The reason Baz Luhrmann is so obsessed with Elvis Presley: “He was in my life early”
You really have to hand it to Baz Luhrmann for honing a style that is so distinctive and so consistent that you can always rely on him to make a larger-than-life adaptation or biopic, full of anachronisms, lavish musical numbers, and pretty unforgettable set design, offering up theatrical worlds, packed to the brim with excess.
With Romeo + Juliet, he modernised Shakespeare’s classic play with a bold artistic vision, and there are not many people who could pull off a movie set in the present day, with guns and Hawaiian shirts, but performed exclusively in Shakespearean style, with the script pulled directly from the 16th-century text. It could’ve so easily fallen into cliché or just simply not worked, but Luhrmann produced a timeless classic, setting the blueprint for all further Bard adaptations.
He brought more glamour and tragedy to Moulin Rouge! in 2001, with Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor playing doomed lovers, his first proper musical, with popular songs finding their way onto the soundtrack, from ‘Like a Virgin’ to ‘Your Song’. It was a hit, but it wouldn’t be until 2022 that he’d return to the musical genre, this time for a biopic that would fulfil a lifelong obsession with the ‘King of Rock and Roll’.
Elvis saw Luhrmann recruit Austin Butler to become Mr Presley, and he went full method, keeping his southern drawl even after filming wrapped, where it almost seemed as if Butler was going to talk like that forever. Clearly, his devotion to the part worked, though, because he wound up with an Oscar nomination, which isn’t too shabby for an actor who, until this point, was best known for starring in TV shows and movies aimed at adolescent audiences.
The film might’ve featured a questionable performance from Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker, which earned him two Razzie Awards, but on the whole, critics lapped it up, and Luhrmann’s long-time love for Elvis Presley had all worked out in his favour. The singer, who changed music with his gyrating hips and slicked back hair, had enraptured the Australian filmmaker from a young age, and I’m sure many people can say the same.
Seeing him on the TV for perhaps even a movie screen for the first time back in the 1950s or 1960s was surely a groundbreaking moment for many young people back then, where few people had seen anything quite like Elvis before.
“Well, he was in my life early. We lived in a very tiny country town, and at one stage, we ran the local cinema for a bit. They were doing Elvis matinees, and as a ten- or 12-year-old, I thought, ‘Oh, this guy’s the coolest guy in the world’,” Luhrmann told The Playlist.
It makes sense for someone from a small town, far removed from the bright lights of Hollywood and the excitement of rock and roll, to see Elvis on the screen and feel this newfound excitement, this understanding of a world beyond. He represented something greater, a changing of culture, of social attitudes, of art.
When Luhrmann started ballroom dancing, he often found himself drawn to Elvis songs, adding, “I’d go up to the guy in the competition and say, ‘Hey man, can you play ‘Burning Love’?’ That was my thing to get me going. So Elvis was with me. But as I got older, my musical tastes opened up very quickly – there was Bowie and Elton and AC/DC and opera. He was always there, though.”
There are some singers you can never let go of, and it seems like Elvis has always been the ultimate artist of Luhrmann’s life.
