Baz Luhrmann on the Burning Love Behind ‘EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert’

Baz Luhrmann is about to dive back into his long-aborning Joan of Arc movie. But before he does, he had to return to the Elvis well, and the King’s new and returning subjects are glad he did. “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert” opened exclusively in Imax theaters this weekend before going wider to slightly smaller screens on Friday. there was little doubt the audience for Presley is still there, or at least for an Elvis seen through the eyes of one of contemporary cinema’s biggest name-brand directors.

“EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert” may not make it to the $151 million domestic gross achieved by the director’s 2022 biopic “Elvis” in 2022, but weekend results were strong in the initial 325 Imax theaters that played it this weekend, with a $10,000-per-screen average, the highest of any film on the chart. So Luhrmann can already claim victory in his crusade to immerse contemporary audiences in what he considers to have actually been Presley’s peak period as a performer, when he first started playing Las Vegas at the very end of the ’60s and beginning of the ’70s. Critics as well as the Elvis flock have taken to it: Variety‘s review, by Owen Gleiberman out of its Toronto premiere, called it “one of the most exciting concert films you’ve ever seen.”

Prior to his personally touring a series of international Imax unveilingss, Variety spoke with Luhrmann over Zoom at his compound in Australia, where he carefully maneuvered the camera to not reveal any “Jehanne d’Arc” spoilers plastered across nearby walls. But there’s nothing to spoil about his contention that, in his mind, Elvis Presley is America… at any size, but preferably at about 45 feet tall, enshrined in full motion in Hollywood Blvd.’s vaunted Chinese Theatre.

First off, how are you?

I am extraordinarily absorbed and busy, and it’s just been my nature since childhood. I’m just always making things and doing things. And I’m deeply absorbed in my big movie, “Jehanne d’Arc,” which is driving ahead. But now I take a moment for this completely different work, which is trying to get as many people — fans and new audiences — to see “EPiC” on the biggest screen possible. I have to pause and shout out John O. Redmond, my editor of at least 20 years, who’s the creative partner in this and drove it as much as I did. Our big focus is to make a theatrical cinematic experience, and to make it feel as much as possible like you’re actually in the audience and your experience of Elvis is kind of unfiltered. So part of that is me going out and encouraging people to not wait to stream it, to get out and be part of a theatrical experience. Bluntly, it’s a passion of mine.

Putting it on Imax screens exclusively for one week before it goes wider is one way of getting that messaging across. And personal appearances you’re making at some Imax screenings.

Absolutely, man. I’ve been actually in the Gold Coast, where I have my creative facility, then I go to Sydney, which is an outdoor experience with thousands of people, and then that night to the biggest Imax screen in the world, which ia Melbourne. Then I go directly out the back door of that to London, then to L.A. We are doing it at the TCL, the old Mann’s Chinese, in Imax, and I’m thrilled about L.A. because of the memory I have of coming out of COVID.

Quick side story. After being locked down for two years and working in Australia on “Elvis,” the movie, I was finally able to leave and I came to the U.S., landed, and the first thing we said we would do — with masks on and all of that — was “Let’s go down to see a movie.” I walked into TCL and “Dune” was on, which I didn’t want to see on streaming, in thistheater I dearly love. I saw the opening night of “Titanic” there with Leonardo. So I walk up the stairs, thinking, “Oh God, what’s it gonna be like — will there be anyone here? Iit a good idea to go to the theater?” And as I go up the stairs, I can see the screen., and I just stood there and looked at the vast image and the sound, and I just went, “I’m home. I am home.” So the idea that something the whole team has toiled so passionately on is gonna be seen at the TCL, I think for me, that’ll be a historic moment in my journey.

This includes footage that was shot for a couple of Elvis concert films in the early ‘70s. I liked those films, but I admit I haven’t seen either of them since I had them on laserdisc in the ‘90s… which is similar to a lot of people’s experience, except maybe minus the laserdisc part. So for those of us without a clear memory of those films, how much of them might be carrying over into what you have in your film, albeit with a big upgrade?

Yeah, I can tell you. Look, I loved them too. I really did. But the quick narrative is: I’m making “Elvis,” and I hear from John that there might be these lost reels. He said, “Look, if you’re able to get the funds, maybe try and find these reels.” And Ernst Jorgenson, who is probably the premium expert on Elvis in the world, says to me, “Try and get the funds.” And I go, “OK, maybe we can use some of these extra reels,” as supplementary footage of the (Las Vegas) showroom, which I didn’t have in the film at that point. So we got the funds, we go looking, and to our surprise, we find 69 boxes. I didn’t go there, but it’s literally in the salt mines in Kansas City where the negatives of the whole MGM collection are kept so that they don’t rot. When the guys find it, they start sending pictures — boxes everywhere, some are mislabeled, some stuff missing, some not. Wow. So we bring it out and we print some of it. I go, “Look, this is too big a job right now. I’m gonna build the showroom (as a practical set). We’re not gonna use it.”

