As filmmaker Baz Luhrmann was deep into his work on “Elvis,” his 2022 biopic of Elvis Presley, an idea struck him: What if he wove real-life footage of Presley into concert scenes of actor Austin Butler as Elvis?
He reached out to his Elvis experts and quickly heard back.
“This wonderful man called,” Luhrmann says on a recent video call from the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. “Ernst [Mikael Jorgensen] is like the scientist of all things Elvis, and he says, ‘I think there are these lost reels.”
In “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann used hours of never before seen film and audio of Elvis Presley performing in Las Vegas in 1970 and cities around the United States in 1972 to let Elvis tell his own story in a way that’s never before been done. (Film still courtesy of Neon) “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann used hours of never before seen film and audio of Elvis Presley performing in Las Vegas in 1970 and cities around the United States in 1972 to let Elvis tell his own story in a way that’s never before been done. (Photo courtesy of Baz Luhrmann and Neon) In “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann used hours of never before seen film and audio of Elvis Presley performing in Las Vegas in 1970 and cities around the United States in 1972 to let Elvis tell his own story in a way that’s never before been done. (Movie poster courtesy of Neon) In “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann used hours of never before seen film and audio of Elvis Presley performing in Las Vegas in 1970 and cities around the United States in 1972 to let Elvis tell his own story in a way that’s never before been done. (Film still courtesy of Neon) In “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann used hours of never before seen film and audio of Elvis Presley performing in Las Vegas in 1970 and cities around the United States in 1972 to let Elvis tell his own story in a way that’s never before been done. (Movie poster courtesy of Neon) In “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann used hours of never before seen film and audio of Elvis Presley performing in Las Vegas in 1970 and cities around the United States in 1972 to let Elvis tell his own story in a way that’s never before been done. (Film still courtesy of Neon) In “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann used hours of never before seen film and audio of Elvis Presley performing in Las Vegas in 1970 and cities around the United States in 1972 to let Elvis tell his own story in a way that’s never before been done. (Movie poster courtesy of Neon) In “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann used hours of never before seen film and audio of Elvis Presley performing in Las Vegas in 1970 and cities around the United States in 1972 to let Elvis tell his own story in a way that’s never before been done. (Film still courtesy of Neon) In “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann used hours of never before seen film and audio of Elvis Presley performing in Las Vegas in 1970 and cities around the United States in 1972 to let Elvis tell his own story in a way that’s never before been done. (Film still courtesy of Neon) This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Austin Butler in a scene from “Elvis.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP) In “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann used hours of never before seen film and audio of Elvis Presley performing in Las Vegas in 1970 and cities around the United States in 1972 to let Elvis tell his own story in a way that’s never before been done. (Film still courtesy of Neon) Show Caption1 of 11In “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann used hours of never before seen film and audio of Elvis Presley performing in Las Vegas in 1970 and cities around the United States in 1972 to let Elvis tell his own story in a way that’s never before been done. (Film still courtesy of Neon) ExpandJorgensen told him that they might not be easy to get, if they’re even gettable at all, Luhrmann says.
“Unfortunately, they’re in the salt mines in Kansas where they keep all the negatives of everything,” he says of the underground vault in Kansas where many Hollywood studios store their original negatives and master copies.
It’s too expensive to go down, Jorgensen told Luhrmann. But maybe you can get to them, he added.
“I think, ‘Well, maybe I can use the footage in the showroom [scenes in Las Vegas],” Luhrmann continues. “Like to sort of deal with budget.
“We met, and it cost a lot to get down there,” he says. “About $100,000 just to go down and look.”
But what he found there was priceless: 65 boxes of never-before-seen footage from the concert documentaries “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is,” shot in 35mm anamorphic film at the International Hotel in Las Vegas in August 1970, and “Elvis on Tour,” filmed at arena shows in New York, Virginia, Florida and Texas in 1972.
Angie Marchese, vice president of archives and exhibits at Graceland, came up with a few more boxes of unseen footage, a stash of Super 8 movies of Elvis that included rare footage of Elvis with his wife, Priscilla Presley, and only child, Lisa Marie Presley.
Now, Luhrmann had 59 hours of extremely rare footage and the irresistible opportunity to do much more than he’d initially considered.
“And then we find this half hour of audio of Elvis just talking about his life,” Luhrmann says of the epiphany that he and longtime editor Jonathan Redmond experienced as they worked through the archival negatives. “I said, ‘This is it. We’ve got to let Elvis just tell his own story.’
“Because Elvis stuff is always someone telling you about it,” he continues. “That was the light bulb moment. It was that and then all the song choices that help tell the story, you know?”
“EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert” opened in IMAX theaters on Friday, Feb. 20, and opens in movie theaters everywhere on Friday, Feb. 27.
It’s a remarkable look at Elvis, the untouchable icon restored to his flesh-and-blood humanity through a forgotten trove of film footage that had sat for decades in a vault hundreds of feet below the Kansas plains.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Luhrmann talks about why he wants everyone to see it on the biggest screen possible, what it took to restore the film and audio, how he fell for Elvis as a boy growing up in Australia, and more.
Q: So you must be a busy guy this week.
A: I’m good, man. It’s like “EPiC” weekend, so you do everything you can. By the end, you just hope enough people come to see the man on the big screen.
Q: I saw it earlier this week in IMAX, and it’s so impressive. People are going to come see this.
A: I hope so. I love the fact that you saw it in IMAX. I’m really glad you took the time because I just think the nature of the subject is there’s no screen big enough for Elvis, you know?
Q: So tell me how you started to explore all those boxes of film.
A: Well, we bring the stuff back to Warner’s, and it smells so strongly of vinegar, which means it’s falling apart. And some is missing, and some is mislabeled, and there’s no sound. So the first thing we do is I convince Warner’s to scan it because it’s going to disappear. Then we spent two years finding mag track [magnetic tape used to sync the audio track to the film images]
We were able to get the mag track, which gave us voices and the band. But a lot of the micing on the orchestra, the Sweets [backing vocalists the Sweet Inspirations], and the gospel singers was a bit up and down.
We wanted to do it in five months. It took two years to sync the sound with the pictures.
Q: Your new film – is that all stuff that’s never been seen before? Or does it include material from the original concert films?
A: Yeah, that’s a good question. There will be some bits that are in the previous doc, but there’s a lot in there where people think, “Oh, I’ve seen that before.” And they might have seen that, but they wouldn’t have seen that camera or that take or that night. [Eleven cameras simultaneously shot performances for the 1972 movie.]
And if you notice, his costume changes all the time, and we didn’t care about that. We didn’t care that in one song we got six versions. The third thing is they would have seen online and on YouTube lots of bootleg. There’s a huge black market in stolen stuff. So even with the sound, sometimes we had deal with gangsters in carparks to get a little bit of missing sound.
There are a few actual bits where we’ve gone, “Ah, that’s what we need to join that to those other two shots [by inserting a piece from the ’70s films between newly discovered footage]. It’s very small. I don’t know what the percentage is.
Q: Watching the movie, I was struck by how real and how human he seemed here.
A: That’s it, that’s it. Like he says in the film, there’s the image, and there’s the man. When you see as much material as I have, you really realize that there’s the humor and the goofiness, too. I think that’s him disarming everyone so they get past the icon and they see the man.
Q: What else struck you as you worked through the footage?
A: Some things really jumped out. There’s some things we couldn’t use because it just didn’t have the focus of the story. You realize he just kind of hung with people, and he’s very human, very empathetic, very polite. And he’s always goofing, because I think he’s just damn shy, and he’s trying to disarm everyone.
It’s like Whitney Houston said. Her mom [Cissy Houston] was in the original Sweets the year before. And she meets Elvis, she was probably 10 or something. She said he walked in the room with a fur coat on, and it wasn’t like, “Hello, Mr. Elvis.” She said, you just stare. You freeze and stare. Because of the way he looks, you know? So there was a lot of that
It’s happening quite a bit actually now. People not into Elvis at all, they know the caricature. But they come out of this film, they go, “Who is this guy? I love this guy!” Because he’s human.
Q: Tell me how the unused audio of Elvis talking about his life was recorded.
A: In the tour, there’s a little bit you see, and he looks very tired. He’s talking about, “Well, I like all kinds of music,” and he talks about gospel, and he says, “Look, I’m too tired. I’ll do it in the morning.”
And when he comes back, he says, “Guys, I can’t be on camera. I’ll just talk.” So they never used the talking bit. That’s where he goes, “I got a whipping from my mother,” and that same bit is where he goes, “I was very shy, you know.” About girls liking him after he started singing.
Q: What needed to be fixed or restored in the film and the audio? And how did you go about it?
A: Yeah, one thing I want to be really clear about: there’s not a frame of AI. Some people said, ‘Oh, it’s AI.” No, no, no. There’s no AI, and there’s no visual effects. But [filmmaker] Peter Jackson, the magician, and his wonderful team at Park Road, we gave them the anamorphic.
I don’t know if you know about anamorphic 35mm, but it’s squashed. And when you stretch it, you just sort of head towards a possible 70mm. You get a lot more out of it. What [Jackson] does is, he’s able to go frame by frame and take out aberrations and really help the grain. There’s 8mm footage in that’s the size of two buildings, and it still holds up.
