Elvis and me: Baz Luhrmann’s new film crowns ‘the King’

1 week ago 3

Baz Luhrmann’s new Elvis Presley film EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert has premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to a standing ovation, closing the loop on a journey that began for the filmmaker when he was developing his critically acclaimed 2022 biopic Elvis.

The new film, a blend of documentary, concert film and narrated autobiography, was assembled from unearthed fragments of archival material believed lost from Elvis: That’s the Way It Is, the film of Presley’s 1970 Las Vegas summer residency, and another road concert film, 1972’s Elvis on Tour.

“It’s not a documentary, it’s not a concert film,” Luhrmann said, speaking after the premiere screening in Toronto at the weekend. “Instead of people telling you about Elvis, it [is a film in which] Elvis sings and, for someone who wasn’t that verbal, [he] tells his story like never before. The storyteller is Elvis himself.”

Presley, the Mississippi-born, Tennessee-raised musician, was one of the most influential music artists of all time, rising to prominence in the 1950s and parlaying his success on the concert stage into a film career. Selling more than 500 million records worldwide during his career, Presley died in 1977.

Luhrmann described the project as a collaboration with film editor Jonathan Redmond, with whom the 62-year-old Australian filmmaker has worked for more than two decades. “We were really creative partners on this because it is found footage,” Luhrmann said. “John brings a lot of the poetry to it.”

The result of that collaboration is EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a 96-minute film that explores a period in Presley’s life which, despite his cultural ubiquity, is perhaps also deeply misunderstood. “He wanted to go to Vegas, and they really thought he was going to do a nostalgia show, you know, just do the ’50s numbers and all of that, but [Elvis] wouldn’t have a part of it,” Luhrmann said.

Elvis Presley during his 1968 Comeback Special on American television.

“Elvis wanted a big sound. He wanted to take a song that Simon & Garfunkel did and make it his own,” Luhrmann said. “Bridge Over Troubled Water is an amazing song, but when Elvis takes it, it’s an amazing prayer.”

On the red carpet at the film’s premiere screening, as the Toronto International Film Festival marks its 50th anniversary, Luhrmann noted that the festival has been the launching stage for most of his major works, notably Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge (2001) and The Great Gatsby (2013).

Toronto is one of the “big four” international film festivals, Berlin in February, Cannes in May, Venice in August and Toronto in September. Of the four, TIFF is the most consciously outward facing: more than 250,000 ticket holders will pass through the festival’s turnstiles, attending screenings and other presentations.

Unsurprisingly, the reaction to EPiC: Elvis in Concert in Toronto at the weekend was overwhelmingly positive. But Luhrmann was hesitant to draw parallels between himself and Presley, gently dismissing the notion that they both possess showman-like qualities.

Elvis Presley in Concert premiere in Toronto.

“Showmanship can sometimes be misunderstood,” Luhrmann said. “Because when you see Elvis, one thing that I’m really sure you can see is that he’s also a very spiritual person. So if you go into a gospel church, or a spiritual place, there’s a degree of theatricality that also comes with a way of bringing an audience into ... a spiritual unity.

“You can sometimes go into the heart to go to the brain, or you can go into the brain to come to the heart, right? But the thing you try and do is bring them both along,” Luhrmann added.

It’s showtime … Baz Luhrmann at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“So I like to think that even though I make shows, they’re made for audience participation,” Luhrmann said. “They are made as showmanship, some people call it razzle-dazzle, but then right in the middle of it, I like to flip it and say yes, but it is about something. Whether that’s about growth through pain or impossible love, it is about something.”

Luhrmann’s keen interest in Presley’s life is well known. In 2022, he co-produced, co-wrote and directed the film Elvis, which chronicled the iconic music legend’s life. It starred Austin Butler as Presley and Tom Hanks as Presley’s famous manager, Colonel Tom Parker. The film won four BAFTAs, a Golden Globe and was nominated for eight Oscars.

It was during research for that film that Luhrmann said the recovery of potentially lost filmed material became a possibility. “Along the journey we thought we might be able to get some footage from Elvis’ Vegas shows and use it in the movie, and then we heard [it] might be mythical footage,” he said.

The film’s research team had access to storage facilities where film negatives of Elvis’ film and music archive were kept in cold storage – Luhrmann describes them as “the salt mines in Kansas” – and said he picked up the phone one day to be told the concert film negatives had been found.

But that treasure trove of 59 hours of film came with no sound, forcing Luhrmann’s sound editing team to spend the next two years syncing the recovered film’s extraordinary vision to surviving fragments of audio.

In that process, they found the film’s Holy Grail: a 45-minute lost audio track of Presley being interviewed, which was turned into the new film’s narration. “He just talked about his life, and he was so unguarded, and we thought, that’s it,” Luhrmann says. “We made the decision that we should let Elvis sing and tell his story himself.”

An Australian release date for the film has not yet been announced.