But now we have 59 hours of not just “That’s the Way It Is,” but “Elvis on Tour,” and some 8mm. And most tellingly, we have this audio — about 50 minutes of it — of Elvis just talking about his life in a way in which you really never hear him talk. So all the way through making “Elvis,” we said, “We’ve got to do something.” And the Elvis fans got wind of it, and it was a bit like, “Release the video! Release the footage!” Like, “Release the files! — the Elvis Files.” And I contemplated: Do we just kind of do a reboot of “That’s the Way It Is” and “Elvis on Tour”? But then we also had this 8mm that was extraordinary, and we had this audio, and we also got things like the full Hampton Road concert (shot on 1972 at the Hampton Roads Coliseum in Virginia for “Elvis on Tour”). But we only had negatives and we didn’t have the sound.

I was so lucky to work with Peter Jackson and his remarkable team at his studio, because you know how Peter had done refurbed the Beatles (for the “Get Back” docuseries). And Park Road have a particular gift for (upgrading) 35mm anamorphic. MGM shot in 35mm anamorphic for “That’s the Way It Is.” Then you had 16 and you had 8. I wanted to bring it all up to Imax quality, so that’s expensive. And then we spent two years trying to find the sound. The mag tape wasn’t there, so we had to find audio. Sometimes we had people in car parks in the middle of the night trading bootleg stuff. I mean, the bootleg industry for Elvis is gargantuan.But the concept becomes: Why don’t we do something that never really happens when it comes to either an Elvis doc or even a concert film, and just let Elvis tell his story — sing it and tell it to you — almost like in a dreamscape?

Now, John O. Redmond will be able tell you what’s in this exactly frame by frame. [For more of that, look to a separate interview with Redmond about making the film, coming up in Variety.] There are some bits that are in “That’s the Way It Is,” and there are some bits that look like they’re in “That’s the Way It Is,” but actually aren’t; it’s a different night, or a different angle. Then there is a significant percentage of the footage which is material that just simply has not been seen. Or maybe some seconds or some minutes have been bootlegged.

I’ll give you an example. There’s an amazing bit I love where Elvis was just sitting with the guitar and he is doing “Little Sister,” and he segueways into “Get Back.” Now, there’s pirated black-and-white stuff out there, but through Park Road we were able to print it and bring it back into a colorscape. Or, when he sings “How Great Thou Art” in the gospel section, 16mm, that’s just never been released. Some of it you would’ve seen in very scratchy bootleg versions. But even if you’ve seen some of it in “That’s the Way It Is,” you’ve never seen it like this… In our movie you see Sammy Davis Jr. and Cary Grant backstage, and we’ve been able to dig back the sound. You’ve seen that footage occasionally, pirated, but we found the sound of what they actually say.

And we had the original Elvis voice, we have the band, but sometimes I’m going from him singing on stage to him talking. Or we’ve done these DNAs where we’ve kind of made new Elvis songs. So it’s meant to be a dreamscape, and that distinguishes it from “That’s the Way It Is.” But what I do want to say is, even in Toronto (it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival), people were geeking out about the quality. The image is three times the size of my building I’m in, if you’re in a big Imax. But what we really did was make it sound and feel like you’re actually there.

For a lot of us who grew up after the main Elvis era, we go through a journey where we come to worship the Sun Sessions of the ‘60s, and things like the ’68 comeback special, but generally, Elvis later on represents something to us that is spoiled or gone to seed. And so there’s this dichotomy: Black Leather Elvis, cool. White Suit Elvis, not cool. And the average person almost has to put some effort into listening to the boxed sets RCA has put out over the years from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to discover how much of value is there. There’s still this fallacy we have to get over that Las Vegas was just, in its entirety, not a great period.

Yeah. A thousand percent. You’re dead right — the black leather, cool, but the white jumpsuit, because it’s associated with his extremely fast decline at such a young, young age… And with Las Vebgas… He does it once and twice, and then he does the 15 cities/15-day tour, great. Then does it again, and then does it again, and then does it again, and then does it again. He doesn’t quite know, like a bird hitting a glass window, why the hell he can’t go and do the world tour that he so desperately wants to do. And then as with all of those artists that are beyond music but are actually cultural icons, all of the corruptive things come, and the body becomes corrupted. So what we remember is the Halloween costume — the cheesy white jumpsuit that people wear at Halloween with the glasses, or the wedding chapel send-up guy or the impersonators.

