{"id":501611,"date":"2026-02-24T19:59:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T19:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/501611\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T19:59:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T19:59:07","slug":"baz-luhrmann-has-found-his-perfect-muse-in-elvis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/501611\/","title":{"rendered":"Baz Luhrmann has found his perfect muse in Elvis"},"content":{"rendered":"

EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert is Baz Luhrmann\u2019s first nonfiction film, and the first time the Australian screen legend has returned to a subject\u2014although he never really left Elvis after directing his biopic<\/a> in 2022. Since then, Luhrmann has become a full-on fanboy. (He\u2019s even adopted<\/a> the singer\u2019s fashion sense.) And his enthusiasm is evident in promotional materials that bill EPiC as \u201cmore than a documentary\u201d and \u201cmore than a concert film.\u201d It\u2019s a \u201ccinematic experience,\u201d the continuation of a long tradition of mythmaking around Elvis Presley\u2019s life and career. The ballyhoo perfectly suits Luhrmann, a devoted maximalist who has found his muse in the long-dead \u201cKing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Early in EPiC, Presley says in voiceover that \u201cthere\u2019s been a lot written and a lot said, but never from my side of the story.\u201d This both is and isn\u2019t true. Whatever material Elvis left behind when he died at the age of 42 in 1977 has been pored over and microscopically dissected over the last five decades, raising the question of how much of his story is really left to tell. A perfect example of this dredging: The clip mentioned above, in which Elvis says that his story has yet to be told, was already used in a video, also called \u201cMy Side Of The Story,\u201d posted to the official Elvis Presley YouTube account in 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n

EPiC is composed of such scraps, made fabulous by Luhrmann\u2019s bedazzled touch. The film is mainly leftover footage from the pre-existing concert docs Elvis: That\u2019s The Way It Is and Elvis On Tour, restored from negatives acquired from the MGM vaults through Warner Bros., which released Luhrmann\u2019s Elvis back in 2022. (Amazon currently owns MGM, but Warner Bros. owns the rights to its pre-1986 catalog, including those Elvis docs.) The story Luhrmann tells about their acquisition is appropriately dramatic, involving researchers who traveled to archives \u201cburied in underground salt mines in Kansas\u201d to find a box of negatives that no one thought was real.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The salt mine bit is true<\/a>, as is Luhrmann\u2019s privileged access to recorded interviews from the Graceland archives. But it\u2019s also true that, thanks to the tight control the infamous \u201cColonel\u201d Tom Parker kept over his most famous and lucrative client, much of what came out Elvis\u2019 mouth took the form of sanitized soundbites. \u201cReality\u201d is always relative in Elvis-land, and EPiC does little to challenge the legend\u2019s main talking points\u2014arguably even less than Luhrmann\u2019s biopic, which at least engaged with Presley\u2019s drug use and political beliefs. Luhrmann doesn\u2019t go as hard on Tom Parker in EPiC as he did in Elvis\u2014this is a mash note, not an expos\u00e9\u2014but a sequence where Parker lurks behind the singer as he deflects a question about artists\u2019 political obligations very much plays like a defense of Luhrmann\u2019s Tennessee idol.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Throughout EPiC, the filmmaker proves himself to be thoroughly enamored with his subject. Luhrmann paints the singer as a ladies\u2019 man and lovable goofball who came alive on stage, where he proved himself to be a surprisingly versatile performer. His vocals are enhanced, as if to defend the singer against detractors who argue he was all stage presence and no talent. Luhrmann frequently cuts away from the stage to shots of ecstatic women in the crowd, and he devotes an entire montage to Elvis kissing starry-eyed female fans on the mouth mid-performance. It\u2019s partially an admiring \u201cattaboy\u201d from the filmmaker, and partially Baz screaming in the stands himself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The editing of Luhrmann\u2019s film is where the pairing between artist and subject is most sublime. The backstage moments are relatively calm and meditative, with lingering shots of the singer learning the melodies of songs by younger, hipper musicians while surrounded by long-haired session players. In these scenes, Elvis seems lonely, a man out of time. Luhrmann and his work have never fit into any particular era, either: This is the filmmaker who moved Romeo & Juliet to \u201990s Miami and set it to an alt-rock soundtrack, and who meshed Jay-Z and Florence And The Machine into the 1920s fantasyland of The Great Gatsby.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Luhrmann speeds up his already-manic editing style to match the electrifying singer\u2019s twitchy movements on stage. EPiC is manically paced, jumping between subjects and eras in Luhrmann\u2019s signature nonlinear style. Never content to just leave the camera static, in performance sequences Luhrmann rhythmically cuts on every karate chop and high kick, a sped-up version of the hand claps in the climactic scene of Strictly Ballroom. In Elvis, the camera frequently outpaced star Austin Butler; here, it\u2019s Luhrmann who has trouble keeping up.<\/p>\n

Over-the-top sets are another Luhrmann signature, on which the director partners with his wife and production designer Catherine Martin. Here, the filmmaker has also found a spiritual soulmate in Elvis: The singer\u2019s own home, now preserved as a museum, is an overwhelming, overstimulating shrine to midcentury kitsch. (If anyone can appreciate the mirrored velveteen excess of Elvis\u2019 TV room<\/a> and jungle-themed living room<\/a>, it\u2019s Baz and Catherine.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, EPiC is an archival documentary, which leaves no room for Luhrmann to build a lavish rhinestone world around his subject and whip the camera around. But he makes room for maximalism both in the film\u2019s graphics\u2014it features the biggest, most grandiose Bazmark logo yet, and the end credits resemble those of The Great Gatsby, but with bedazzled belts instead of Art Deco designs\u2014and in the film\u2019s color grading. Charmingly, Luhrmann writes in his director\u2019s statement: \u201cIn a world where Artificial Intelligence can make all sorts of illusions, the[se] illusions were made from authentic and original material and restored with meticulous human craft.\u201d<\/p>\n

The footage Luhrmann\u2019s team scavenged from that salt mine was all restored for EPiC, over several years and at presumably great expense. The colors in this new-old footage are eye-singeing, and there are moments where they clash and pop off the screen. Special attention is paid to the colors blue and red, recalling a similar color scheme in Moulin Rouge!: Take the bright aqua blue trunks Elvis wears in one of his half-hearted Hollywood roles (which movie? Who cares?), or the billowing red backdrop at his Vegas shows, a wink to Luhrmann\u2019s own \u201cred curtain\u201d trilogy. The sheer saturation of these colors is thrilling in itself: At one point, Elvis straps on a pink paisley guitar while wearing purple sunglasses, and it\u2019s as decadent as the interiors of the Moulin Rouge.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But what really ties Luhrmann and Elvis together is something deeper than aesthetic: They both believe in love. Luhrmann\u2019s earnest, even dorky, belief in \u201clove conquering all\u201d is a recurring theme in his movies, and Elvis sang some of the corniest\u2014and the most beautiful\u2014love songs of his era. Both of their artistic expressions are built on big feelings, expressed in dramatic, maximalist style. Elvis thought he looked great in those spangled bell-bottom jumpsuits, and with the power of his charisma behind them, he actually did. Baz Luhrmann unabashedly, unselfconsciously agrees.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert is Baz Luhrmann\u2019s first nonfiction film, and the first time the Australian screen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501612,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136],"class_list":["post-501611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}