the night BAZ LUHRMANN premiered his lm
Elvis at the Cannes Film Festival, all eyes were on Priscilla Presley. She had turned 77 the day before, and in the 45 years since her former husband’s death, she’d suffered many cartoonish caricatures and lame imitations of the man she loved. But that night, as the credits rolled, she cried.
Luhrmann was relieved; after all, Presley’s blessing wasn’t something the director took for granted. “I really mean this with great respect, because now we’re like family,” he says, “but she got a little bit vocal about her doubts. She said, ‘I don’t know, this film could be crazy. Baz can be wackadoo. And how can this skinny kid play Elvis?’”
The “kid” she referred to was Austin Butler. And her concern was understandable. How could she trust anyone to depict the man she loved; the tortured and brilliant artist who changed music history? He was a man both complex and self-destructive, with a huge, fragile heart. As Luhrmann says, “Elvis had become wallpaper. He was sort of a Halloween costume. But to his family, he was always a husband, a father, a grandfather and a person.”
On top of that, Luhrmann wasn’t planning some puff piece of cinema about a beloved icon. Instead, he sought to look behind the velvet curtain. “There were things that were going to be difficult for them to see about Elvis, but they were also going to see the humanity and true spiritualityof him, which was the most important thing.”
After seeing the film, however, Presley wrote Luhrmann a letter. “I won’t share all of it,” he says, “but the key thing she said was, ‘My whole life I’ve had to put up with people impersonating my husband, and I don’t know how that boy did it, but every move, every wink... If my husband was here, he’d say, ‘Hot damn, you are me.’”
BAZ LUHRMANN likes to live his movies, and Elvis was no different: in the course of making it, the Australian moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he visited Graceland, Elvis’s home, took a dive deep into the singer’s archives, and even found the man who had been with Elvis on the day he discovered the power of Gospel music.
His mission was to show us the lost boy behind the mask, but he would frame it as “a canvas to explore America”—and crucial to that was the relationship between Elvis and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (played by Tom Hanks in the movie). A former carny, Parker used both financial and coercive control to line his own pockets, while depleting the artist’s mental and physical health, until in 1977, when the 42-year-old Elvis—the bestselling solo music artist of all time—died of a heart attack, likely caused by his reliance on barbiturates.
Says Luhrmann, “The Colonel represents the great sell in America, and this therefore made it about America: the sale of the soul, the artist and the ringmaster.”
Surprisingly, when producer Gail Berman first approached Luhrmann about an Elvis project, he hadn’t been sure. “She’d managed to get the rights to the estate, and she said, ‘I’ve got this one idea.’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ She says, ‘It’s you.’ And she never gave up. Then, when I told her my idea about the Colonel, she dogged me even more about it.”
Having cracked the subtext, there was still a long way to go: where do you find an actor with the range to play that kind of icon? Luhrmann originally set about workshopping Harry Styles and Miles Teller for the part. But then came this former Disney actor, Austin Butler, for whom getting the role felt almost tinged by magical intervention.
“I had never heard it before in my life,” Butler says, “but in the month prior to hearing about Baz making the film, an Elvis Christmas song was on the radio, and I was kind of just goofing around, singing along to it. And my friend said, ‘You’ve got to play Elvis.’ But it was such a long shot, I just laughed and pushed it to the side. And then a couple of weeks later I was playing the piano, and my friend said, ‘I’m serious. You’ve got to figure out how you can get the rights to maybe write an Elvis film or something.’ I said, ‘That’d be amazing, but there’s no way that that’s going to happen.’”
A week later, his agent called and told him about Luhrmann’s film. “Well, immediately I got chills,” Butler says.“because of the synchronicity of it all, I thought, ‘I got to just give it everything I got.’ So, I started prepping from that day as though I was going to be making the movie.”
The first thing he did was send Luhrmann a self-tape. “It came out of this detail that I learned about Elvis,” Butler says, “about his mom, who passed away when he was 23. That’s how old I was when my mom died, so I ended up filming this tape that came out of a nightmare that my mom was dying again. It was an emotion of such deep pain. It kind of stripped away the icon of him, or the caricature of him, and it just made him so human.”
This was precisely the depth of Elvis that Luhrmann sought, and Butler was so right for the role that Luhrmann doesn’t even recall offering it to him. “I just remember the moment he walked in,” he says. “Then one day we made the movie.”
