Baz Luhrmann does not advocate drinking while on the job. But if you are going to do it, you better make it a martini. And you better come to his “special bungalow” – as he refers to his office, a tent “done up like Graceland” – on the Gold Coast set of the filmmaker’s wild, daring, spectacular, add-anotheradjective-because-it’s-Baz Elvis biopic. It was here one evening after a long day of costume tests that Luhrmann mixed a couple of drinks for his stars, Austin Butler and Olivia DeJonge, who turned up in character as Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Catherine Martin, Luhrmann’s partner and the film’s costume and production designer, wasn’t there, but she has a meticulous memory for clothes. “He was wearing a black shirt, fawn pants, a red kerchief and black boots, and she was wearing a Prada tunic and pants, printed tweed, in pale blue and cream,” Martin rattles off. “And they looked amazing.”
Luhrmann being Luhrmann, he rather enjoyed this. “We were all talking as ourselves, but they were kind of flirting as the characters and building the relationship,” he recalls. And Luhrmann being Luhrmann, he picked up a Leica camera, which was lying around in the way that Picasso might have left a few paintbrushes down the back of the couch, and started filming. Butler blurred into Elvis, DeJonge blended into Priscilla. “I was still in full Priscilla get-up: hair, make-up, nails,” DeJonge recalls, wiggling her fingers on Zoom. The factual and the imagined melted into each other until it was impossible to distinguish between what was real and what was an illusion, which is probably as good a way as any to describe a movie. This impromptu footage made it into the final cut of the film. “Actors are called players, you’ve gotta have play,” Luhrmann muses. “That bit of play was a breakthrough
