“I’m not here to do an infomercial, ” Baz Luhrmann says over Zoom, tapping his fingers like the white-toothed showman he is. “Like, ‘Hey, young kids, get into Elvis, he was such a great guy!’”
The maximalist filmmaker was, at first, uncertain Elvis’s story could interest a 2022 audience. His own son only knew of Elvis through “some video game”, and Baz worried that – after decades of parodies of parodies – the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll may have become nothing more than ’cultural wallpaper’, or fodder for fancy dress costumes.
The road to releasing this reverential, rhinestone-studded biopic began with that question: do people even care about Elvis anymore? Baz and his team – including his partner in life and costume designer, Catherine Martin (whom he calls “CM”) – spent 18 months digging through Graceland archives to find out.
“… CM [and I] would live the research and not make the movie,
