1 day ago
9
When Baz Luhrmann was directing his 2022 film “Elvis,” he heard about some mythical missing reels from the 1970 documentary “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is.” Luhrmann was intrigued, mainly because he thought he could use the footage in his film for an elaborate showroom sequence and thus avoid building a huge set and employing hundreds of extras. When he sent an associate into the Kansas City salt mine where MGM keeps its negatives, he discovered that there was something even more valuable hidden in the studio’s collection.
“It was a little bit ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ Luhrmann told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, describing the room that housed the missing reels. “There were 65 boxes, some with stuff stolen or missing, and all rotting.” Luhrmann had the boxes shipped back to Warner Bros. and realized the footage was all disintegrating in the film cans; he also realized it was a treasure trove of “That’s the Way It Is” outtakes, 16mm behind-the-scenes footage of Elvis’ concert tour, and even some rare 8mm, none of which had sound. The material didn’t work for “Elvis” — Luhrmann ended up building that showroom after all — but it was too valuable for Luhrmann to ignore.
“At the end of [‘Elvis’], my editor Jonathan Redmond and I were like, ‘What are we going to do? We’ve got to do something with this,” Luhrmann said. The answer came when Luhrmann discovered a tape of Elvis Presley speaking in his own voice about his life, completely unguarded. “I cannot overstate how rare this is. That was a sort of light bulb moment: what if we just got out of the way and let Elvis tell us his story and sing us his story in a dreamscape? That was a liberation and the beginning of an epic journey.”
The result of that journey is “EPiC: Elvis Presley Live in Concert,” a gloriously exuberant celebration of The King that’s unlike any concert film or music documentary ever made. It’s an impressionistic and immersive portrait of Elvis at a peak moment in his artistry, when he was performing up to three shows a night in Las Vegas and interpreting everything from his own classics to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” and The Beatles’ “Get Back.” The Beatles song is only one connection between “EPiC” and Peter Jackson’s 2021 docuseries “The Beatles: Get Back”; Luhrmann worked with Jackson’s Park Road Post to employ the same technology that was used to restore the old Beatles footage to save those vinegar syndrome-afflicted film cans from the salt mine.
First, however, Luhrmann had to find the missing sound for all the material in MGM’s archives. Because “Elvis” was a success, Luhrmann was able to hire a researcher who he said was really more of a full-time detective to track down the audio, which often involved shady exchanges in parking lots with people selling a few minutes of sound at a time on the black market. In some cases Luhrmann had to convince collectors who didn’t want to part with their material that his intentions were pure, meeting with them multiple times until they trusted him with crucial footage.
Once Luhrmann had all of the material, he took it to Jackson’s Park Road so they could restore the footage to its original glory. Luhrmann was intent on presenting Elvis and his music as they were, so the idea was to preserve the footage without altering it. “There’s not a frame of AI in this film,” Luhrmann said. “There’s not a visual effect. What Peter and his team do is take the negative and take the abrasions out of it and reproduce it at its highest quality. Then we take it back for color grading, which is a very sensitive art. It’s just spending hours and hours, which I did with our colorist.”
The rigorous work pays off in “EPiC,” which looks and sounds like it was shot yesterday. “The pictorial resolution is achieved through painstaking love,” Luhrmann said. “Peter and his team have this love and there’s no one like them on the planet. Think of what they did with that first World War picture [‘They Shall Not Grow Old’]. Think of what they did with The Beatles.” The restoration work and the enveloping sound design by Wayne Pashley make “EPiC” an extraordinarily visceral experience that not only brings the viewer inside Presley’s perspective but gives a sense of what it would have been like to attend one of his concerts.
“We wanted to make it as much as possible like you’re actually at a concert with Elvis,” Luhrmann said, which is why he encourages audiences to see it on the biggest screen available — preferably IMAX. Although the movie is a typically maximalist Baz Luhrmann spectacle, its production was much smaller than he’s used to, and that made it particularly pleasurable. “I’m not saying I don’t enjoy [making other films], but everything is usually fraught with labor and complexity and is a mountain climb. Here we were a tiny little team and it was probably the most enjoyable thing I’ve ever made.”
“EPiC: Elvis Presley Live in Concert” is currently in theaters. To hear the entire conversation with Baz Luhrmann and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
English (US) ·