Luhrmann had originally planned to have a voice impersonator perform as the young Elvis, because he didn’t have the rights to use those original recordings. Nevertheless, he asked Butler if he could sing. “Austin said, ‘Well, I don’t really sing but I’ve practiced one Elvis song… ’” He pauses. “I’ve still got it on video. I mean, when you hear him sing, it’s crazy. You cannot believe. It’s spinetingling. We just started riffing, and hours would go by.”
Butler returns the praise, describing Luhrmann as a great collaborator. “Baz has this extraordinary quality where he doesn’t have a barrier between life and art,” he says. “He lives the art life. David Lynch talks about that, and I think Baz is very similar: there’s this never-ending poetry of the art, and you see how it flows into his life and vice versa. So that’s an amazing quality to be around, because you don’t feel like you’re ever breaking into something else. The two are one. And it’s also a way that I really love to work.”
“In the case of my movie, it’s basically the SELLING OF THE SOUL. It’s talent versus promotion, really.”
Finding the right actor to play Colonel Parker was equally fortuitous. Casting Tom Hanks so severely against type would only serve to highlight Luhrmann’s message: how, as with Elvis, a star can be constrained by audience expectations. He says of Hanks, “Once you start to be something avuncular, everybody wants that tune from you, a riff on that part of you as a performer. My joy is finding actors and helping them play a tune no one’s ever heard.”
He recalls that Hanks came on board shockingly fast. “An actor like that, to get them to do a large role like that, could take you a month of talking and convincing and cajoling. I went in to see him at Playtone, and I said, ‘Colonel Tom Parker’s like a clown with a chainsaw.’ I had a video of Parker, and I had all these props to start convincing Tom to do it. I never got the video out. He stopped me in the middle of it. He talked a bit about the character, and he went, ‘Well, if you want me, I’m your guy.’ It must’ve taken 20 minutes.”
Luhrmann’s theory as to why Hanks was so sold on the sinister Svengali role is this: “I think he’d got to such a place in his life that he knew by playing Colonel Tom Parker he would have an extra level of distastefulness from his fanbase, because it’s a bit like your favorite dad turning out to be corrupt. I think he wanted to take that step and break the expectations, because he’s truly one of the great actors of all time.”
Significantly, Luhrmann uses the Colonel’s point of view to frame the movie, a device he compares to the 1984 Miloš Forman-directed Amadeus, in which the story appears to be led by the ill-fated Mozart, when in fact it’s the twisted and jealous Salieri who tells the tale.
“It’s not Amadeus’s story,” Luhrmann says. “Salieri is saying, ‘So let me
get this right, God. I was chaste. I made a deal with you to give me the gift of music. And I’m king. I’m loved. And then you go and put genius in that little pig? How’s that fair?’ And then you have the preposterous conceit in that movie, like, ‘Right, I’m going to wear a mask and get Mozart to write the Requiem to kill him.’ Now, you have to have a stupid idea like that so that you can explore the bigger idea, which is, in that case, jealousy. In the case of my movie, it’s basically the selling of the soul. It’s talent versus promotion, really.”
So now he had the theme, the cast and the dramatic tension. But at the heart of all of Luhrmann’s films, there’s always a love story. And Elvis’s is not the one you might expect.
“Very early on,” says Luhrmann, “a young guy working with me on the music said, ‘Look, I really like what we are doing, but every movie you’ve made has had this great romance in it. And you’ve got Priscilla in it and the Colonel. Is the romance really the Colonel and Elvis?’ And I went, ‘Well, Priscilla, absolutely. The Colonel and Elvis? Yes.’”
But now, looking back, Luhrmann sees that it’s something else. “I’ve just realized, the true love story of Elvis, and the way it fits into the oeuvre, is between the audience and Elvis. It’s actually about his addiction to this love: the more you get, the less love you actually feel. It’s a destructive love. Because in the end, Elvis Presley is not that child who runs around and just can naturally sing and everyone goes, ‘Oh, you’re great.’ He keeps developing a character, and then, at some point, he can’t take that character, the mask, off. But he has that addiction to the audience, and the audience’s complete need for their icons to stay eternally young, to do another album, another song, another movie… ”
IN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT the man under the shades and the rhinestone jumpsuits, Luhrmann found an extraordinarily talented, deeply spiritual person who spent his life trying to mitigate old pain. The film takes us back to Elvis’s beginnings in Tupelo, Mississippi, and later, Memphis, seeing the hardship of his home life. “There’s a big hole in his heart from childhood,” says Luhrmann, “from the shame of his father going to jail, from being in one of the white houses in the Black community, all of that. He’s trying to mend his life constantly, trying to be liked and getting people to like each other. And ultimately, that’s going to end in self-destruction.”
