Warner Bros. Pictures just released the first trailer for Elvis starring Austin Butler in the title role and Oscar winner Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker. Oscar nominee Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!) co-wrote the screenplay and directed the drama which explores the life of the iconic singer and delves into the relationship between the rock and roll legend and his controversial manager.
Warner Bros. hosted a special virtual press conference, moderated by author and filmmaker Nelson George and featuring Baz Luhrmann and Austin Butler, prior to the trailer’s worldwide release. Luhrmann, a self-described trailer nut, introduced the trailer during the press conference and then described in detail why he focused his attention on Elvis Presley.
“There are musical icons in my life that were so important to me. Now as a young guy I was an Elvis fan, but I don’t know that that fanhood was in any way the reason all these years later I wanted to do Elvis. The truth is that in this modern era, the life of Elvis Presley could not be a better canvas on which to explore America in the ‘50s, the ‘60s, and the ‘70s,” explained Luhrmann. “It’s a mythical life that he lived – 42 years. […] But that 42 years is three great lives put into a short period of time.
What’s extraordinary about it is that that life is culturally at the center of the ‘50s and socially the ‘60s, and actually the ‘70s. It’s a great canvas on which to explore America. That’s what drew me in. That, and a guy called Colonel Tom Parker who I always like to say was never a colonel, never a Tom, and never a Parker.”
People might be shocked to see Tom Hanks playing a villain of sorts – or at least the closest thing there is to a bad guy in Elvis’s story.
“You know, I think Tom…he ran towards that. I think it’s interesting because ‘villain’ is too easy to wrap it up. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying – because you just saw in the trailer – the trailer opens with, ‘There are some who say I am the villain of this story.’ […] He tells the story; he doesn’t go on to tell the story that says, ‘And they’re right.’ So from that character’s point of view, he’s defending, actually, his telling of that story.
It’s a device, and it’s a device because in truth when it comes to a historical character, there’s only ever somebody’s telling of that story. Even in life, if you lived with an Elvis or you lived with an Amadeus, it’s your memory, your version of their life. And people always tell the story of someone else from a perspective that is their telling. It’s a bit like I did [with] a little show called The Great Gatsby. It might be called The Great Gatsby but it’s actually Nick Carraway’s story,” explained Luhrmann.
Austin Butler (The Shannara Chronicles, Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood) was 27 when Baz Luhrmann cast him as Elvis and he’s 30 years old now. Butler’s had lots of time to reflect on the role and on the man he hopes to faithfully portray on screen.
Describing what drew him to the project, Butler said, “There’s many reasons but I think fundamentally getting to explore the humanity of somebody that has become the wallpaper of society in a way. He’s such an icon and he’s held up to a superhuman status. So, to get to explore that for years now and learn why he was the way that he was and find the human within that icon, that was really just such a joy. I could do it for the rest of my life, probably. But that paired with the fact that I get to work with one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live… I mean, this is just the joy of my lifetime.”
Capturing Elvis Presley’s Performances and Mannerisms
When Butler first took on the role, he set out to make his voice sound identical to Elvis Presley’s.
“That was my goal is if you heard a recording of me and you heard a recording of him, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,” said Butler. “I held that for a long time. What that does is it also instills fear…you know, this fear that I’m not going to achieve that or whatever, so that got the fire burning inside me to work and work and work.
For maybe a year before we even started shooting, I was doing six, seven days a week of voice coaching and working with different experts, just trying to get the register to be in the right place and the dialect and the way he inflected and everything.”
Butler eventually realized capturing the essence of Elvis was more important than becoming a vocal carbon copy. “You can impersonate somebody but to find the humanity and the life within and the passion and the heart… Ultimately, I had to release myself from the constraints of that and try and live the life as truthfully as possible,” said Butler.
Luhrmann revealed Elvis will be a mix of Austin Butler singing and Elvis’s real recordings.
“We came up with an unusual language – a musical language for the film – and that is that Austin would sing all the young Elvis but from about the ‘60s on, we would blend it with the real Elvis. So, when Elvis sings ‘In the Ghetto,’ it’s Elvis,” explained Luhrmann.
Baz Luhrmann was thrilled to be embraced by Elvis’s world and was even given space on standby in the barn at Graceland for 18 months. They also used Elvis Presley’s actual recording studio in Nashville.
As he immersed himself in Presley’s world, Luhrmann determined the early Sun Records recordings were wonderful but somewhat nostalgic. “But there’s a few rare recordings where the Colonel’s being interviewed and in the background you can hear Elvis on stage – and this is really early in the ‘50s. The way he’s singing and by [the] description of people that were there – I mean, he is the original punk in some regards – because they’re not nostalgic, they’re not polite. He’s wildly provocative.
If you read what’s written about Elvis in the early ‘50s, he really did get that RCA dog and roll around on the ground. There really were riots. I mean, I’ll get it wrong but another famous musician said…there’s a line in the movie: ‘When I first saw Elvis in the ‘50s I can not overstate how strange he looked and how shocking he was.’ Now, here’s our job. How do we translate strange and shocking to a contemporary audience?
