Elvis: Baz Luhrmann’s biopic gets a trailer + more from the director and star Austin Butler

The trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is finally here, and wow, does it ever look like an incredible biopic. Being a fan of Elvis Presley, I honestly didn’t know if Austin Butler, who I only really know from Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood would be a good choice, but I gotta say, based on this trailer alone I’m sold. This looks like a Luhrmann epic through and through, with the film exploring Elvis’s life and career, as well as his conflicted relationship with his infamous manager, Colonel Tom Parker, played here by Tom Hanks.

Luhrmann and Butler actually presented the trailer via a live-streamed event last week from the WB lot, and Luhrmann was quick to emphasize that Elvis will be a theatrical only event.

“This is number one, a movie for theaters from the get-go. We set out to make a motion picture that’s going to bring all kinds of audiences together.”

But what was it about Elvis Presley that made him such a compelling icon to frame an epic around? As Luhrmann explained, “the truth is, is that in his modern era, the life of Elvis Presley could not be a better canvas on which to explore America in the fifties, the sixties and the seventies. I mean it’s a mythical life that he lived.”

Notably, Elvis himself died at only forty two years old, but as Luhrmann noted, that was in a lot of ways “three great lives put into a short period of time.” He adds: “it’s a great canvas on which to explore America. So that’s what drew me in.”

As for Butler, the minute he opened his mouth I was taken aback by how much he sounded like Presley. It was uncanny and definitely will blow audiences away when it comes out this summer. Of course, playing the King of Rock n’ Roll is no easy task as Butler himself explained:

“He’s such an icon and he’s held up to a superhuman status. So to get to explore that for years now and learn why he was the way that he was and find the human within that icon. That was really such a joy that I could do it for the rest of my life probably. That paired with the fact that I get to work with one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live.”

Austin was twenty-seven when he was cast, and spent the next three years getting the role down cold, as he also has to sing for Elvis during the part of the movie set during the fifties, as Luhrmann explained that the recordings of his records were in mono, and would not sound right in a movie such as this. As Luhrmann explains, “so we came up with an unusual language, a musical language for the film, and that is that Austin would sing all the young Elvis.” He adds that from the sixties on, what we’re hearing is the real Elvis Presley. “So when Elvis sings, you know, when you hear In the Ghetto, it’s Elvis.”

Of course, that was a big project for Butler to take on:

“I think when I began the process of this, I set out to get my voice to sound. Identical to his. That was my goal is, is if you heard a recording of me and your heard a recording of him, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference and I held that for a long time.” He adds: “and so what that does is it also instills fear, you know, this fear that I’m not going to achieve that or whatever. And so that got the fire burning inside me to work and work and work.” He went on to explain that for a year before they began shooting, he was doing six or seven days of vocal coaching a week.

That said, neither Butler nor Luhrmann wanted to do an impersonation of Elvis, but rather they wanted to capture the life within. 

As for Luhrmann, he went all in on the experience of mounting the biopic and diving into the world of Elvis. “I’m the ultimate outsider. So when I go and do Moulin Rouge in Paris, I come as an outsider and I live it. If I do The Get Down, I come as an outsider and I live it. If I do Gatsby, I came in as an outsider and I lived like Fitzgerald… I probably got a little bit too much into some of the things Fitzgerald did, but, but I do live it. That’s why I make films so infrequently. So the greatest joy for me is to be an outsider and to live it.”

Elvis opens on June 24th, 2022 in theatres only!