If Priscilla Presley gives her seal of approval to your portrayal of Elvis in a movie, that’s all you need.
And that’s exactly what Priscilla, who was married to The King and is the mother of their child, Lisa Marie Presley, did during the Memphis premiere of the Baz Luhrmann movie Elvis, which stars Austin Butler as Elvis, on June 11th at The Guest House at Graceland.
“Elvis morphed into you,” Presley told Butler on stage before the movie started. “You had his guidance.”
Stars from the movie, director Luhrmann, and members of the Presley family, including Lisa Marie and her daughter, Riley Keough, and Elvis’ buddy and business associate, Jerry Schilling, were at the premiere. They all gathered on stage at one point. The movie is slated to open nationwide June 24th.
Earlier, I talked to Priscilla and people involved in the film.
I asked Priscilla what sets Elvis apart from other movies and documentaries about the performer. “It’s very sensitive to me and the family,” she says. “Baz has done an amazing job in this film. This has been two years. I know he’s been wanting to do this forever, do a movie on Elvis. But, with Baz, I get a little nervous because Baz does what he wants. He’s got an eye. He’s got such style. But now dealing with such a sensitive story was a bit worrisome [as to] where he’s going to take it.”
But, she says, “It is a true story between the ups and downs of Elvis and Col. Parker, but with his stylized way, beautiful way. Especially with Austin Butler, who plays Elvis so realistically. He had him down pat to the point of a gesture. He studied him for two years. And the story will prove it. When you see it, you think you’re seeing Elvis Presley. But, again, he is not Elvis Presley. He is an actor playing Elvis Presley. And that’s what I like about it, too. He’s not trying to be Elvis. He is his own person.
“But the story is a wonderful story and I think it’s a different take on what we normally see.”
I asked Butler, who described Elvis as “such a complex human being,” what was the most difficult part of Elvis for him to play. “One of the most challenging things is the fact that he has been held up as either a god-like iconic figure or as this caricature that is not the real man,” Butler says. “So, for me, it was stripping all that away and getting down to his humanity.
“And the challenging part about that is you want to be incredibly technical. You want to be meticulous about all the details. But it could never be the details sacrificing the humanity.”
Luhrmann told me Elvis movies were shown at the theater in the small town where he grew up. “The matinees were the Elvis movies,” he says. “So, like as a 10-year-old, he was the coolest guy in the world. And then I grew on and all that. He was always present.”
As for making Elvis, Luhrmann says, “I didn’t do this so much out of fandom, although I have a great respect for him. I did this because I really believe he is at the center of America in the ’50s, ’60s, and the ’70s. And he is a way of exploring America. To understand that he was this rebel in the ’50s and it was dangerous to do what he was doing. And his relationship to Beale Street and people like B. B. King and then him being put in a bubble in Hollywood and then finding himself again in the [Elvis] ’68 [Comeback] Special and reconnecting with gospel, his great, great love. And then, to put it bluntly and to quote one of his songs, being caught in a trap in Vegas. That’s the sort of tragedy of that.
“And yet, what he’s left behind, as you see in that last great performance of him is still the voice and still the spirit. To me, whatever you say about Elvis, he was a spiritual person. And that comes from his love of gospel.”
Kelvin Harrison Jr., who plays B.B. King in Elvis, told me what drew him to the role. “For me, it was just how smart he was and how savvy he was with his business,” he says. “This was a very strategic man, in my opinion, but also [he had] so much heart and soul. And a simple man. He literally was working in the fields, and literally put up a wire on a post and started learning how to play and find sounds playing one string. That is so incredible to me. So I was just so inspired by the tenacity that he had, and just the rawness.”
In the movie, Elvis is astonished at the stage presence, complete with the most amazing moves, of Little Richard. Alton Mason plays Richard in the film. What attracted him to the role was “how powerful, how outspoken and loud he was,” Mason told me. “How sexy he was. How fly he was. And his aura.”
Mason, who said the revered gospel singer Mahalia Jackson is his great-great-great-great aunt, also told me, “I had to develop empathy for not only who he was, but the period and the time that he was in. And him being that in that time, it takes a lot of power, a lot of fearlessness, to choose to be so different in a time like this. It was an amazing learning experience for me, too.”
I loved what Tom Hanks, who plays Col. Tom Parker, said on stage before the movie began: “As an actor I found myself shooting in castles in which kings once lived in. I shot in palaces that have been turned into museums that were the homes of kings. I shot in museums in which kings and queens have lived in.”
But he told the audience to notice that all of those kings and queens “have an ‘s’ on the end of them. Meaning that there were more than one. At Graceland, we are visiting the home of The King.”
