And then about a few hours later I got the letter, and it was one for the most beautiful things I
ever got, which was, she said, ‘Every movement, every eye, every… but not only that, just the
person.’ She said, ‘If my husband was here he would say to Austin, hot damn, you are me.’
The number one thing with Elvis and journey was epic and, like, you know, there’s a movie to
be made about how Elvis survived, the film. You know, Tom, first day of rehearsals, COVID,
all that, the film going away. Austin Butler, like… I was the most unusual experience. Like,
I know you’ve heard, but I told you I don’t do auditions, I do workshops. It’s a really precious
thing when actors come into my world. I want to make sure that we focus on the text.
It’s not like, I never go, ‘You’re out.’ I just go my job is to help you get this role and I want to
work with you to try and find something in the text that I didn’t know. It was different with
Austin. I don’t know if you know but he really felt he was sort of born to play the role. And
he made a tape and he thought it was terrible. Now, I didn’t know for many years,
or for a long time that he had lost his mother the exact same year that Elvis had.
And he has this dream - this really happens, and he wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold
sweat - that he’s lost his mother again. And he thinks, ‘What can I do with this?’ He’s always got
this thing of what can I do with these feelings of fear or emotion. He’s so driven in the craft.
And he goes downstairs and he’s in his robe and he plays Unchained Melody and he sings
it to his mum. And his agent sent it to me and I go ‘What is this?’
And I see him, and pretty much from the time he came in, he was down the road of Elvis.
And, I mean, I was clear pretty early on, I was like… and the reason I kept the workshopping
process going so long was just to prepare him, like, for the robust, for the giant hill that
he was going to have to climb. Getting ready to be dexterous, getting ready to be flexible.
Because I knew once it got out there the pressure on him, the kind of,
like, ‘You? That?’ Like, you know. I just was getting him ready and I was putting it off.
And I also got a call from Denzel Washington, who I don’t really know at all. And he rings me and he
says ‘You are about to experience–’ he’d been on stage with Austin, ‘You are about to experience
a young actor whose work ethic is unlike anything you will experience in your life.’
And I thought that was so, such a big statement, but I was already experiencing it.
And you know what? When the movie went away, Tom got COVID, I thought the film was gonna
fall apart. And Tom was a bit like, ‘Look, let’s put it off until February when this
is all over.’ That was like two years ago. And I rang Tom back and I said ‘Look, I’ve done my
research and I don’t think it’s gonna be over.’ And Tom bravely came back and all of that.
But while he was away Austin should have gone back to America and he said, ‘I’m not leaving,
I’m staying.’ And he doubled down on the work. And he doubled down on the karate and
finding every possible piece of-- there’s nothing he does not know about Elvis.
So, I think what he did was he did the craft thing. But, I think he absorbed it so much that
he was able to fuse literally his spirit and his soul. So it became not an impersonation of
the most impersonated man on the planet but it was an interpretation. So he’s both absolutely
incredibly observed, to the extent that Priscilla Presley who I met early, lost, was estranged from,
said she was going like ‘How’s he ever going to do this?’ And she was worried, understandably.
And then, when I was… and she was not happy about what was going on,
she was scared about what I was gonna do. And other than that Strictly Ballroom screening,
the most fearful screening of my life was that I had to show Priscilla. And the plane was late
and I landed and I rang and they said, the security guard said, ‘She’s crying, the
woman.’ I said ‘Did she run from the room?’ And he said, ‘No, she’s still in there, crying.’
And then about a few hours later I got the letter, and it was one for the most beautiful things I
ever got, which was, she said, ‘Every movement, every eye, every… but not only that, just the
person.’ She said, ‘If my husband was here he would say to Austin, “Hot damn, you are me.”’
And from that moment on, a whole new journey began with the Presleys. And one that I was unbelievably
privileged to be part of. And how on earth did you
identify which songs to use? Yeah, well, it’s like anything.
I think personal taste is the enemy of art. And what I mean by that is my choices, despite
what people might think, are not really personal taste. My mission was to take someone, who was
really the poster boy of American pop culture, for the good, the bad and the ugly and the fifties,
sixties and seventies, I was using it, Elvis, as a canvas to explore a larger idea.
Not unlike Amadeus, I think, is about jealousy. It’s Mozart,
Salieri, it’s really about jealousy. It’s got a preposterous conceit at the centre of it.
