Filmmaker Baz Luhrmann’s “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” which had its world premiere on the Toronto movie competition, is a love letter to the King of Rock and Roll seven years within the making.
A fusion of live performance film and quasi-documentary, it makes use of long-lost footage unearthed by the director whereas researching his 2022 Oscar-nominated drama “Elvis,” starring Austin Butler.
Luhrmann and his crew gained intensive entry to Presley’s Graceland household archive, in addition to salt mines in Kansas the place Warner Bros saved nearly 60 hours of movie damaging in its cool, pitch-dark underground vaults for many years.
“We’d heard… there may be mythical footage,” Luhrmann advised the Toronto premiere viewers. “The guys went in and said, ‘actually we have found the negatives.'”
Some of the footage has by no means even been printed onto movie reel beforehand. Hours extra has solely been within the public area within the type of scratchy, poor-quality bootlegs.
Luhrmann expensively restored the negatives in collaboration with Peter Jackson who made the acclaimed documentary “The Beatles: Get Back.”
And a lot of the footage they tracked down had no accompanying sound. Making the movie required the usage of lip-readers to match up movie with disparate audio from numerous sources as precisely as potential.
Indeed, the director doesn’t describe his newest effort as a documentary, however a “cinematic poem” — recognizing its use of creative license.
For occasion, although many of the sound makes use of Presley’s authentic vocal from stage, some voices and devices needed to be re-recorded.
Luhrmann makes use of the movie to make the case that the singer was nonetheless on the peak of his performing powers in his late profession, relatively than the bloated, slurring caricature typically related along with his swansong years.
In explicit, “EPiC” makes use of clips from Presley’s Vegas residency in 1970, and summer time tour in 1972, because the singer returned to dwell efficiency after years in Hollywood.
“He became if not irrelevant, lost” throughout his Nineteen Sixties movie-star interval, defined Luhrmann.
“When he was going to Vegas they really thought he was going to do a nostalgia show, just the ’50s numbers and all of that. No. He wouldn’t have any part of it.”
Presley carried out properly over 1,000 exhibits in his closing eight years.
The movie takes viewers backstage as Presley banters and flirts with rehearsal session singers, and playfully covers songs by bands that had supposedly supplanted him, together with the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and “Something.”
The film is completely narrated by Presley, utilizing a variety of interviews, press conferences, and a 50-minute audio-only interview he recorded whereas on tour that has by no means come out of the vault earlier than.
“We made the decision that we should let Elvis sing and tell his story himself. That was really the choice,” stated Luhrmann.
“EPiC” doesn’t but have a distributor or launch date — one thing Luhrmann and producers will likely be hoping adjustments after its standing-ovation reception in Toronto.
Luhrmann quipped that even after seven years, he nonetheless won’t be executed with Presley, explaining that he has sufficient footage to make a sequel.
“The more you dig on Elvis, the more unique you realize he is,” Luhrmann stated.
© 2025 AFP