So, to a certain degree, there are things we absolutely [can compare] apples to apples. I’d like to think you went, ‘Gee, that’s exactly like it was,’ [for the] ’68 Comeback Special, right, because it’s in the modern era. But there are other things where, as Austin said, it can’t be an impersonation. It’s got to be an interpretation because we don’t have the source material. And even if we did, it’s filtered through old, nostalgic technology,” explained Luhrmann.
Luhrmann said Austin Butler’s number one mission was to humanize Elvis Presley, and Butler had six months to really study Elvis before filming began.
“First, I just watched as much as I could and over and over and over. I didn’t look at or read or hear anything that didn’t have to do with Elvis for the entire duration. Thankfully, there’s so much incredible footage out there. But he also moved very differently in the ’50s and ‘60s and ‘70s. That’s just breaking it into three sections, then there’s many variations between those decades. So, it was ultimately just such a pleasure to get to take that time and study him, really.
I had an incredible movement coach named Polly Bennett who worked with Rami (Malek) on Bohemian Rhapsody. We really just delved into rather than looking at the external of how he may touch his face or how he moves his legs on stage – any physical thing that seems external – you ask the question, ‘Why does he do that? What is really coming up inside?’ And then I found that once you do that enough, then it stops feeling external and then it suddenly feels like it’s a part of you,” said Butler.
He continued: “It’s such an incredible responsibility. I feel not only a responsibility to Elvis and his life, and I feel a responsibility to Priscilla and Lisa Maria and his entire family, and all the people around the world that love him so dearly. I’ve used the analogy before but when I first started it really felt like when you’re a kid and you put on your father’s suit and the sleeves are much too long and the shoes are like boats on your feet. In the beginning I thought, ‘This is impossible. How could I possibly do anything but feel like I’m less than this superhuman individual?’
And then as time passed, at least for me, I started to feel like I grew into it and suddenly I felt his humanity more. And so, we got incredibly meticulous with things. But Baz also directs in such a way that we tried so much. We had takes where it was just purely for getting every finger to be in the exact same way that he moved, and then some where we just threw it away and allowed just the visceral life to come out.”
Elvis Presley’s Upbringing and Influences
Austin Butler said being able to go to Nashville and record with amazing gospel singers was an incredible gift. It allowed him to truly understand Elvis Presley’s influences and helped him capture Elvis’s passion for gospel music.
“The first time we walked into this little chapel and set up all these period microphones and got to go in there with 30 of the most incredible gospel singers and they’re stamping their feet … I stood in the center and tears just poured down my face and I got chills down my spine,” said Butler. “It’s a glorious experience, that. And it’s hard not to have it in your marrow at that point. So, it was experiences like that along the way that really showed me how much gospel and spirituals influenced Elvis on a musical level, on a spiritual level, on the way that he moved, on the freedom of his body. It was really beautiful.”
Luhrmann described how during the production they located a neighbor of Elvis’s who shared his memories of Elvis growing up. The neighbor described Elvis as living with his mother in the one white designated house in a Black community in Tupelo. Elvis used to run with them as a group and they’d get naughty and visit juke joints in the Shakerag district. The neighbor said Elvis would also completely lose himself to the music in a gospel tent.
Luhrmann came from a tiny town and no matter the project, be it Moulin Rouge!, The Great Gatsby, or The Get Down, he always considers himself to be an outsider to the world inhabited by his characters. As an outsider, he needs to completely immerse himself in the environments portrayed in his films.
“That’s why I make films so infrequently. The greatest joy for me is to be an outsider and to live it. And the thing that became so apparent to me by living it in Memphis and living the story is that actually the number one thing about Elvis Presley’s journey is that Black music and culture isn’t a side note or a footnote or a bit. It’s absolutely the canvas on which the story is writ. Meaning, if you take that out of the Elvis Presley story, there’s no story.
He grew up in the community from the get-go. I mean, the idea of him on Beale Street sometimes being the only white face in Club Handy…the owner of Club Handy says that. He was on Beale Street. From the get-go, that’s there. You have the Civil Rights Movement emerging. You have him becoming a problem in terms of jumping the race line. He’s a problem. It’s dangerous.
This is where we now have to segue and start talking about the Colonel. This is not the moment of talking in great detail about it because spoiler alert, but something has to be done about this Elvis kid. And something is done about this Elvis kid – spoiler alert. And eventually the journey of Elvis is to get back to who he really is, and that is in the trailer. And who he really is is gospel music and gospel music is spiritual.”
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Warner Bros. Pictures will release Elvis in North America on June 24, 2022 and internationally on June 22, 2022.
In addition to Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, Elvis stars Helen Thomson as Gladys Presley, Richard Roxburgh as Vernon Presley, and Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley. Luke Bracey plays Jerry Schilling, Natasha Bassett is Dixie Locke, and David Wenham is Hank Snow.
The cast also includes Kelvin Harrison Jr. as B.B. King, Xavier Samuel as Scotty Moore, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Jimmie Rodgers Snow.