He’s just brilliant at that. Peter, I mean, he’s a savior of many, many things. He did it with the Beatles [the docuseries “Get Back”]. Love that piece.
And with the sound, some of it we had to do remixes, some we take three [versions of] songs and make new works because we couldn’t just do everything start off the stage. A lot of it is. I mean, “Suspicious Minds” is just remixed.
Q: The editing is such a terrific part of storytelling. How did you and Jonathan go about that?
A: The process was once we said let him tell the story, we worked out parts. Like, “OK, now he’s going to talk about his Hollywood years, now he’s going to talk about relationships, now he’s going to talk about his feelings.”
You know, when he was asked about politics, he says, “Well, I’m just an entertainer.” They seldom play the second clip where he’s asked, “Should other people speak about their politics?” and he says, “Sure.” Then we put “In The Ghetto” and that other lovely song [“Walk a Mile in My Shoes”] where he goes “There are people on reservations and in ghettos and there but for the grace of God go you.” It’s a very empathetic song.
Then take the cut of “Poke Salad Annie,” which I think is brilliant. Jonathan is a brilliant cutter, anyway. He started with U2 when he was a kid, but he’s worked with me for years, and we make these, like, tone poems. Poetry, more than linear. The vibes of the movie. But it had to be guided by Elvis’s story, and the way we did it was by this question: What would Elvis have done?
Q: You don’t use the usual documentary talking heads – were there models for that for you?
A: The only one I can think of that I actually really enjoyed was that documentary [“Listen to Me Marlon”] where they found all these tapes that Brando did. I was a big Brando fan, and at one stage, Marlon Brando was maybe going to be in “Romeo + Juliet,” believe it or not. I have some very treasured letters from Marlon Brando.
I just loved the way you heard Marlon just talking [in the documentary]. It made you fall in love with Marlon all over again, just the way he illuminated things. [He does a quite good impression of Brando talking about Cary Grant.] I love that stuff. I just think you can’t beat it having someone actually tell their story.
Q: What was it like when you showed “EPiC” to Priscilla and Riley?
A: Actually, Priscilla’s only seeing it for the first time next week, and Riley’s about to see it, too. But I want to explain something. First of all, they were so supportive during the making of the [“Elvis” biopic]. But since then, it was a great sadness of what was a beautiful journey. [Lisa Marie Presley, Priscilla Presley’s daughter with Elvis, and Riley Keough’s mother, died in January 2023.]
Right in this building, after the Golden Globes, I remember Lisa Marie saying, “Can you help me down to the car?” And of course, she was gone a few days later. [“EPiC”] is about Elvis, but for Riley, it’s about mom, and for Priscilla, it’s about her daughter. There’s some really poignant unseen 8mm in there that no one’s ever seen of Lisa Marie as a little baby, you know?
I think they need to see it in their own time. Just anywhere that suits them. I mean, I love them, so anytime, anywhere they need it, I’ll make it happen.
Q: As a boy growing up in Australia, how’d you first encounter Elvis and become such a fan?
A: We lived in a very isolated little country town. We had a gas station on the highway through it, and we had a farm. Dad was super industrious. He was in the Vietnam War. So we had artists living with us, and we did everything from command training to ballroom dancing to learning how to shoot film and process photography.
At a certain point, we [owned] the local cinema, and there were Elvis matinees every Sunday. So that was my intro, and I just thought he was the coolest guy in the world, you know? I probably think differently about “Easy Come, Easy Go” now, but then I thought, “Wow, look at that guy in that black sweater.” I wanted to be him.
Then he loomed large, but in life, I ran away and grew and [explored] opera and Bowie and all sorts of different musical forms. He was there, but not in the same way. I’m a great admirer, as I was making films, of “Amadeus,” and a lot of people wanted me to do different musical bios.
Yes, you learn about a lot about Mozart [in “Amadeus”], but it’s really about jealousy then. And I thought, well, if you want to make “Amadeus” for America, it’s Elvis because of this relationship between the Colonel [Tom Parker] and Elvis.
One is the great salesman, promoter, and the other sort of what [the Colonel] thought was a carnival act but turned out to be sort of Orpheus. Sort of Greek, mythical, very sensitive and gifted. A singer, mover, creator. Remember, Elvis didn’t have a choreographer; Elvis didn’t have a stylist.
Q: He just made that up on his own. You see him playing around and seeing what works in “EPiC.”
A: Well, as he says, “I just do what I feel.” And that’s kind of interesting, because that kept the band always having to watch him, and they never knew what he was going to do. Neither did the audience, and that makes it really spontaneous.
[He snaps his fingers.] Electric.Related Articles
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