TheElvisdirectors opulent movies arent for everyone, and hes okay with that.
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Baz Luhrmann knows how to make an entrance.
Luhrmanns hair is perfect.
To date,Elvishas made $286 million globally.
My whole lifes about trying to contain the chaos of my mind, he says.
Theres too much cutting, too many angles.Actually,Strictly Ballroomhad that same complaint.
Too much cutting in the musical numbers?And too many close-ups.
I cant just sit back and eat my popcorn.
I need to absorb this information.
In all of my films I have what I call signing the contract.
A contract between characters?Between the movie and the audience.
The movie offers the audience a contract, and the audience either accepts the contract or not.
InRomeo + Juliet, its, Now, wheres Romeo?
And hes down on the beach.
After that, youre into the style of the film or youre not.
Youre coming with us or youre not.
And some people do leave the theater and go,I dont know what this shit is.
You drastically mix modes in your films, in ways that perhaps older movies might.
He flips the coin all the time.
My upbringing was in a very isolated place where we only had one black-and-white television.
My diet was old movies.
I think I skipped a generation and I was programmed by films likeCitizen KaneandThe Red Shoes.
It was programming that was sort of dumped out on regional television.
I always make my movies for the future, not for the present.
I want them to have relevance later.
You keep moving between cinema and theater.
And also the reverse?Yes.
And then we cut to a wide shot of the army coming across.
You, the actor, bring the audience in closer.
Now, of course, I might use lighting to help you, the actor, with your close-up.
But whats important in theater is that you, the actor, givemea close-up.
The audience looks wherever the actor is looking.
So in theater, the actor is the camera?
And in cinema, the camera is the actor?Something like that.
Its all about where we want the collective eye to go.
Theatricality is central to most of your movies.
All-powerful Barry Fife inStrictly Ballroomis Zidler inMoulin Rouge!, and the colonel inElvis.
Theres always a Colonel Tom Parker.
And theres always a Christian inMoulin Rouge!
a writer or a pure soul.
And then theres Satine.
She is the muse and the idol and the perfect love.
The real relationship inElvisis with the audience.
The movie is not what I expected from an Elvis biopic.
I described it to friends asThe Last Temptation of Elvis.
Elvis Presley has always sat in my mind since childhood.
When I wasballroom dancing, I did it to Burning Love.
But I didnt set out through fandom to doElvis.
I like to look at Shakespeare.
He continually takes historical figures and uses them to explore a larger idea.
Another example, and certainly the best one for me, isAmadeus.
Peter Shaffer wrote the play.
Its historically researched very well, but theres a preposterous conceit at the center of it.
Salieri did exist, Salieri was jealous.
Did Salieri really commission Mozart to write a requiem for his father to send him to his grave?
What is the larger idea ofElvis?I think its the great tragic American opera.
And I dont just mean opera as in vocals.
Operas tend to be vast.
They have big internal emotions, and they speak to a larger truth, usually about worlds.
Theres this kind of beautiful Camelot moment with Kennedy, lost somewhat in the purple haze of Vietnam.
When Kennedy gets shot, the disillusionment begins, and the disintegration begins.
The death of Martin Luther King Jr., the drugs and malaise of the 70s.
He finds himself growing up in one of the few white houses in a Black community.
Elvis is amongst all that.
The time Colonel Tom came into was the time America started moving directly toward populism.
Put your brand on things.
Elvis and the colonel come together as an atomic explosion.
I was shooting a ratio of 1:2 or something stupid, so it all had to be engineered.
I had to know exactly what the film was going to be.
You probably had to rehearse the hell out of everything, not just the dance numbers.Everything.
Austin Butler did not leave the character for two years.
They want to play.
Thats why they call it aplay.
So my job in the creative process is to keep fear away.
How do I get the actors to go out on that limb?
By keeping fear outside the door and saying, You cant fail.
In your way, youre as much of an obsessive as Stanley Kubrick.Im probably the Stanley Kubrick of confetti.
I dont put myself in the same gauge as Stanley.
But Ill tell you something.
Stanley, Wes Anderson, me, Quentin Tarantino we all have our own language.
And you dont have a language unless you know how to write in it.
David Lynch is another one like that.
Campbell Soup cans, seriously?A lot of that comes back to the shock of thenew.
Thenew, thedifferent, is never going to come wrapped up in an easy-to-understand package.
I mean, Im not new anymore, Im 60.
But back in theStrictly Ballroomdays, who would think that little film would causesuch a ruckus critically?
It was like I had burned the tenets of the cinema in my basement or something.
Any time your name comes up you hear the same complaints: Hes exhausting.
He cuts too fast.
But Im not swimming between the flags, as we say in Australia.
Its the singular relationship with the audience.
You cant just arbitrarily do a thing because you feel like it.
The reality has got to be so immaculate that within it, the audience will buy into the world.
Its alsoProsperos Island, if you want to take it back to Shakespeare.Thats exactly right.