And what gets lost is that when he first did that show, everyone expected him to do a nostalgia show, but he was totally on the cutting edge. And the big sound, like taking “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and turning it into this giant gospel power ballad … I spoke to Clive Davis, and he said, “I was there opening night, and you know what? I still to this day have never seen a night like that,” talking about the opening night, the ‘69 show. The white suit doesn’t come till 1970, because that’s when they film it. But he said, “They had to stop him from doing cartwheels.” The energy on stage was just on another level.

So what has been forgotten is that his absolute pinnacle, his true pinnacle, are those very early Vegas shows. The other thing I think is worth taking into account is that the critics were all flown in by Colonel Parker, and it was a time of the counterculture and the Beatles were breaking up. They came basically with an attitude of like, “This is gonna be a bit of a joke,” and they were utterly blown away by the artistry and the sheer stage power. One thing that I love in the film, for me, personally, is when he is covering the Beatles or doing a Bob Dylan song. Bob Dylan actually said, “The highlight of my career, that’s easy, Elvis recording one of my songs.”

I mean, even the white jumpsuit, by the way: If you look at Mick Jagger and Freddie Mercury, the jumpsuit becomes this huge rock ‘n’ roll iconic thing. Mick wore it, Freddie wore it. But it comes from Elvis.

One thing not everyone will be aware of before seeing this is how great the TCB Band is, with some of the greatest players in the world, on their game.

What do you think the privilege is like to be able to work with this stuff? I’ve produced a lot of music; I’ve been working with RCA for, like, 15 years;I’ve had a label with them. But to be able to isolate just Ronnie Tutt’s drumming… the Tuttster’s drumming… He’s surrounded by the best. And when you see Elvis rehearsing, he sings the top lines — like, he sings the orchestrations — and he’ll go, “No, no, no, let’s go up here.” It’s in his head. And I think what gets lost again in the whole white jumpsuit kind of Halloween costume smoke is what an awesome and profoundly gifted musician he was. He’d just pick up and sing anything. By the way, think of the voice. So, he’s starting as a high tenor in the ‘50s. But he’s so obsessed with Mario Lanza and opera singers, and he says in our film, “I listen to everything,” and he’s always working on his voice. By the end of it, he’s truly got operatic tone.

You have some augmented or drastically remixed tracks in the film and on the soundtrack.

Working with Jamieson Shaw, we started doing this on “Elvis” the movie, thinking, instead of just having score all the time — although we do have score in this —sometimes we go, “Well, why don’t we just make a new Elvis track?” … We have this small section of Elvis singing “Oh, Happy Day” with the Sweets [the Sweet Inspirations]. We started the movie with him singing that, but he always dreamed of singing with really giant Black gospel choirs, because as you know, he would go when he was a kid and see people like Mahalia Jackson. Elvis was always mixing white and Black gospel. So we have him singing with the Sweets, but then we also recorded choirs in churches in the South, so that we could realize slightly the dream, in this dreamscape, of Elvis singing “Happy Day” with a giant gospel choir. And a big shout-out to our lovely friends in the South who recorded that for us. It’s just going like, well, what if… wouldn’t it be amazing… we’re always asking the question, what would Elvis do?

If you read reviews of the comeback special, some of the (critics) said, “Once again, Elvis is selling sex, but really can’t sing.” I mean, I work in opera. I’ve worked with the greatest singers in the world. And he’s almost like Orpheus, he’s so gifted. I’ve heard the raw vocals. He never recorded in studios with a drop mic; he always had a handheld. So when he’s on stage, the clarity and the evenness of the vocal, even with a pretty crap sound system, is so great. That’s because he’s basically mixing it himself, by mic technique. Which is a thing you just learn — when you bring it in and out, basically, you’re balancing yourself. I’ve heard raw tracks of all sorts of icons, and he has the greatest mic technique of any vocal artist that ever existed.

Do you have a favorite performance of his that’s in the film?

Well, I always avoid doing lists. But, I really lock in every single time when he does “Polk Salad Annie,” because it’s so random. When he goes into the onomatopoeia…I don’t wanna be the world’s biggest name dropper, but a famous, famous, iconic singer of a famous band who I dearly love as a friend said to me, “Oh, the thing about us is, we rehearse, but Elvis never rehearsed moves. It’s a bit like he’s in a spiritual state. He just kind of felt it.” And you see it in “Polk Salad,” him just feeling the music and doing the scat, and then the movement, and then what he does at the end — he’s not so much making it up as he’s going along as just feeling it and passing it on to the audience. And I think that’s why he’s so enigmatic on stage, is that not only does the audience not know what he’s gonna do, the band didn’t know what he was gonna do. Ronnie Tutt said, “We had to glue our eyes to him because we were like, what’s he gonna do next?” That’s why he’s so remarkable as a live performer, because he is literally like a live wire. For a person who’s so uncomfortable off-stage, he’s so comfortable on stage. It’s like you’re in his lounge room, hanging out.

