"I've never cared a lick about Elvis Presley, who would have turned 91 in January, had he not died in 1977 at the age of 42. Never had an inkling to listen to his music, never seen any of his films, never been interested in researching his life or work. For this millennial, Presley was a fossilized, mummified relic from prehistory—like a woolly mammoth stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits."
"By the end of its rollicking, exhilarating 90 minutes, I turned to my wife and said, 'I think I'm in love with Elvis Presley.' 'I'm not trying to sell Elvis,' Luhrmann clarifies. 'But I do think that the most gratifying thing is when someone like you has the experience you've had.'"
"Elvis made much more of an imprint on a young Luhrmann; he watched the King's movies while growing up in New South Wales, Australia in the 1960s, and he stepped to 1972's 'Burning Love' as a young ballroom dancer. But then, like so many others, he left Elvis behind. As a teenager, 'I was more Bowie and, you know, new wave and Elton and all those kinds of musical icons.'"
Baz Luhrmann promotes his new IMAX film EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, which presents 1970s concert footage of Elvis Presley. The director discusses how the film successfully engages audiences who have no prior interest in Elvis, converting skeptics into admirers. Luhrmann himself rediscovered Elvis after initially moving away from his music as a teenager in favor of artists like David Bowie and Elton John. His interest in Elvis resurged when developing his 2022 dramatized feature film Elvis, which examined American culture across the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The concert film represents a different approach from his previous narrative-driven Elvis project, focusing instead on raw performance footage presented through Luhrmann's signature visual style.
Read at www.npr.org
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