted plays a few clips of Butler in character, it’s clear the actor has mastered the idiosyncratic vocal tics, bass and twang of Elvis’s distinctive voice. It’s goosebumps-inducing.
The final, and most exhilarating avenue features the music that Monsted and Luhrmann have commissioned to do what they do best through the director’s films: translate that rapturous feeling of first hearing Elvis sing into the musical language of today. As Monsted puts it: “‘Just take our word for it – this is what this moment felt like, rather than what it literally was like.”
So how do you capture the energy and innovation that made Elvis one of the defining artists of a century? You call up some of today’s best. Like Diplo and Swae Lee – coincidentally both born in Elvis’s birthplace of Tupelo, Mississippi – whose voices mingle with Butler’s on a track that is a freewheeling, upbeat blend of country music, hip-hop and swing. Kacey Musgraves sings a hauntingly beautiful, stripped-back rendition of Elvis’s legendary Can’t Help Falling in Love. Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker works his magic on a modernised version of Edge of Reality, and Doja Cat turns Hound Dog into a rallying cry for all the women who’ve ever been let down by a playboy.
Monsted sets the scene: “We have an actor portraying Big Mama Thornton. She’s singing Hound Dog in a bar.” It’s the song we all know and love, but as the camera pans down to find Elvis, things change and, slowly, Big Mama Thornton’s voice gives way to the hip-hop beat of Doja Cat’s take.
Monsted is humble about his part in orchestrating the songs that will form the backbone of Luhrmann’s blockbuster. He sits back quietly and nods his head while he plays a few tracks, a joyous grin creeping across his face. For someone who has achieved so much in music and film – as well as his work with Luhrmann, Monsted is the former executive vice president of soundtracks and A&R at Capitol Records and he’s worked on films including Hidden Figures, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Promising Young Woman – he is the antitype of the Hollywood exec-stereotype. He’s a man who just loves music and the movies, and wants people to love them, too.
Despite those early days with DiCaprio or brainstorming with Jay-Z for The Great Gatsby, Monsted says the highlight of his career came early. “Driving in LA and hearing #1 Crush played on a radio in the car next to you,” he reflects, referring to the mid-90s Garbage B side that Romeo + Juliet turned into a hit. ”That’s the sort of thing where you go, ‘Two weeks ago, nobody knew that song, and now it’s being played on the radio.’ That’s a pretty amazing moment.”
And his hopes for Elvis are similarly simple. Monsted isn’t chasing awards or critical acclaim. He just wants to remind people “how it feels to see a great film on the big screen with really big songs and big music and big emotions. All of those things that we’ve all been deprived of for the past couple of years.”
“The musical dialogue that Baz and I started back in 1995, we’re still having a continuation of that same dialogue in 2022”