There’s an important scene where a very young Elvis ventures into a Gospel service with a friend, and the friend instinctively tries to pull him back, as though they don’t belong there. But Elvis is captivated, and the preacher says, “Leave him be, he’s with the spirit.”
That friend was Sam Bell, and, unbelievably, while living in Memphis, Luhrmann turned investigative reporter and tracked Bell down, getting that story firsthand.
“One of the family members knew of him,” he recalls. “We got an address.
I sent a Fedex. Nothing. We drive around to the house. It’s raining. And I could see the Fedex is wet from three days of rain. It hasn’t been touched. And the house looks pretty unused. So, I said, ‘Look, he’s not here.’ And one of the young guys says, ‘So let me get this right, we’ve come all the way to Tupelo, and you’re not going to get out of the car?’ I get out the car, there were cobwebs around the door. I thought, ‘Well, he’s clearly passed.’ And then the same young guy said, ‘We’ll go round the back, then.’ I’m like, ‘Don’t get arrested. I’m Baz the coward.’ Unbelievably this older lady comes out. I said, ‘I’m looking for Sam Bell.’ She says, ‘Yes, I’m his wife. He’s been in hospital for six months, but he’s coming out next week.’”
Bell was a veritable goldmine. “Sam told me a whole lot, actually. I mean, there’s more than I put in there about how he and this kid called Smokey used to fight all the time. And Elvis was a bit of a story maker-upper because he was so embarrassed about the fact that his dad had been off in jail. Sam said, ‘My grandparents adored him. He called them sir and ma’am. No white person in those days, man, woman, or child ever said that to my grandparents.’ They just thought he was the most magical, unusual, sweet and vulnerable, but kind of cocky kid they’d ever met.”
Bell passed away in the fall of 2021. “The revelations were so authentic,”
Luhrmann says. “And he never asked for money. He just told the stories.”
Luhrmann thought a lot about them, and the pain that dogged Elvis. He sees it as a throughline to a universal human experience: the need to fill the emptiness, to manage shame, to love and be loved.
“That’s what the Greeks call pothos,” he says, “and that is, the more love that you seek that’s not internal, the more adoration you need. It’s a drug. [Overcoming it] is a life’s work. And you probably don’t start to deal with that until you’re at least 40. Because before 40, you’re going, ‘Am I someone?’ And you’re just so focused on getting it. And then when you get it, you’re like, ‘Hang on, I thought this would fix things. No. Shit. Well, how do I fix things?’ The external thing probably helps you a lot because it’s selfmedication of a feeling of insecurity and not being good enough. I mean, we see them, they’re all poster boys for it, whether it’s Michael Jackson or Napoleon. They just keep going, they keep pursuing some impossible goal that ultimately destroys them.”
There’s some footage of Elvis from the very last time he performed on camera. He’s singing “Unchained Melody”, and two years before he shot the movie Luhrmann knew he wanted to use it. “He sings the best he ever sings,” Luhrmann says. “It’s so moving that that’s the death scene. That’s the farewell.” But Authentic Brands Group, who control the licensing and merchandising rights to Elvis Presley, did not want it to be shown.
Fortunately, Gail Berman came to the rescue and persuaded them to agree. Luhrmann says, “They actually said, ‘Look, we trust you so much if
you really believe that. But we’re scared of it because Elvis is so unattractive in it.’ He’s discombobulated. He can hardly put two words together. I said, ‘Well, if you don’t want to do it, I’ll get Austin to do it.’”
Butler came through. “Unbelievably, he just absolutely studied it and channeled it, even in the costume test,” Luhrmann says. But Luhrmann knew he still wanted to follow the biopic trope of showing the real artist at the end. So, he cut from Butler’s version to the original. “We knew we had an emotional beat-change; we knew we really had something.”
Says Lurhmann, “There’s a moment when Elvis is singing the song and he looks to the audience and he smiles like a little boy: ‘Am I doing good? Am I good?’ And you realize that there’s still a little boy in there trying to make up for a dad going to jail, trying to please and be loved, and have people love each other. It’s so childlike. And then we cut to the real Elvis. I mean, we could have run through with Austin, but I knew we were going to miss the really important final thing: Austin’s humanized Elvis in a way that I don’t think Elvis has been humanized for so long. You have to remind people that it’s OK that his body was corrupt and all the discombobulation with the drugs. Inside was still this beautiful kid who just wanted to love and be loved in return.”