Baz Luhrmann: ‘There’s the image of Elvis and then there’s the man’

Interview Baz Luhrmann: ‘There’s the image of Elvis and then there’s the man’ Jim Farber The singular director has made a second film about the King of Rock, and Roll and this time audiences will get to see a side of him they’ve never seen before I n the spring of 1972, a film crew trailed Elvis Presley everywhere he went to capture a pivotal moment in his career – his first tour in nearly a decade. Ironically, one of the most crucial things that happened during that project occurred way off camera. “We really wanted to get an interview with Elvis on film,” said Jerry Schilling, a confidant and employee of the King who at that time was working for the company behind the movie. “But he was tired when we were going to do it and for whatever reason we never wound up getting anything on camera.” They did, however, get Presley to talk casually on tape for about 40 minutes, during which he said things he never put on record before. That was enough to raise concerns for his notoriously censorious manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who insured that little of that talk saw the light of day during his lifetime. Now, more than five decades later, significant parts of that audio tape are finally being heard in a new film by Baz Luhrmann , who four years ago directed the global blockbuster biopic Elvis. His follow-up, titled Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert, is far from the conventional concert movie its title implies, thanks in key part to that interview. The tape “was our lightbulb moment”, said Lurhmann by Zoom from his office in LA. “Because Elvis was off camera when it was taped, I think he was really unguarded and really open hearted. We thought, ‘What if we use this in the film so that Elvis tells his story himself?’” Quotes from that interview wound up functioning as the film’s thematic spine, connecting a mad swirl of images, voice overs and editing derring-dos that turn the movie into what the director calls “a dreamscape poem of Elvis”. That approach – hallucinogenic in tone ...