You take it back to Prosperos Island which, by the way, is a great metaphor for Australia.
Shakespeare always has both realistic human beings and a spirit world.
At best, theyre mixed.
Its an old Hollywood character-actor performance, like Joseph Cotten inCitizen Kanewhen hes wearing old-age makeup.
But it seems to fit the tone of the movie.And also the colonel himself.
He was so brilliant at pulling the wool over peoples eyes.
He called that snowing.
It was a real thing.
LBJ was a member of the Snowmens League.
He was entered into it by Colonel Tom Parker!
It was free to get in, but it cost $100,000 to get out.
There was aSnowmens Rulebook.
He gave you the rulebook, and there was nothing in the pages.
Tom and I talked about all this.
Eventually he needed money so much that he just sold all his artifacts to the estate.
Amidst the stuff was a tape recorder.
The colonel was crazy about taping himself, so Ive got all these audio recordings of the colonel.
So Tom had to look at all of that.
Toms voice and accent are accurate to the colonel.
Theres a coldness in the colonel.
We dont really know why he ran.
We know that he comes to America, and we know that he reinvents himself.
But he goes out of his way to disappear, to transform himself.
There was an amnesty for being an illegal immigrant.
He could easily have taken it.
One reason he overpaid in tax is that he absolutely did not want to leave the country.
1 focus was never traveling outside of the United States.
The colonel left so much money on the table by not letting Elvis tour internationally.
Despots are like that.
When the colonel expresses love for Elvis, he really loves Elvis,in that moment.
His behavior is both conscious and unconscious.
The camera soars during those moments.It exalts.
And it does not seem like this is an incidental or random touch.
You have to set those shots up.
And that comes from, I think, the early involvement with the church.
Thats why I make gospel music the spine of the whole movie.
He only ever won a Grammy for gospel.
Essentially he has his residency in hell, arranged by Colonel Tom Parker.
And yet paradoxically, thats the place that is most like a church for Elvis.
Hes the pastor.Its a cathedral.
Im like,Okay, youve got my attention.Turns out its by this young guy called Austin Butler.
He lost his mother at the same age Elvis did a deeply traumatic thing for him.
And apparently he sent in another video earlier to audition forElvis.
And his agent, James, said, Youve got to send it in, and he does.
I remember asking maybe a month later, Wheres he from in the South?
I was told, Hes from Anaheim, actually.
I never heard him speak in his own voice until just recently.
But it wasnt that I went, Bang, hes it.
Hes talked about what he describes as afive-monthaudition.
So what youve got to do is find the language that brings together Austin and Elvis.
Thats what you have to create.
For all of my confetti drops, I come from an acting background.
No matter what I do, its resting ontheirshoulders.
And history will look back and understand the weight that rested on this young mans shoulders.
And then he had to face a moment where the film went away because of COVID.
Like, we wereover.
Its going to come back, I know it.
And he would not let it go.
Now, some of his clothes were beautifully made.
When you go to the archives there are, in fact, some Gucci pieces from the 70s.
But other items are just stuff that Elvis liked.
You know those famous Elvis sunglasses, the metallic ones with the holes in the side?
They were just something he saw at a roadside gas station.
He adapted those to becomehissunglasses.
Put it in the movie, right?
But there are two problems with that.
One is, we know what happens in the act of making a movie.
The other problem is well, let me tell you a story.
See, in those days, you couldnt make something sparkle on film like real diamonds.
You needed real diamonds.
So that necklace is real.
Its worth $2.5 million.
Luckily, now it’s possible for you to just do the sparkle in post.
How do you research Elviss jumpsuits?You go tothe jumpsuit museum at Graceland its really well done.
And thats where the brilliance of C.M.
We did not use that original leather jumpsuit.
And we didnt have time to cut Austin out of a horse-leather jumpsuit every time we did a take.
and her team got with the original manufacturers of the jumpsuit.
They worked in collaboration.
Things like that are done thread by thread, decoration by decoration: absolute copies.
Im a research nut bag.
I have a great research team, and Ive got anoffice in Graceland.
Lookhow long it takes me to make a movie!
But I find a way of coding all of that research under the story.
Take that 30-second sequence during theHayridescene where Elvis walks on the stage and wriggles around.
I could show you about four historical references that are hidden inside that one scene.
The layers are designed so that you might see the movie over and over again.
The wriggling thing where the women burst into screams actually comes from the first time he performedon the bandshell.
But I didnt put those references in there to be Easter eggs.
I put them in there because they helped me.
What Im saying is, I become so saturated with the facts that then one interprets.
Because in the end, even the best, most detailed biographical drama is an interpretation.
To what degree isElvisabout you?Its everything Im about.
Elviss documentary is calledThe Searcher.
I think somehow, also, Im probably searching.
Always trying to make it good.
Im always moving forward.
I think the search is actually about not being constrained.