Musically, right, it’s not that it’s all my favourite Elvis pieces. It’s what pieces of
music dramatically move the story forward. So, you know, obviously ‘Suspicious Minds’
you’d want there. But as it turns out, it’s a suspicion between the major relationship
in his life and, you know, he’s caught in a trap and he can’t get out. You know?
And that trap is gonna be that golden cage in which the Colonel traps him in. So,
that has dramatic intent. There’s lots of Elvis music I wish could be in there but couldn’t be.
‘In the Cold Kentucky Rain,’ it’s an amazing song. But we just didn’t have a dramatic scene
that was in the cold Kentucky rain. You know?
But you’ve got the most amazing dramatic scene for ‘If I Can Dream’, which is my
favourite Elvis song. So, good job. Yeah, all that’s true, actually.
Well, and I was just going to say, actually, how much were you concerned about the truth?
I know you wanted to have the spirit of him but how do you divide between
what’s the myth and what’s the reality? Because I do my homework. Like, I live it.
Like, I… and I can tell you something. I mean, there are theatrical conventions.
There’s preposterous device, like the Colonel in a morphine dream arguing that the relationship
of love, the real love story in this movie is not between him and Elvis it’s between Elvis and the
audience. You guys. And you guys and Elvis. And actually there’s some truth in that.
If you’ve ever been a fan you always want just one more movie, or one more song, or, you know,
‘David can’t you just do one more album?’ But that means, ‘Please remain a God not a human being.’
Now, everything in that film I can point to and there’s a reference for it. For example,
that line, ‘I cannot overstate how strange you look.’ That’s what Buddy Holly said
when he first saw Elvis as a kid on stage. And when Marian Keisker jumps up like that,
she didn’t do it at ‘Hayride,’ but the first time Elvis went on stage ever, nervous wiggling, and
said to the guys, ‘What are they screaming at?’ That happened when he went on the Bandshell.
And Marian Keisker, who worked with Sam, the record owner, producer, goes ‘And it
was terrible. He started to move around, and he had the flappy trousers, and of course things
were going on down there. And I was shushing the girls, and it was getting noisier and noisier,
and all of a sudden there was a middle-aged woman standing up and screaming. And it was me!’
You know. You know. So I put that in there. So there’s a reference for everything that’s in
there. And, some understandably, because I have to play a really, really, sharp hand of cards,
even, I had a privilege that no writer ever had. And that is although, you can
go in the Elvis archives and, like I said, I had an office and Angie Marchese was amazing.
The Colonel, towards the end of his life, needs his money he dumps all of his stuff and ends up
selling it for two million dollars. And it’s just thrown into Graceland.
And it’s not that well-filed. But amongst it was a tape recorder
and he loved taping himself. And there are these totally whack-a-doo recordings of him going like,
‘So, er, Saperstein is… yeah, yeah, you know. Well you know…’ one moment, and the
next moment he goes, ‘Two ladies are perhaps…’ He was always morphing.
The size of the character of the Colonel you cannot overstate. Like, his buffoonery, he’s like
a clown with a chainsaw. You know, like, he is so large a figure that he would suck the air out of
any room, and control you by kind of humour. So, just to give you an example, I don’t go into it
much, but The Snowmen’s League, which he formed, LBJ, the President was a member of that. Like,
he would just beguile you and manipulate you. And he’s a curious, curious character because
I had to talk to someone in a sort of serious breakdown, they were doing a sort of serious
breakdown of the movie. And he said to me, ‘You know, I looked at that scene where the Colonel’s
got his arms around Elvis in the closet. And you know, I really could see it when I saw it,
he does love Elvis in that scene. But then I saw the movie again I wanted to… and I thought, no,
no, he’s manipulating him. And I was coming to see you about it, I watched it again and,
no, no! He actually loves him.’ And I went, ‘No, no, it’s actually both.’
He loves him, but he can’t-- He’s like the scorpion and the frog, you know. He’s a scorpion.
He can’t help but get… like he’s built to punch the air because he got an extra penny out of a
five-year-old for a stick of fairy floss where only half of it’s on the stick, you know. So.
He’s such an incredibly gigantuous character. And that’s why I really needed someone like Tom to
step into the… into it. Because you had to have someone who would swing big. Because, you see,
in life, you know, sometimes characters are even bigger than actors, you know.