Director Baz Luhrmann mines ‘mythical’ Elvis footage for new film

Toronto – Australian film-maker Baz Luhrmann’s Epic: Elvis Presley In Concert, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept 6, is a love letter to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll seven years in the making.

A fusion of concert movie and quasi-documentary, it uses long-lost footage unearthed by the director while researching his Oscar-nominated drama Elvis (2022), starring American actor Austin Butler.

Luhrmann and his team gained extensive access to Presley’s Graceland family archive, as well as salt mines in Kansas where Warner Bros stored almost 60 hours of film negative in its cool, pitch-dark underground vaults for decades.

“We’d heard... there may be mythical footage,” Luhrmann told the Toronto premiere audience. “The guys went in and said, ‘Actually, we have found the negatives.’”

Some of the footage has never even been printed onto film reel previously. Hours more have been in the public domain only in the form of scratchy, poor-quality bootlegs.

Luhrmann, 62, restored the negatives in collaboration with New Zealand director Peter Jackson, who made the acclaimed documentary series The Beatles: Get Back (2021).

And much of the footage they tracked down had no accompanying sound. Making the film required the use of lip-readers to match film with disparate audio from various sources as accurately as possible.

Indeed, Luhrmann does not describe his latest effort as a documentary, but a “cinematic poem” – recognising its use of artistic licence.

For instance, though most of the sound uses Presley’s original vocal from stage, some voices and instruments had to be re-recorded.

Luhrmann uses the film to make the case that the singer was still at the peak of his performing powers in his late career, rather than the bloated, slurring caricature often associated with his swansong years.

In particular, Epic uses clips from Presley’s Vegas residency in 1970 and summer tour in 1972, as the singer returned to live performance after years in Hollywood.

“He became if not irrelevant, lost” during his 1960s movie-star period, said Luhrmann.

“When he was going to Vegas, they really thought he was going to do a nostalgia show, just the 1950s numbers and all of that. No. He wouldn’t have any part of it.”

Presley performed well over 1,000 shows in his final eight years before he died in 1977 at age 42.

The film takes viewers backstage as Presley banters and flirts with rehearsal session singers, and playfully covers songs by bands that had supposedly supplanted him, including English rock band The Beatles’ Yesterday (1965) and Something (1969).

The movie is entirely narrated by Presley, using a range of interviews, press conferences and a 50-minute audio-only interview he recorded while on tour that has never come out of the vault before.

“We made the decision that we should let Elvis sing and tell his story himself. That was really the choice,” said Luhrmann.

Epic does not yet have a distributor or release date – something Luhrmann and producers will be hoping changes after its standing-ovation reception in Toronto.

Luhrmann quipped that even after seven years, he still might not be done with Presley, explaining that he has enough footage to make a sequel.

“The more you dig on Elvis, the more unique you realise he is,” he said. AFP