Speaking of iconic singers of famous bands. Bono has been very interested in Elvis all along, even writing a song on “The Unforgettable Fire” that is essentially his poem about Elvis. Here, you have Bono delivering another poem speaking at the end of the movie. How did that come about?

If you saw the show the guys did in Vegas in the Sphere, there’s a lot of Elvis in that, you know? Bono is a real friend, and we’ve collaborated way back in “Moulin Rouge,” and he was such a help on this, just as a cheerleader. I was in the South of France where he lives, and he said, “Look, I’ve written a poem about Elvis,” and he read it to me. John O. and I were thinking, how do we end this? You can’t wrap it up with a comment. Is it another song? And John O. put the poem in, and it seemed to be a great way, with a film that is really, I think in itself, a poem, to end poetically. So I rang Bono, and he said, “Absolutely, I’m honored that you would use it.”

You’ve been on such a mission with Elvis, so you must feel gratified that, with the previous film, the world kind of came along with your vision. There has been a fear among some Elvis fans that his core audience will die off, and even the next generations, over time, so will people still be going to Graceland in 50 or 75 years? You forestalled that, to a degree, or at least gave him a major cultural turbo boost. Even though the feature film will probably always be the biggest thing you do for Elvis, it looks like this is going to be kind of a continuum through your life.

Look, it wasn’t planned that way. I mean, I was affected by Elvis as a child, but I also went on to other artists as I grew up — Bowie and Michael Jackson and Elton John, for sure, who I love and work with. But Elvis was always there, more than just as a musician or even a pop icon. He was America in so many ways, through the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s — the incredible rebellious energy, the kind of cool family part, but also then almost rising up like a god, and then the descent. And even in his most corrupted bodily state at the end of his life, he sings “Unchained Melody” with probably the best voice he’s ever had.

I did not intend to become this enmeshed in the curation of Elvis. But to your question, the gratification for me — and it’s a little bit unexpected — was to give Elvis a fair voice. It’s not particularly my vision. Of course, any storytelling is somebody’s storytelling. But when I spent all that time in the South, I found Sam Bell —  very hard to find him, actually; an older gentleman of color who, when Elvis lived in one of the very few white houses in the Black community, told the story about how they grew up. And I really realized at that point the impact of Elvis… and you can’t extract him from the story of America. He’s that central to so many key things.

I think about what’s going on in America right now. And if you want to know what Elvis might think — and I’m not gonna answer for him; he didn’t often use words — it’s in the song choices. I’m so happy we’ve got “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” or “In the Ghetto” in this show. And people did not want him to record those songs… Now we know through the data that not only have we picked up a truly surprising percentage of young audience that have discovered audience Elvis anew, but even little kids jump up and down in front of the television watching the “Elvis” movie. It’s Elvis’ energy. It moves through time and geography.

More than gratified, I feel privileged to have been the curator to help it be guided away from what I consider to be an ossification — not malicious or on purpose, but an unfair unfair rusting, an untruthful summation, turning Elvis into a trope. It happens. And I wanted to take the trope, shake off the rust and help guide and reveal Elvis for the artist that he is, but also most importantly, the impact that he had on culture and on America as a whole. And the world. And the world — that’s the thing. We know why he didn’t have the world tour [as explored in the earlier “Elvis” film: Colonel Tom Parker had his sway]. And honestly, we are going to give Elvis the world tour he dreamed of. Because he’s gonna be playing on the biggest screens in the world. In Toronto, people actually came up to me and said, “I couldn’t work out whether I was in the audience or not. It felt like I was at the show.”

Are you still thinking about doing a stage-musical adaptation of the Elvis story?

Yeah, actually… I don’t know if it’s announced; I’ll get in trouble. But definitely… Let us put it this way: serious work is being done on the Elvis stage show, based on the movie.

Good enough. And then to ask briefly about the Joan of Arc film’s progress…

I’m so deep in it. The reason I’m shooting this corner of my atelier [on a Zoom call] is because the rest of it is just plastered with story structure and script. We have this extraordinarily gifted, gifted, gifted young actor (Isla Johnston) who’s quietly doing all it’s gonna take. Because it’s gonna take time. I always take time. But I am building medieval France! You know, there’s not a lot of medieval France hanging around ready to be photographed. So it’s not quick, but I’m deep in it. As soon as I finish the tour of Elvis, I’m back to “Jehanne d’Arc,” and that will be my next journey. And yet another character who has actually been kind of relegated to a bit of a trope and a little bit forgotten. I like to be involved in those iconic characters from the past who you sort of wish their power and their guidance and their light was around today. Who, in different ways, were the most surprising candidate to have so much of an effect on the world.